At the Little Free Craft Library that is up the hill from me and on my walking route, I always peek in and sometimes see something that grabs my attention. In this case it was a small book-as-binder of Key to 1000 Quilt Patterns by Judy Rehmel (Third Printing, 1978; and looks to be a self-published book by Rehmel in Richmond, Indiana). It is not an instructional book, but a book for those who wish to identify patterns for historical reasons or just to find out their names, which is helpful, and can be done quickly. It looks like she published other books as well in her lifetime.
After looking through all the patterns, I was drawn to the "Palm Leaf Hosanna." Its meaning can be divined elsewhere; I just liked the pattern. Or a version of it. But I didn't want to piece it, so I drew a stencil of one frond, changing it from three sections to five sections like a hand, and stenciled it onto black cotton instead.
I had already dyed some green cotton, both light and dark. For the binding I had some commercially printed cotton but not enough to border the entire quilt, so I stenciled deColourant leaves onto my darker green cotton strips. Light green is behind the scenes, set up for the reverse appliqué.
The little stenciled gold dots and dashes on the branches are in fact Morse code (with artistic license) for the title. I added French knots and stitches to make the letters tactile as well as visual. Each frond took about an hour to stitch around.
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