The Eyes Have It!

This is my finished piece (11.5" x 16") for the online blog challenge, The Eyes Have It!.

 I started working on my vision for this piece while in Florida.  I initially wanted to have a piece with animal eyes in it but then decided on a flower created from eyes!  So I started off with a Google search of eyes, selected different color, size and shapes of eyes and printed them onto white fabric with fusible on the back. I cut out each eye and started to layer into a circle, starting with the largest eyes first.  Then the fun began!  Organizing the different sizes into the shape of a flower!

This was my final circle of eyes...

 I then fused the eyes to a piece of white muslin but just around the middle of the flower.   I did this because I wanted to fuse the eyes to my background after it was quilted.   Thanks to my bud, Susan, for the assist in selecting the background!  We took my 'eyes' flower with us to the quilt shop to find a good background and, as you'll see, the brown fabric was perfect.  I just free motion quilted leaves on the whole background using brown thread.

Next up was the layout on where to place the eyes and create the leaves....flowers have leaves on their stems, right!   I sandwiched two layers of green fabric between some batting then traced different shape leaves onto the fabric.   Next I free motion quilted the outline of the leaves then I cut out each leaf.  I did color some of the edges with a green marker if the white batting showed too much.

Next, I played around with making some stems, which I wrapped with a piece of brown bias fabric I had in my stash around a piece of bias green fabric I had fusible already on!  Then I added my leaves where I thought they might look good.  And I had to add some 'eyes' inbetween some of the leaves!

 Once I was happy with that, it was time to start to work on the center of my eye flower!  For this, I used my tailor tack foot which worked perfect.

When I was totally finished with the edging and sewing down all the leaves, I did go back and snip some of the tailor tack threads.

And as they say...that's my story and I'm stitcking to it!