Patching a quilt

A while back, I bought a utility quilt at a thrift store, for five or ten dollars. The top is made of rectangles of wool and polyester from old suits, in browns and blues grays and blacks, and the back is a plaid flannel sheet. It's a good quilt for winter, but it's not pretty.

Some of the seams on the top were starting to come apart; a little hard to fix when it is the fabric itself that is pulling apart.

One of the pieces of fabric that I recently bought from ArtScraps was a medium-size piece of emerald green wool. Not quite enough fabric to make a garment larger than a hat; it cost about one dollar. So I decided to use it to make some patches for the quilt.

I marked and stitched leaf shapes in the wool, before cutting it:

I used regular (colored) chalk for marking, which comes out easily...sometimes more easily than I would like.

Then I cut out the leaves, just outside the stitching, and hand-sewed them to the quilt top. I should have used button thread, which is much stronger than regular thread, but I don't have any. I plan on re-sewing the leaves on before I wash the quilt again.

The end result is a few organic "pops" of color on a blocky, drab background. I am not actually a fan of pops of color in decorating, but in this case it worked out really well.