Using Lutradur

I promised I'd show the progression of "Celtic Roots" from start to finish. It all started with this package of Lutradur. I bought it last Fall with not a clue what to do with it. But as you know by now, I love to experiment with just about anything I can get my hands on.
Lutradur is a Mixed Media sheet that you can cut, paint, fuse, stamp, fold, stitch, ink, run through your printer and who knows what else. It feels and looks almost like very stiff dryer sheets

So with my idea to create a sort of 3D tree with Celtic knots for roots and lots of plaids as foliage, I got busy drawing my design.
To make the "tree", I began by using a small amount of fusible web to fuse two slightly overlapped sheets of the Lutradur together so that I would now have a large enough continuous piece. (All of these photos should be large enough to see some detail when you click on them) Can you see where the pieces are joined? I drew my tree and roots onto the Lutradur and then roughly painted the trunk, roots and earth. No need to be all that careful as I knew I would be cutting it out and adding stitching later.
The Lutradur is painted and ready to be trimmed to the finished shapeFabric selectionBeginning to build the layers........each foliage piece overlaps the one before it

Everything is pinned in place to see how it all will work out
The Lutradur tree is folded out of the way so that I could easily quilt the sky (which is my own hand painted fabric)
As I hand appliqued the foliage, I left openings for the branches to be tucked into

Filling in the "earth" area with lots of stitching using a very dark brown thread helps to make the roots really stand out

Above is a look at how the tree branches tuck into the foliage, I had to quilt a section, tuck in a branch, quilt the next section and so on.

With the piece being an irregular shape I knew the binding would be a bit of a challenge. I felt that the bindings would need to match the various areas to get the effect I was after. It was a little tricky to do but if you leave yourself lots of "wiggle" room you can manipulate it so that it goes exactly where you want it to. Below are close up shots of the binding. Notice how the angle changes as it wraps the to the back.

and finally the finished piece. Celtic Roots is roughly 16"x 21" made for the Wee Quilt Challenge, This years theme, was Celtic Connections. Since no matter who you are, we all are connected to family (for better or worse) I chose to do a family tree of sorts and asked how many plaids you might find in yours. Some wild thread colour was used in the quilting of the foliage to represent those "colourful" family members we all have. ( as with all Wee Quilt challenges, use of plaid is a must)
These challenges are great fun and I almost always learn something new with each new piece I create.
It should be noted that you can cut very intricate patterns in Lutradur with a heat/stencil cutting tool, but for this piece I chose to keep my entire Lutradur piece intact, and instead get a raised appearance with the heavy stitching in the background.
I hope this answers many of your questions, but if you have more, just ask.