November Leaves and Acorns

The Pieceful Patchwork kit for November by Shabby Fabrics has leaves and acorns, all in burgundy, brown, and golden fall tones. The rich colors seduced me into buying this kit. Those sawtooth star acorns were just so darn cute, I could not leave them behind.

Cutting
I cut all the fabrics per the instructions labeling, each piece with a color-coded letter for the intended block, pink for Leaf or black for Acorn. I used my Pink Melamine Tray, Alphabitties and Clover Wonder Clips to stay organized. To the right of the tray are the the long strips for sashing and borders. Also on the tray are the two laser-cut, pre-fused brown strips for the stems of the leaves. The backing and binding fabrics are not in the photo but they did come in the kit.

Leaves
I tackled the leaves first, sewing two at a time, since they are identical. Variety comes with their position and orientation in the finished banner. One thing I like about these kits is that a preferred pressing direction is given at each step and the plan is generally pretty optimized to avoid clumps of bulk at seam intersections. These are my two leaves. Not part of the pattern, I used the triangles removed from the flip corners at each leaf point to make four pinwheels.

Acorns

I learned that the top hat of an acorn is called a cupule and is made up of fused leaves. I made the cupules of the two acorns first. A cupule is defined as 

a small, cup-shaped structure found in botany, archaeology, and entomology. For an acorn cap a cupule refers to the cup-shaped cluster of hardened, fused bracts (modified leaves) at the base of an acorn in oak trees (Quercus) and related families. It is also known as an acorn cup.

The acorns each have a saw tooth star at the center. The points of the star are made with two squares and an elongated rectangle, a slight deviation from classic flying geese. This method gives more area around the star without additional seams.

Here is a completed acorn. I was able to get one pinwheel from the cut corners of the base of the two acorns, but it was smaller than pinwheels from the leaves. Corners cut off from the cupules of the two acorns yielded only one pinwheel, and the effort to get it was questionable due to its small size. Pinwheels from cut-off corners of the star points were marginally too small to be worth the effort. Shown is the largest pinwheel from the leaves (one of a yield of 4) and two small pinwheels, one of each size, from the acorns. Total yield of pinwheels was six.

Adding Sashing and Borders
The sashing is an olive green and the corner stone is of the same brown metallic plaid as the acorn stems. This fabric is a stunner. It was also used in a larger quantity as the sunflowers' centers in the Pieceful Patchwork August banner I made. Here is the November banner with sashing and borders attached. Now it needs to be sandwiched and FMQ'd. Then I will attach the labels and binding.