My "Mountains" textile wall hanging is finally finished! This piece was definitely a slow stitch project, starting with the inspiration of antique flying geese quilts. Although I decided to upend the design to make the geese into mountains.

I wanted to make an irregular version, so hand drew paper templates without rulers to achieve the naive style that I like.

Next came ideas for colour palettes and I hit upon blue, yellow and beige with dark contrasts. I used a mixture of mis-matched, repurposed textiles, with a bit of new fabric included, and some hand dyed yellow fabrics.

Each unique template shape was transfered to fabric, then was hand sewn to its neighbouring piece in rows. The rows were joined before being layered with wadding and a backing fabric. The whole piece was hand quilted before the bias strip was added to finish the edge of the artwork. Finally a hanging sleeve was made to take a fine wooden dowel for display, and my maker's label was added to the reverse.

I decided to add rounded corners for a change and was pleased with the result.

One pleasure of autumn is the colour to be found in the berries and leaves around. We also were fascinated by the spiky seed cases of the sweet chestnut tree that grows a short walk from our house. Sadly, it never produces mature nuts, but the seed cases make an interesting display.

I've made three small, hand stitched textile samples in recent weeks, looking at contrasts, in colour and texture:

• warm and cool colours in the blue and red sample;
• triadic colour contrasts and the effect of proportions of colours used in the orange, purple and green piece; and
• contrasting textures in the monochromatic white/cream sample.
  

I have no real object in mind when creating samples like this, but it can lead to ideas for colour palettes to use in future work, or juxtapositions of materials that are interesting.

If mounted nicely, they make interesting small abstract artworks in their own right, or small pieces can be sewn to a card blank to make a special greetings card.