How to Quilt a Cornstalk

My father is a Cornhusker and in honor of Nebraska's rout of Arizona last night and also the Wisconsin Badgers' win over Miami in Orlando the night before, today's post is for them.First, you find a copyright free picture of a cornstalk. Print it out and take it to the copyshop and enlarge it to the desired size -- bigger is easier to quilt.
Cover your copy with a piece of Golden Threads Quilting Paper and trace, using a fine point permanent marker. Use a permanent marker because you don't want any ink bleeding onto your quilt. Pin the quilting paper in the desired position on your quilt. I used my fine, strong silk pins which have glass heads (that don't melt when you bump them with an iron). I use these pins for precision piecing. Using straight pins makes it easy to remove them before you sew over them.
After making a practice quilt sandwich to test your thread, needle, and tension, then with feed dogs dropped, free-motion quilt following the lines. You don't have to be exactly accurate because you're going to remove the paper and with it, all the lines. Just quilt the outline so you have a guide for more dense quilting.

Gnash teeth and say some bad words, because you have gotten "into" your quilting and forgotten that you are just outlining here. Dense quilting makes it difficult to remove the paper.

After quilting the outline, tug the quilt on the bias to rip the paper for removal. Say some more bad words and get out the fine point tweezers because of the dense quilting on top of the paper. After removing all the paper (sometimes gently scratching a fingernail over the stitching will help remove the remaining bits), continue to quilt in the detail, changing thread as desired.
The corn tassel (sorry, the picture is sideways) after paper removal (more gnashing of teeth) and some more quilting.
And the root end -- the paper removed easily from this part. I was pleasantly surprised.

I'll post pictures of the leaves and the cobs after I do the detail quilting.