Postcard trees - stitching path

When I started making the tree postcards I figured out a stitching path so that I wouldn't have any starts and stops. There's a little stitching over previous lines but that's still faster than stopping to cut threads. Johanna asked for me to show how I stitched them so here it is. It's not very pretty but I think you will understand.

The trick is to make sure that the trees touch each other and to start where 2 trees touch. I started in the red tree where it touches the orange tree, stitched the top of the tree, the trunk and then the green triangle and then back to where I started.

Now I want to travel over to the blue tree on the left and I do that by stitching only the bottom part of the middle tree. I stitched the trunk and the green triangle and then over to where the blue and orange trees meet.

Now it's on to the blue tree. I stitched the trunk, the purple triangle and then the top of the tree and back to where the blue and orange trees meet.

The last step is to stitch the top of the middle tree.

The way that I stitch the left and right trees might vary and that doesn't matter. What matters is to start where 2 trees touch, stitch the tree on the end, then half of the middle tree to travel to the other side, stitch the other side tree and then finish the middle tree.

It took me a little while to figure this out but it was worth the time to do it. When I make cards in bulk like this I am always looking for shortcuts to save time. Usually I work on one set at a time but this year I'm working on all three designs to get the fronts done. I'll fuse all of the backs on at one time and serge all of the edges at one time. That way I don't have to set up the serger 3 times. It's all factory production here.