Feeling Sheepish

Last month produced a new landscape quilt, which started with a fat quarter (18" x 20-22") of sky fabric. It's a weird sky fabric though, a cloud-filled gray and pale-pink piece.

It naturally followed (for my brain, at least) that the mountains would be in the pink family. Sheep were eventually pulled from the stash and cut from their background; then pasture grass (a completely different fabric). A drystone wall followed (more on that below), and below it some rough field grass, as well as some flowers that would pull some of that pink down into the foreground. Anybody know what they are? Please comment below. [UPDATE: possibly Larkspur.]

But the sky needed something to break up all those monotonous clouds. Enter the hot air balloons.





Imminent Surprise (working title, They Have No Clue) is 20" x 35".










Below are a few closeups (click on them to enlarge).

Sheep number 3 appears to be chewing on a loose piece of fiber. I'll have to remove that.

As mentioned, above, a little more about the drystone wall: None of my other stone prints were appropriate for the top of the wall, so I just went with this one-dimensional depiction of the wall, thinking it would look okay in the end. But I'm not happy with it. I realize now that what I should have done was shade the lower majority of the wall with black tulle before quilting it (I know because I thought to audition a piece of it AFTER the quilt was finished. The improvement was immediate, but there is no way to add the tulle to the quilt at this point, with those blades of grass overlapping the bottom of the wall). Feeling a bit sheepish about it but, lesson learned.

[Also feeling a bit sheepish about my original homonym mix-up...this quilt almost went out of here with the title Eminent Surprise instead of Imminent Surprise.]

Next time, a new venture, using these leftover scraps from 10 years of landscape quilting. Skies, water, flowers, grasses, trees, rocks, mountains, animals, boats, etc....it's all here.

Be well, and be safe. All the best to anyone dealing with a difficult or scary situation.

And keep quilting if you can. We all know how therapeutic it can be for our minds, and that's half the battle.

Linda

Leftovers (and Some News)

Last month I took a break from landscape quilting (although there's some news regarding landscapes further below) and pulled out all my batik strips...leftovers from years and years of making quilt binding. A printed batik was pulled from the stash to make borders. The resulting quilt is 75" x 66".

I also pieced a lot of the smaller leftovers into piano key borders....

...which I'd planned to include in the back of the quilt. That didn't happen, but I'll use these at a later time.

Instead, I made the quilt "reversible" by piecing completely different fabrics for the back. This is a good way to use up yardage stash.

It's on the couch now, batik side up, and I can switch to this other side when the mood strikes.

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Some news on the landscape front, as promised above...my landscape quilt Still Waters was chosen to be included in this Spring's issue of Art Quilting Studio magazine! I am thrilled to be in the company of so many wonderful quilt artists again, and as I've mentioned before, this magazine coincidentally has been my favorite quilt publication since long before they ever published any of my work.

(Click on any photo to enlarge.)

 Stampington Publications did an absolutely beautiful job of photographing the quilt. I couldn't be happier or more grateful.






Here's the cover of the issue, out on stands now through May.

For information on the making of Still Waters, check out this old blog post and older ones leading up to it.

Signing off for now. Happy Spring (or Fall, depending on what hemisphere you're in)!

Linda