Sunday, March 29, 2020

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

5 comments:

  1. I thought I knew why you called this post "Feeling Sheepish"as soon as I saw the sheep. Sorry don't know the name of those flowers. I certainly like what you came up with. Blessings. You stay safe, too.

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    1. Thanks, Angie. Well, I rarely waste an opportunity to play with words, at least in my blog titles. In conversation I rein in the impulse, since my husband is a raving punster, and doesn't need further encouragement from me. LOL I still don't know what those flowers are but am going to try to find them online.

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  2. I wonder if....could you still put the black tulle on and then embroider the grasses over top? Just a thought! Or....could you use a black/dark grey coloured pencil and just carefully shade it? I know, I'm full of ideas but it's not me having to do it! Love the addition of the hot air balloons.

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    1. Yeah, there are some drawbacks either way, especially now that I've bound the quilt. Color pencil would work, but would also dull the stones in a way that the tulle wouldn't. The easiest thing to do, probably, would be to put a very diluted ink wash over it, but I'd have to treat the boundaries of the wash with the stuff that stops the pigment from bleeding outside the boundary (name escapes me at the moment). I actually could test that at some point on a scrap. Something to consider. Thanks for the brainstorm! At the moment I'm about to embark on a new venture--making fabric masks for my family. Never thought THAT project would be in the cards, but I guess no one did.

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    2. I often see something I wish I had done differently with my landscapes - a definite learning curve. I'm making masks too - seems there's a need out there for them and, at least locally, many different organizations are asking for them.

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