Welcome Back! It has been a while...

 

STARDATE:  -299063.82 (or December 8, 2023)

Well, greetings from a long-dormant blog.  Life got crazy starting in 2020 and while folks found themselves in a myriad of unknown situations, life for me somewhat stayed on course as my job kept me monumentally busy (along with life events) and I lost any time really to post to a blog.  I wanted to; thought I’d have all kinds of time, working from home, but this darned software implementation has been a buggar.  Going on three years now, it’s still not implemented.  But, I finally decided, it’s time to stop focusing on that and start getting back (at least a little bit) to those things that I enjoy and love.

So, after plowing through making a large quilt for the annual Guild auction, I am finally finding some time to refocus on some projects (okay, call them “UFO’s”), so I’m happy about that. The Guild also had a challenge to make 12” art quilts depicting one of the seasons.  I worked through many ideas, but ran aground due to time.  In a creative burst, though, I did manage to pull together a couple of small quilts and here’s a couple shots of what I created.

One depicting a cold winter’s walk through the trees during an early sunrise... 

"A Winter's Walk" depicts a winter sunrise in Colorado.  Due to time changes, we actually get to see the sunrise on the way to work, and they're often stunning and deep rich in color.

My first real attempt at "thread painting"

And one depicting fall in all its glory as the Ash trees turn fabulous shades of red, yellow, purple, and still hang on to some green.  The sun and sky shine through, and I attempted to capture that feeling...

It's supposed to hang diagonally so the tree is straight up and down...

Fall was created by piecing the tree and its background together, then cutting roughly ¾” squares of different batiks to make the leaves.  I tried to leave some of the blue and yellow sky shining through to convey the feeling that the sun and blue sky were peeking through all the colored leaves.  That’s what these massive Ash Trees look like in the fall – at least in my mind.  I put netting over the whole thing and quilted through the netting. 

Winter was created by just free-piecing scraps of fabric together.  I somewhat designed this in the spirit of Bob Ross (you know, the “Joy of Painting” painter??!)…he always does the beautiful winterscapes with the sun shining through the winter sky haze.  I think I should have started with the dark sun in the center and moved to light as I went outward, but I kind of like the interpretation that just, well, “happened”.  The distant trees are gray while the closer trees are dark, navy blue.  Then, I attempted to do some thread painting on the trees to try to “shape” them into the round-ish beings they wanted to be. 

Meanwhile, I’m working on pulling old items out of the “I’ll get to it” bin, and actually…well….get to it.  I’ve readied one quilt for actual quilting.  The quilt is one I was working on when my pup passed away…so, it’s been 5 years or so that the quilt has been waiting to get completed. So, hopefully over the next few months, I can make some progress.

 

Cheers & Happy Quilting!