Hi! So, it’s been a while. The quilts are designed, stitched, quilted, and finished, hung at the Living with Craft exhibit at the 2016 League of NH Craftsmen’s Fair at Sunapee a couple of weeks ago. So now I’ll backtrack and try to catch you up.
You will notice that NONE of the fabrics in my last blog post ended up in the quilt. Someday, I would like to make a black and white quilt out of this design – but this time I ended up going with more realistic colors. When I got back to working with the photo mid-spring, that’s what I saw, instead of what I’d seen earlier. You gotta go with your gut, sometimes, and my vision changed.
My new challenge was finding the “right” fabrics to match my new vision. And my new vision needed some help, because I could not work out a design. Did I want it to be realistic, like, a realistic tree on a realistic background? Or what? The background really was the issue. Cutting shapes for the background to simulate the photo just wasn’t making me happy!
I planned – at the last minute - to visit a friend who was visiting NYC from LA, whom I hadn’t seen in years. I didn’t want to drive, so bought cheap bus tickets from Boston to NYC. I knew where I was going, but I listened to my GPS – twice, once driving and once walking – and watched the bus drive away. Between traffic and bus snafus, I would have less than two hours to visit, and 8-9 hours of the bus riding.
So, instead, I could head back home, or spend a Saturday by myself out. What a gift! My daughter lived near, but she was out of town for the day. I was on my own.
I visited the Museum of Fine Arts - the contemporary wing, which I hadn’t seen before. Fabulous! And I found the solution to the background on the quilts. Repetition.
There is a whole area of the wing devoted to the use of repetition, in a variety of ways. One piece in particular caught me, and I would show you a photo, but I didn’t take a photo of the tag, so I can’t attribute it to the artist or even give you the title of the piece. From across the gallery, it was a large framed piece with a dozen or more vertical lines. Up close, it is made of fire hoses, all different muted colors and rough threaded fiber. The vertical repetition and the texture drew me in. The artist had collected fire hoses that were used to “calm down” crowds during the civil rights movement. Reality, right in front of me.
Vertical and horizontal repetition. My visit to the MFA gave me a basis for my backgrounds. A steadiness.
Making the tree – for both a framed wall piece and for a sofa/lap quilt – proved very challenging. But that’s another story. And choosing thread color…
P.S. Fabric and color continue to intrigue me. See the borders on the larger quilt? The one on the outside is silver, and the one next to it – the gray one? That was from my blue stash. It is the same blue as the shadow of the tree. I thought it was blue! It was – and worked with the blues in the background. It changed when I added the silver, and I didn’t even see that it changed until it was hanging in the exhibit. It looks gray, and now I can only see it as gray, not as blue. Fascinating.
