Changes

I've been browsing the internet, and find that many serious fibre artists blog about their past year, and what they've accomplished.  I wonder about the quilters who keep careful records of how many quilts they started, how many they finished, how many yards of fabric came into the house and how many are there at the end of the year, etc.  That sort of thing would take the fun out of fibre, for me.

Given the number of years I've focused on fibre, I tend to think I've seen it all-there is nothing new under the sun. Reflecting on the outgoing year, my unexpected trip into Modern and Improv work has taught me I'm wrong.  There is a whole new world in front of me.  How exciting!  What a lot to look forward to!

So, rather than talking about it, I think I'm going to re-visit my recent quilts, and include a picture.  This is first one I made this summer.  It was an exercise in creating shapes that appear to float on a background.   I've been agonizing about how to machine quilt it.  I had an idea of what motifs I wanted to use, but the vision, of how that would play out, escaped me.  It is sandwiched, ready to go, but sits folded up on a shelf until I sort things out.  Quite recently, I had the germ of an idea, and think the problem may be solved.  The next step is to do sample, and then tackle the big quilt.  It isn't that big, but is bigger than I usually  manage to deal with on my current machine.

Next came this beauty.  I certainly want to explore this technique a little more, but feel that I need to do a little more research on it, to get it more firmly established in my mind. This did not turn out as I thought it might, and I need to figure how how to create my vision better.

This was next.  I'm thrilled with it, but not really comfortable with the variety of colour within it.  As well, the red is appearing to be my "go to" colour.  I've even laughed bit over the years, that I work as though red was a neutral.  Maybe too comfortable a niche?

So I next made a real effort to not work with the red end of the spectrum.  I like this and think I know how to quilt it.  But--am I getting too comfortable with white as my background?

White has been used again with this challenge piece I recently finished.  This was an exercise in improv piecing, in response to a challenge from the LQG.  We were given 3 fat quarters with the instruction to make "something", flat, where the three fabrics provided were obvious on the front of the piece. But we could add up to 5 additional fabrics.  I added white.  The beads are hand made, and embellished.  All the finished challenge pieces are to be auctioned off at a big quilt show next April, for charity.

There is another piece in the works, but I'm not ready to show it yet.  I very much enjoy the process of taking many solid colour fabrics and combining them into a joyous riot of piecing.  But--and a big "but"--is the difficulty I had in addressing my need to control for colour.  I cannot work on a piece if the colour doesn't please me, or make sense within my knowledge of colour theory.  The techniques involved in this process scream out for a huge variety of plain coloured fabrics.  So-o-o, I need to explore the limits of my comfort level in all of this  given the restraints I'm placing on myself.