New project

About 3 weeks ago Maria Elkins spoke at our guild. If you are not familiar with her work you can read about her here. She had just found out that one of her quilts had won one of the major awards at the International Quilt Festival in Houston. She started the quilt on May 16th and had it finished in time to meet the show deadline of June 1st! Here is the picture I took of her quilt 'Windswept' at the show.

Hearing her story really inspired and motivated me to create something I haven't done in quite a while.....make a quilt that I consider show quality. It seems like I have had a lot of starts and stops in the last year or so and haven't seemed to be able to stay focused on creating a piece I am really proud of.

Now you might think that I would do a small to medium piece but noooooo..... I have started a landscape that is 4ft wide and 6ft tall. The piece is based on a picture that I took about 4 weeks ago when we took a drive on the Cherohala Skyway which is close to our home in NC. I plan to share my process and post progress here on a regular basis. So here is what I did on day 1 of the project.

I use raw edge applique to make my landscape quilts and step 1 is to create a base to work on. The sky fabric is a hand dye by Stacy Michelle and the bottom is a piece of an old sheet. I find starting the most difficult step since now I am facing a big blank space that needs to be filled.

Next I start adding large pieces of fabric to give me more insight into where I am going and I seem to work better once I can get something up on the wall. You can have now fear in cutting up your fabrics and I do adulation and try to select fabrics that will be used in the final piece. The next picture shows what it looks like after about 5 hours on day 1.


I know this isn't very impressive but now I have a better idea of where I want to go with this. I used chalk to sketch in the basic flow of the water. I didn't crop this picture so you can see the size of the piece. That is a chair just to the right of the quilt. I will post more tomorrow.