Strawberry Fields Forever

It is hot here on Quilt Island. My friend Carolyn and I went strawberry picking today. We picked strawberries on Monday, too. I made jam and intend to make some more tonight when the kitchen cools down. I picked 4 quarts Monday, but only 3 today. Strawberries are so fragile, aren't they? So delicious.

As a child I remember a wooden plaque with a basket of strawberries that my grandfather made with a wood burning kit. After the design was made the scene was stained with soft colors. I would like to have that plaque now.

Today I have been working on a fusible art quilt from Art Quilt Workshop by Jane Davila and Ellen Waterston. I saw Jane on The Quilt Show and ordered the book from Amazon right away. Jane and Ellen take you step by step, project by project through the elements of design. Different techniques for creating art quilts are shown. You start at the beginning of the book and do all the exercises, building on what you have learned. I have really been enjoying it.

One of the first exercises is about perspective. All the quilts you make to complete the exercises are only 9x11, so they are fairly quick to do and don't require much fabric. I chose to make a quilt using diminishing size to show perspective. I don't know that it really worked here, but I had fun making it. I think if the whole quilt were bigger and there was more space between the pumpkins it would work better.


Click on the photo to see more detail. The size of this quilt is small but I really made an effort to make all the details just right. Sometimes I have a tendency to say any old thing will do, but I want these little quilts to be really good.

The quilt I am working on today is a fusible rendition of a photo. Before attempting to create my own quilt from my own photo, I followed the pattern in the book for a pear. It kind of looks like paint by numbers, but very effective. I really like it.

I used some of the many leftovers from my Louisa Smith Citrus quilt to make the border. I kept running out of bobbin thread when I did the machine quilting, don't you hate that? I kept thinking "that's enough thread" on the bobbin and it was not. Wish I had won that bobbin winder at the Back Road quilt auction earlier this month.

So, the photo I am using is one of my daughter Zoe when she was four. I made a drawing of her face and hair. Then I traced each element onto lightweight fusible web. I've been picking out mostly solid color fabrics. I can't decide if it looks okay or is really horrid. I think this may be one of those projects that you have to just go ahead and make before I can really make an assessment. I think quilting will really help bring out the details. Or not.

Looks like another thundershower on Quilt Island, so I will say goodbye for now.