To Art Quilting and Beyond - Week 4/Part 1

As you might imagine...since I've now done Summer Garden, Autumn Migration and Spring Pond...the next piece has to be a Winter piece. Only makes sense, right?

As I noted on Friday, I did not have much fabric to work with but with the blue fabric the girls chose and the connecting fabric I had just enough to make it work! Believe me...I was sweating this one.

Because I have the pond with an upward arc I wanted to do this one with a downward arc. So that is how I began.

The blue fabric is the snowy blue sky of a winter evening. And the downward arc finished off the balance of the background. So I had a beginning.

And this is how it sat for almost 2 days. I looked at my bag of items and thought and thought of how to make it blend with the other three pieces. Finally I decided the connecting fabric looked like a valley of snow and that is the direction I settled on.

I started by stitching a tree on the right side but when I put it with the other 3 it looked very  different and like it didn't belong. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it!) I did not get a photo of that stitched tree. It did not turn out like I had wanted anyway.  The one thing that came out of this mishap was noticing that I definitely needed more stitching on the background. Which I did later on as you will see in the coming days,.

So I cut a paper template to use for the tree fabric I had found. I laid that on the background and played with some of the bits in the bag of items just to get an idea of what it could look like.

Here is the first layout.

This one took a little more "marinating" than I'm used to but once I got the vision it evolved fairly quickly.

This process was a bit different than how I usually work. Usually I have a fairly well formed idea of the final product. Granted, it often changes a bit along the way but it ends up near the original vision at least. On this one, I only knew I wanted it to be a winter theme AND that it had to go well with the other three pieces.

So, let's see where this one ends up now!  See you tomorrow