Inspiration and Mental Process

Since I’ve been a bit under the weather, and not feeling like actual creating anything, I’ve spent quite a bit of time between napping and watching TV, thinking about this new piece. Inspiration, the mental process, and what actually ends up, is really pretty interesting.

These two pieces from Sedona are my inspiration.

These are wood pieces painted. I was so drawn to these, but I was looking at them in fabric.

Just thinking about this process from wood to fabric brought up a memory from my past.  Years ago, I saw this beautiful picture of a big dog laying on a bed quilt. The quilt was made of jean squares. I was new to quilting, so it looked pretty simple for me to make, and I had lots of old jeans around. With excitement, I showed my then-husband the picture. I think he was more interested in the dog, but said it would make a nice cover for the bed. As I began working on this project, I thought I needed another color. Off I went to the fabric store, and ended up with yards of red denim, and white with red stripes denim. I was so happy with my fabric. I enjoyed cutting squares out of the three fabrics, and then sewing them together. When I had about a third of the top pieced, I made the mistake (or maybe not) of showing it to my partner. All he could do is laugh, and told me it looked like a d… flag! So much for that quilt. I packed up the fabric, my unfinished pieced top, and took it to the thrift store. Hopefully, someone else finished it. By the way, I never made a quilt for that bed.

For any of us who create, whatever the art, we don’t always know how it will end. Often it will look nothing like the inspiration.

For this project, and most of what I create, I like to start with the design board, putting up fabrics I want to use. Since I wanted it to look like Sedona, I chose some of those new pieces that are mostly turquoise and orange.

I added a piece of white to balance out the dark and mid shade fabrics. But the white just stuck out. It was too… well, white!  I ended up painting it light orange. I also took some of the fabric out that I didn’t feel needed to go in this piece.

To help me see how this would look when it’s sewn, I just cropped the picture so I wouldn’t be distracted by the uneven edges.

That helped me to see it better. But I really didn’t like both orange pieces. I decided to get rid of one of them.

So this is where I’m going so far. It will be quilted, but I’ll also be printing over it to tie all the fabrics together. And as the wood pieces, I want to make three of them in different sizes to hang next to each other. But that’s just the plan right now. Looking forward to working on this.

For all of my US readers, I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. And for all of you, I am so thankful that you take time out of your day to stop by and see what I’m doing. Drop by again soon.