Translate

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Tea and Daffodils--As Promised

The Vermont Quilt Festival is over, and I've returned home. This was my
first time to teach there. Burlington VT is really beautiful. The quilters up in New England are very lucky to have such a great show and conference in the area. I was fortunate to teach in a Janome sponsored classroom, and the first time that their brand new Horizon machine was used in a classroom! Now I'm home, rested and ready to get back to my studio.

At last here is my new little daffodil quilt, shown in stages of its development!

April and May were wonderful months for daffodils and narcisis in my yard. I picked large bouquets of them for my dining table and living room. After a long winter the color and fresh scent makes me feel so good. One day while I was having tea, the idea for this quilt struck me, so I got started as soon as I could.

Above is the background. The angle on the right side is to give the impression that there is a table top. Next it is time to make a vase full of flowers. I took a closeup photo of an arrangement on the table and that's what I used to create the flowers. Working a little each day on the flowers, it took me 4 or 5 days to get all the flower heads fused together. The stems are great. I used bright green cotton, and shaded them with Inktense Pencils.

The vase was a sheer iridescent piece of Polyester fabric. It created a great glass vase. Just what I needed.

I knew that a tea cup was going to be sitting on the table but what else should I have?  There should be 3 things included in my composition. So I talked about it with a friend at coffee the next morning. We came up with the idea of using several cookies. The idea worked for me.



Here are the cookie shapes cut out of paper for a pattern
.

Next comes the cup and saucer. I love the contrast with the yellow flowers and the blue background. Now the cookies don't seem to work, so I put a napkin under them, to make them more visible.



A week has gone by and something is wrong, and I'm not happy with the composition.  Finally the solution for the problem comes to me. The cup and saucer are larger than the cookies. So I pulled them to the front, and put the cookies toward the back. At last it works. Now everything is fused together and time to do the embroidery.



I added a fallen yellow petal laying at the base of the vase.


I'll show you the finished photos next time.

Ann

1 comment:

Linda and Michelle said...

Ann - I liked following your thinking on this. I am curious to see how all the embroidery adds to the finished quilt. I particularly liked the lemon slice on the cup of tea.