Marionb

By Marionb

A Watercolour....

...Quilt. 

Another very hot and humid day..with a thunderstorm and the now almost daily deluge of rain thrown in for interest. Other than doing some essential errands, I pretty much stayed indoors in AC again which meant I was stumped yet again for a blip! 

One never ending source of blips in this house would be my quilts...as I have many! It is a hobby that comes and goes like all my hobbies, and I have not made one for a long time, but recently I have been getting interested again.The other day, my friend and neighbour was having trouble putting together fabrics for a new quilt top and wanted some help with colour choice. We dug through my fabric collection and found a couple that would solve her problem..and in doing so, I could feel my interest being re-kindled..all those Kaffe Fassett luscious fabrics sitting neglected on those shelves were just crying out to be loved and made into something fun and funky.. In the next couple of days, I found myself pulling out quilting books and browsing for ideas...and then choosing my mom's quilt to blip the other day. I was getting all nostalgic about her quilts and all the ones I have made over the years.. Hmmm..methinks that soon there may be a new quilt in the making...?

I hang my quilts on walls and rotate them according to the season or just out of boredom, wanting a change of scene. This quilt usually hangs in the guest bathroom..I took it down today to give it a dusting and decided to put it up in the living room for a while. It is one of my early quilts and one of my faves. I like the impressionist look of water-colour quilts and they are fun to make because you choose fabrics not for their colour, but for their value. You sort them into categories of varying shades of darks, mediums and lights...and then arrange them to make blocks where the colours wash together to create patterns. It is quite unsettling to ignore colour...like, how could that possibly work? But it does!  In this quilt design, that last fabric you choose for the outer edges will determine which colours within the quilt become more prominent. This was my first attempt and not entirely successful, but it was a good learning experience.To me, the watercolour technique is the impressionism of quilting...and of course, as the impressionists are my favourite artists, its appeal  is understandable! 

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