Category: Background and Other Thoughts

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What Do I Do With All of Those Blues?

So…once I find all of those blues, I actually have to DO SOMETHING with them. Remember: this is a bargello project. I’m still firmly convinced of that, even after I had to make a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet, folks. I must be off my rocker.

The first thing I did for this quilt was project the image on a wall where I’d taped a large piece of paper. I used the image to draw a rough outline of the shapes I wanted to mimic in the final quilt. The image on paper is 30” high and about 54” wide, so that is what the final quilt will be as well. 

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with a ruler and laid out horizontal lines an inch apart from the water line to the top of the mountains in the image. The water line is 16” from the top of the image, so the image is slightly top-heavy – more of the image depicts above the water line than below it – but the water is basically a mirror, so what I do on the top of the image will be mirrored below the water line. The mountains aren’t really a large part of the image – I think the largest mountains in the image only extend 6-7” above the water line. The rest is sky.

The sky will be fairly “standard” – it will be like a traditional bargello in that it will be the same colors, in the same order, simply staggered to create the appearance of movement. (Remember that I have mother-of-pearl buttons to create the clouds in the sky, so much of the sky will be covered by “clouds.”) 

In a traditional bargello quilt, the height of the blocks is usually standardized – 1” finished, in most cases, but sometimes 2” finished. The width, however, varies depending on the effect that the pattern needs to create – a steeper angle needs pieces with smaller widths, while flatter curves can use wider pieces.

To create the mountains for this quilt, I squared off the contours of the mountains into 1”, or sometimes ½”, pieces, and varied the widths according to the changes in the coloring. I’d already assigned the six muted blues – I think I’ll call them mountain blues – to parts of the traced image, so all I had to do was number each of the squared-off pieces with the number of the mountain blue that it covered. I ended up with 54 columns of widths varying from ½” to 2”.

Here’s where it gets complicated. In a traditional bargello, the colors stay the same and appear in the same order. In this one, not a single one of the 54 columns is going to be the same as any other (except its mirror image below the water line). And therein lies the challenge…and the spreadsheet.

I labeled each column with a letter. And when I ran out of letters, I doubled them (AA, BB, etc.). And when I ran out of those (I didn’t use I, II, O, and OO for somewhat obvious reasons), I used the three extra letters in the alphabet of another language I speak, and doubled those as well. (Fortunately, I ran out of columns about the same time I ran out of letters and didn’t have to resort to Cyrillic.) I put each of those into a spreadsheet. I wrote down the width of the column, added a seam allowance, and doubled it (for its mirror image below the water line), and then I wrote down the number of 1” and ½” strips of each color that I would need. The spreadsheet is detailed. I am a dork, but I am an organized dork, at least on paper.

This is what the paper drawing looks like with all of my scribbling on it.

In the image, the water line is the straight line on the left, and the squiggly lines are the original tracing of the actual image. The rectangles with numbers in them will be pieces in the quilt; the numbers represent the blues – the higher the number, the darker the blue. The open space to the right is sky.

I hope it still makes sense to me when I sit down to actually sew the dang thing together.

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The First Steps to College Fjord

The College Fjord quilt is going to be the most difficult quilt I have attempted so far. I made a SPREADSHEET. It’s ugly.

Let’s discuss, for the moment, the fact that I still cannot find the solid blues I want and that the indecision surrounding said blues has (temporarily, I hope) paralyzed forward momentum on this project for my ADHD brain. (Also, let’s ignore the fact that I have had a metric crap-ton of other things on my plate for the last few weeks, and I have not really been able do sit down and do anything in the sewing room beyond finishing a couple of bindings and watching old episodes of “All Things Great and Small.” (So excited about the new season in January! But I digress…)

I actually shouldn’t say that I haven’t found the blues I need for this project. I have found the blues for the mountains. Six of them. Muted blues, ranging from so-dark-it’s-almost-black to so-light-it’s-almost-white. Found them in one store actually – it was pretty perfect. 

My issue has been finding solid sky blues. Bright blues. None of this muted nonsense. The morning sky (and the sky in this photo) is a brilliant, sapphire blue ranging from deep royal blue to, again, a blue that’s almost white, but a different almost-white than the muted blue almost-white. I can hear you now – “A blue that’s almost white is a blue that’s almost white. You can’t have different shades of it.” I (and the people who make paint chips you can get at the hardware store) beg to differ. Trust me, there is a difference.

A few weeks ago, I found a jelly roll of Kona solid blues and thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It looked perfect in the roll, inside its plastic, in the store. I got it home and unrolled it and…it was no longer perfect. Some of the colors stuck out like sore thumbs. There were 12 different shades of blue. I put them up on the design wall and picked out a couple of them as being wrong. I’ve been staring at them for weeks, and I can’t decide whether I need another roll or two (one roll doesn’t have enough for my project), or if I should just start over from scratch. And I also can’t decide whether I should use the 2.5” strips as is or cut them down to 1.5” strips for a true bargello (and a better blend from light to dark). At it’s longest, the sky needs to be 13.5” – with 2” (finished) strips, I only need 7 blues, but with 1” (finished) strips, I need double that, which means finding even more blues.

See why there’s a ton of indecision paralysis? I feel like I need to decide how many blues I actually need before I can go out and find them, and at the same time, I feel like I need to see how many blues I can find before I make a decision about how many of them I need. I don’t want to decide I absolutely MUST have 14 blues, only to find that I can only actually locate ten of them.

Ugh.

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A Busy Fall Commences

We’ve come to fall. Autumn in New England, actually. What everyone puts off during the summer – and there’s a lot of it – gets done in September and October. You’ll be reading this in early October because of the timing of my posts, but I’m writing it in mid-September, and I am about to enter the busiest fall I have had since my teaching days (fall of 2019 was my last fall in the classroom). If ever there were evidence of my ADHD, here it is – my commitments for this fall!

  • Prepping five photographs for submission to the Small Stones Festival of the Arts  
  • Beginning my term as president of Cornerstone Quilters Guild in Charlton, MA
  • Continuing my term as Vice President of Information and Technology for the Worcester Chorus, plus four concerts (Oct. 8, Oct. 27, Nov. 9-10, and Dec. 7) with the chorus or with the Bachtoberfest Chorus. Each concert has a different repertoire.
  • Beginning my term as Newsletter Editor for a local group of a social organization I belong to
  • Attending as many of my nephew’s football games (it’s his senior year) as I can
  • Trying to get my kitchen cabinets painted before the weather gets cold

Oh, wait…you want me to make quilts, too? Don’t worry! I will. It’ll just be a little slower than I’d like it to be.

So here’s what I have on my plate in the world of quilts:

  • Horseshoe Canyon quilt: still sitting, ready for stitch-in-the-ditch whenever I have a long enough time frame to devote to it.
  • Abstract iceberg quilt: also ready to be quilted! I layered it with the batting and backing and basted it all together sometime last week.
  • Oregon waterfall quilt: have fabric, ready to create paper templates and move on it, but needs a good long stretch of time to get in the mindset.
  • College Fjord quilt: still looking for fabrics. The blue ombre I ordered online isn’t going to cut it for the sky. Search begins anew. (Repeat after me: “I will NOT start dyeing my own fabrics. I will NOT start dyeing my own fabrics.”)
  • The other bargello quilt (which I will call “Hus Ved Havet” quilt – I’ll explain later): ironically, the ombre fabric I ordered online may be the perfect sky fabric for THIS quilt, but I am not willing to start sourcing the other fabrics for this until I have proof of concept with the College Fjord quilt. Stay tuned.

So the three quilts that are well underway are at a kind of standstill until I have a good chunk of time to devote to one or the other. The exception is the quilting for the abstract iceberg quilt, which again is stitch-in-the-ditch and could probably be done in an evening one of these days, if I can find one. The fourth quilt is at a standstill until I find fabric(s) for the sky. The fifth I won’t even consider until the fourth is well underway. So…here we sit.

In the meantime, I did a little binding work on a quilt that’s been waiting for the final hand stitching on the binding for probably close to a year. This quilt has absolutely nothing to do with this project, but it’ll be nice to free up some space in my box of UFOs. Maybe I’ll even get the quilting done on a Halloween door hanging I started years ago. Boo.

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Fabrics Before Grids

As mentioned earlier, I also went to the first two of the quilt shops in the All New England Quilt Shop Hop this past weekend. The shop hop runs through the end of October, and there’s no way I’ll get to all 91 shops, but it was a nice day on Sunday so I thought I’d go out for a drive. I particularly wanted to look for fabrics for the bargello quilts. I actually decided to start with the fabrics for only one of them, even though I drew out the plans for both on paper. I figure if the first one is a disaster, at least I won’t have purchased all of the fabrics for the second one!

I decided to start with the College Fjord image (above). I measured out the image at 30” x 50” on paper, and I had a general idea of what I thought it might look like. In my head, this quilt only involves solid fabrics (especially the sky), and it only involves shades of blue. (We’ll talk about the clouds in the picture later – I have a plan for those.) One of the stores I visited this weekend had not one single solid in the whole place, but the other shop had a whole section of solids, which I brazenly raided for the blue shades for the mountains. I started to also pick shades of blue for the sky, but I really quickly realized that I am actually going to need a blue ombre to achieve what I want to achieve there. Online fabric stores for the win! Ombre ordered – waiting for it to arrive in the mail.

I can hear you asking about those clouds in that image. The clouds – along with their reflection in the water – make that image what it is. I can bargello the heck out of a million shades of blue, but if the clouds aren’t there, the image just wouldn’t be the same, would it. My secret weapon – mother-of-pearl buttons. A little backstory…

When I travel, I try to buy fabric or yarn from small local shops, rather than trinkets, to take home with me. (I’m still trying to figure out what to do with a particularly lovely skein of purple, green, and yellow Mardi Gras yarn from New Orleans.) On the Alaska cruise I recently went on, we stopped in Alert Bay, a small First Nation community between Vancouver Island and mainland Canada. I found the mother-of-pearl buttons in a small shop on my walk back from the U’mista Cultural Center with Caroline, one of my cruise-mates. My thoughts, even then, went to using those buttons to recreate the clouds of that image when I finally made a quilt out of it. I am SO looking forward to actually doing so!

Looking for local fabric and yarn has become a really fun thing to do when I travel. In each town we went to on that cruise, I looked for a local yarn or fabric store. In Haines, AK, I found some yarn and a new-to-me-but-not-local maker of lovely knitting needles. In Sitka, I found a shop with both yarn and fabric and came away with a panel of Alaska national park images and some yarn made by a local-living-elsewhere. In Wrangell, I never found the fabric/yarn store (or maybe it was closed? we were there on a Sunday), but I did enjoy the Stikine Stitchers’ annual Fourth of July quilt show in the windows of all of the shops. How lovely that even in such a small town (pop. just over 2000 people) there’s a quilt guild that’s organized enough to put on a show each year! I found the buttons in Alert Bay, and in Vancouver (where the cruise ended and I met up with a friend for a couple of days), I found some fabric AND some gorgeous beads whose color mimics the iceberg in the Tracy Arm quilt. How much fun I am going to have with all of this stuff!

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Paper Piecing the Hard Way

On Saturday, I got out the projector and some large pieces of paper and outlined three potential quilts – the Oregon waterfall and the two bargello quilts. I’m pretty sure I have all of the fabrics for the Oregon waterfall quilt, but I haven’t yet started putting that one together yet. I think I need a full day for that one, so I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon. (I have some pretty busy non-quilting weekends coming up over the next few weeks.)

This was an interesting process. First, trying to trace an image that disappears into shadow if you stand in the wrong place is a pain in the ass. Second, trying to line up a ruler – in this case, a yardstick – with a projected image is actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. I mean, how hard could it be? Line up the straight edge of the yardstick with the straight edge of the image. So, so much harder than it looks. One side of the image was shorter than the yardstick, so that one was easy. But the other was not, so I needed a waypoint. I am 100% sure none of the horizontal lines I drew are straight. There’s no way.

The Oregon waterfall image was far easier than the other two. After all, it was just a matter of outlining the different areas of the image that would be covered by different areas of fabric. For the most part, this was straightforward. I drew lines, I made notes, I labeled different parts of the image. Now all I have to do is make all of the template pieces and put the thing together. That is a project for another weekend.

The bargello quilts were another story. I drew out both of them because I had the projector on and it was just easier to do both while my brain was immersed in the logistics of them. All I really did was draw a rudimentary grid, labeling the water line and providing some structure for the rest of it, then outline each image as if I was going to do it with the technique I’ll use on the Oregon waterfall image. Each of the bargello quilts will be about 30” x 50”, and I was a little surprised to find that some areas of the images were much smaller than I’d imagined they would be when projected on the wall. I’m not quite sure how well that will translate to the bargello pattern, but I haven’t yet overlaid the full horizontal grid lines over it yet to see how well it’ll work.

Now that I have the images on paper, I can start to produce those grids to see whether or not what I have in my head will actually work!

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Thoughts in the Shower

I really need to learn to keep a notepad near the shower so I can take notes on things that I think of while I’m in there. While half of my brain is occupied by the repetitive (and boring) act of showering, the other half gets to wander far afield. Sometimes it focuses on work that I have upcoming. Sometimes it repeats conversations I’ve recently had, heavily notated with the things I wish I’d said at the time. Sometimes it hits on five different topics, so that I forget about the first one by the time I step out of the tub. Yesterday, I visualized and planned quilts.

I won’t take you through the whole thought process that went into this, but I was thinking about this whole idea of using a published pattern, or a traditional way of piecing, and trying to build an image around it. Because I’m me and I know that I get bored easily, the established pattern needs to be easy – something that’s not terribly intricate and doesn’t involve absurd amounts of planning. (For some people, what I’ve already done for the abstract iceberg quilt constitutes “absurd amounts of planning.” The definition of “absurd” is simply “something I don’t wanna do.”) Side note: along this same line of thinking, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to incorporate a log cabin pattern into one of these things, but very few of my images lend themselves well to squares, or even rectangles. But I digress.

Somehow, the image of a bargello quilt came into my head. (Yes, I hear you yelling “I thought you said you DIDN’T want to do absurd amounts of planning!” Bear with me.) And I must admit, I got a little excited at the prospect of figuring out a way to do one of these images in the abstract with bargello. I mean, think about it. Bargello curves. It moves. Like a picture, it is designed for your eyes to travel across it. It is the perfect quilty medium for interpreting hills and mountains and movement.

I have done one bargello quilt before. It was a small table runner, and I swore I’d never do one again. Even though my piecing has become more consistent over the years, it’s still just inconsistent enough that I can pretty much guarantee that very few seams will match on any bargello quilt I make. But perhaps, with a bargello quilt that imitates nature, matching seams isn’t really the point. Let’s be honest – who’s going to notice when it’s hanging on a wall?

I’m trying to imagine myself attempting bargello on a larger scale. I’m not going to lie – it mostly terrifies the stuffing out of me. But I have not just one but two images that would be pretty much perfect to attempt using this method. One is a mirror image picture – mountains and skies over mirror-smooth water. (I’m DYING to do something with this image and was kicking myself that I hadn’t yet figured out a way to do it well.) The other is another scene from the Lofoten Islands in Norway that just contains a lot of that kind of undulating movement that bargello quilts do spectacularly well.

So I will most likely be breaking my oath to myself never to attempt another bargello quilt. May the Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on my soul.

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Choosing Images, Part II

I had another photo from Norway that I was sure I could turn into a small fabric image using a type of layered applique technique I learned in a class taught by someone in my guild. The image is fairly simple – a road, some rocks in the foreground, and some mountains in the background. I easily found fabrics that mimicked the colors in the image, and I set out to recreate it. I love the photograph. The fabric version is BOOORING.

It turns out that the texture in the image was what made it interesting. Take away that specific texture and replace it with a generic texture, and the image loses its impact. So as I look through my pictures to see which ones might end up as cool quilts, I have a lot to think about.

Each of the three types of categories of quilts I can create needs a different quality of image. 

Interesting images that I would have no hope of recreating with fabric can go one of three ways:

  • Is there an interesting element to it? If yes, then I might print the image out on fabric. Unlike the Crater Lake quilt, though, I want to be able to do something interesting to it once it’s printed out. I don’t simply want an image printed on fabric with standard fabric borders. I’m currently waiting on two pictures that Spoonflower has printed to arrive in the mail. I have two very different ideas for what I’m going to do with those two pictures. But I knew that I would have no hope of recreating those two photos to my satisfaction without printing them out on fabric.
  • Are there layers to the image? If so, that might be a good candidate for the layered applique technique I learned earlier this year. I can tell right now, though, that there won’t be many of these. First, I’m not a huge fan of applique. Second, this technique is relatively easy to do, but as I illustrated above, it’s a very specific photograph that will withstand this treatment. I’m honestly not sure I have very many photos that will suffice.
  • Are there lots of colors, or is the image something I like but that would be boring using either of the methods above? If so, it might benefit from the abstract treatment. The first quilt I’ve worked on, in fact, is one of these, and I have another one in my head that I’ll start trying to find fabrics for soon.

I’m still looking through the images I have to find ones that I think would translate well to quilts. I’ve considered and rejected many images so far. I keep having to remind myself of what I am looking for when I look through my pictures. I look at the pictures one way when I’m trying to decide which ones I like in general, but I have to reframe how I look at them when I’m evaluating whether or not they’d make good quilts.

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What Works and What Doesn’t (Mostly What Doesn’t)

When I started working in earnest on this project, I started with the images. With over 45,000 images on my hard drive, there’s a lot to sort through. I have my favorites – the images that I come back to again and again when I need a background for a business card or something to hang on my wall or an example of what my photography is like. I started with my favorite images, but I began to realize that my favorites weren’t necessarily going to translate well into quilts that build on the skills I have. Let me explain using an example.

One of my favorite images from Acadia is a night shot that I took in September 2014 from a pull-out on Park Loop Road. It was an accident – I was doing 30-second exposures of the Milky Way, and I had framed it with an evergreen tree in the foreground that was completely black, which made the Milky Way behind it stand out. One of the dangers of long exposures is that, in a camera’s world, 30 seconds is a LONG time. A lot can happen in 30 seconds, especially out in nature. A plane or a boat comes out of nowhere and now you’ve got a light trail across some otherwise dark piece of sky or water. Or, as in this case, a car drives by. I was trying to time my pictures such that I wouldn’t get the headlights or taillights from cars passing on Park Loop Road behind me. But…a lot can happen in 30 seconds.

In this case, I had the camera set to do a 30-second exposure. Once I pressed the shutter button, there was nothing I could do to close the shutter and end the shot. I waited until a car had passed behind me and, hearing no other cars coming, pressed the shutter button. About five seconds later, a car came around the bend, and its headlights shone onto the tree I was using to frame the sky. You know, that tree I wanted to be black. Oh well. So much for that shot. But the car didn’t just pass behind me and continue on its way. It passed me, then stopped and backed into the pull-out where I was standing. All of a sudden, during the 30-second exposure, I not only had white headlights shining on the tree from behind me to the left, but I also had bright red brake lights shining on the tree from behind me to my right. Let’s just say that it was a good thing that the camera wasn’t recording audio. I cursed up a storm. I was 100% sure that shot was a complete loss. So I kept going, and I did end up getting shots exactly like I wanted them – the Milky Way in the distance over the water, framed by completely black trees in the foreground. They’re nice images. They would be perfectly adequate…if I hadn’t gotten that one shot with the white and red lights on that tree.

This photo has become one of my favorites from that night. It’s an interesting image with a good story behind it, and it was a total accident. It was one of the first images I thought of when I started looking through my photos for quilt ideas. It’s also one of the first images I rejected. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even have to look at it to reject it. Someone who has a lot more patience than I do and is eager to work with little fiddly bits of fabric would have a field day with this image. I am not that person. The image is too detailed to really do well in quilt format, at least for me. If I had better thread painting skills and was interested in figuring out how to faithfully recreate stars and the nebulousness of the Milky Way, this would be an awesome quilt. Maybe someday, but I honestly wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

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Photography

Over the years, I have naturally been drawn to landscape photography. I can appreciate others’ facility with city photography, or sports photography, or photojournalism, but I do not have those skills. Nor, frankly, do I have the desire to develop them. On a recent vacation with copious opportunities for great wildlife photos, I realized that I was so focused on composing each image that I was missing the shots that could have been good in post-production if I’d just TAKEN. THE. DAMN. SHOT. I am not, and never will be, the kind of photographer who is in the right spot at the right time and whips their camera out to get that prize-winning image. But that’s also not what appeals to me, so I’m totally OK with that.

Instead, I need to plan. I need to compose my shot, maybe take several with different compositions to see which ones I like better, think about it some more, and then maybe come back when the light is different. I like to revisit the same spots over and over again for a different perspective. In my favorite places, I have shots from different times of year, different angles, different times of day. Acadia National Park is one of my favorite places to visit. In seven trips there over 12 years, I’ve been there in all four seasons. I’ve taken night photography classes there as part of their night sky festival in September. I have my favorite spots along the Park Loop road, which I visit each day I’m there. I go at different times of day, which usually means different parts of the tide cycle. I go in any weather. I don’t plan out where I’ll be each minute of each day, but I know my favorite spots, and I know I want to visit each of them, and there is a vague plan to do that. Repeatedly.

My favorite images are “uncluttered.” Some excellent photography has a lot going on. There’s a focal point in the image, as there always must be for it to be a good shot, but there’s a lot of other stuff in the image to look at, take in, and process. You see something new in it every time you look at it. Not my favorite shots. There is a simplicity to the images that end up taking my breath away when I get them home and really look at them. Take the Crater Lake shot that I used for the quilt above my fireplace as an example. There is a focal point – the tree – and the tree has texture and movement to it. There’s a line that your eye follows when you look at it. But the background is almost absurdly simple. When talking over potential quilting options for that quilt with a long arm quilter, we talked about, but ultimately rejected, the idea of adding texture to that sky. One of the things I like best about that picture is that the sky is pure blue – no clouds, no mist, no sun. Quilting over that, adding unnecessary texture, would have ruined the image for me. 

Fortunately, these types of photographs lend themselves well to my skills as a quilter. I’m never going to be the quilter who produces ridiculously detailed images with itty-bitty pieces of fabric. I don’t have the skills, and I certainly don’t have the patience. I also don’t see the world like that, but I marvel at people who do and just leave them to their own devices when they’re working on their own stuff. I am happy to stay within my own wheelhouse, which is simple without being boring. (Trust me – I have simple photos that are as boring as dishwater.) I want to visualize large swaths of color, with texture or not, and be able to recreate that from digital format to fabric.

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And All of This Leads To…

I was having a conversation with someone about photography earlier this year, and it came out that I don’t really consider myself to be an artist. At the time, I was thinking more about my submissions to an art show co-sponsored by the photography club I’m in. In 2023, I submitted four images to this juried show, and none were selected by the judges to be included. So I began to think about what distinguishes a good photograph from art, if anything. I had submitted some of my favorite photos to the show, and I was rather disappointed that none of them had been chosen at all. 

So it came out in this conversation that I, personally, don’t see myself as an artist. My friend was surprised to hear me say that. From there, a discussion of “what is art?” ensued, and I won’t bore you with the details of it. The conversation – and subsequent internal musings about it – has changed my perception of what it means to be an artist. I’m still not 100% sure I’d classify myself as one, but I saw my friend’s perspective when she pointed out all of the reasons she would put me in that category. And one of those reasons was the quilts that she’d seen me do in the years that she has known me (as well as the photography). And that conversation led me down the internal rabbit hole that has put me on the path to merging my quilting and my photography in a more meaningful way.

So…what does that mean?

In the months since that conversation, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to answer this question. Understanding my limitations as a quilter – I have little patience for small, fiddly bits, and I mostly detest applique, among other things – would it be possible for me to bring my photography into quilting without simply printing my photos onto fabric, like the Crater Lake and national park quilts, and putting a border around them? What are the possibilities?

The ideas that I’ve come up with fit into three general categories:

  • Printing the photo onto fabric, but then doing…something…with it afterward. Current ideas for this include printing the photo in black and white and adding color back in through thread painting, or printing the photo but only using one element of it, while recreating the rest of the image with regular fabric one can buy at the quilt store.
  • Recreating the image with regular quilters cottons from the quilt store. I have a couple of ideas for this, including superimposing an image onto a normal quilt pattern, or just projecting the image onto a wall or tracing it onto paper, which can then be used as a template for creating the image with fabric.
  • Using the image as inspiration for something abstract. This is actually the first idea that I’m attempting to work on – I found a published quilt pattern that mimics an image I wanted to use, and I’ve been a little creative with the colors I’ve used to do so. So far (it’s not quite done yet), I’m pleased, but I’m learning lessons as I go along.

As I mentioned before, I have about 10 quilts that are sloshing around in my head in various planning stages, and I just returned from a two-week vacation with 3200+ more images to play with (one of which has already been printed out on fabric). Fortunately, what appeals to me as a landscape photographer also plays well with the “doesn’t like little fiddly bits” part of me as a quilter – I tend to like the sweeping landscapes with large scale elements that lend themselves well to larger pieces of fabric that don’t take terribly long to put together. So I have lots of options, and I promise I won’t run out of them anytime soon!

The journey ahead promises to be fascinating, both from a learning perspective (this is what I want to do, so now I have to learn how to do it) and a “push Allison completely out of her comfort zone” perspective (watch me be forced to embrace batiks, which I pretty much have refused to work with up to this point in my quilting journey). Either I rise to the challenge, or I end up throwing things through windows – either way, it promises to be fun to watch!