The second quilt I attempted at the same time as the national parks quilt, in late 2022/early 2023, was born out of a need for some sort of artwork to go above my fireplace in my living room. I don’t ever go out and buy artwork. I have 45,000+ pictures (of varying quality) on the hard drive of my computer. (Actually, they recently outgrew my hard drive – they’re on a 1TB external drive.) Why, oh why, would I go out and purchase someone else’s art if I can display something I myself have made? I don’t take photos so they can sit on a computer somewhere. I take photos so that I can display them to remember all of the gorgeous places I’ve traveled to. So when contemplating the space above my mantel, I knew that there was going to have to be some sort of photo there, and the photo was going to come from my collection.
At the same time, though, the idea of printing and framing something that would be the appropriate size for the space – about 30” high and 40” wide – left me less than enthusiastic for the project. I have a number of images, mostly 8” x 10” matted and framed to 11” x 14”, hanging in my house. I wanted to switch it up a bit, and I had just finished printing the images I was going to use with the national park quilt at Spoonflower. Was it possible to print out one large image on a yard of fabric rather than a bunch of small images on a fat quarter? Yup. Let’s do this.
I chose an image that I had taken in March of 2012 at Crater Lake in Oregon. At the time, I had plans to paint the wall that the fireplace was on a navy blue color. (Those plans changed, and a different wall was painted navy blue; the fireplace wall was painted gray, which was a much better decision.) So I wanted an image that had a good deal of blue in it. It had to be landscape orientation, and it had to be something that would be relatively simple to quilt, without resorting to handing it over to a professional long arm quilter. The Crater Lake images fit the bill stunningly, and I’m very happy with the one I eventually chose.
Once the image was printed, putting the quilt top together was REALLY simple. It needed a thin inner border and a wider outer border. And there’s where it stopped…and stayed…for over a year. I could not, for the life of me, decide whether or not I wanted to have it professionally long-arm quilted after all. And I was curious about whether or not I could do some trapunto quilting – something I’d never done before – with the tree. And because I could not make a decision, it sat. I finally decided that yes, I was going to attempt both trapunto quilting AND free motion quilting – neither of which I had ever done before with any success – and come hell or high water, I was going to get this thing done. I was sick of looking at the blank wall. And it got done in the spring of 2024.
