desert

I’ve been working on this quilt for some while, and it’s gone through several transformations. We had a mocking bird in here which is now slated for a later flight, somewhere else. And we’ve added lizards and subtracted lizards. All the way through, it’s been a stumbly path.

But each quilt needs to build a path for your eye. It’s more obvious with elongated quilts, but if you want movement in your work, you need to help the eye move.

What makes your eye move? Usually the small things: rocks, bugs, a strand of yarn over the piece, leaves. In this case, it’s bugs and owls. What makes the owls seem to move? The turn of their heads. What makes the owls heads move? What they’re looking at, of course.

It helps that the owls are darling. I’ve been in love with them since I stitched them in. But I found the path of the whole piece depended on what they were looking at.

It’s not an exact science, but we look where the owls are looking. It all turns on the turn of the heads.

I’ve talked a lot about the visual path. You can find more information about it on the new web page: It’s the Little Things: Building the Visual Path.

We have it all embroidered and stitched down now. Next stop: backing and binding.

Quilts sometimes get designed in a twisty weird way. I think it’s fun to share that with you sometimes.

I’ve been working on a mockingbird quilt for a while. I found an image that intrigued me and drew it up. And I embroidered that.

All that said, where do you put a mocking bird? I had to look it up. This particular mocking bird was from the desert part of the Galapagos Islands. I didn’t know. And from the desert part.

You may have noticed I don’t do desert. Not personally. Just too hot and dry. And not often in my art. But here’s this mockingbird and she needs a desert.

After a fair amount of reading, I found mockingbirds sitting among cactus. But what tickeled me sideways, is that the cactus had owls living in them. The owls were easy.

So how do you make a hole for an owl in a cactus?

We’re pretty far off my map and this point. I don’t do cactus. I don’t do desert. And I need to do holes in desert cactus.

The cactus don’t just have holes in them. They have a scarred area around the hole where the owls dug their holes. The also need a dark background behind that and a place to slip in the owl heads.

Fjrst, I cut cactus bits. I cut a hole in the side of the cactus, and cut an irregular rim around it that I extended past the edge, clipped, and glued around the hole.