garden

Do you remember Valentine’s Day as a kid?

I loved it. My mother made me a red and white dress for the day, and you brought valentines for everyone, and then you filled their mail box with them and found your own filled.

I was not much of a social butterfly. And I’m not sure I would have gotten any valentines if everyone didn’t send them to everyone.

But most of all, I loved all that color in the middle of the snow. Red, pink, and orange warm my heart whatever the temperature. Add a dash of purple. I could get drunk on it.

Valentine’s day is sort of a bust for a number of reasons around here. Mostly, Don doesn’t do holidays. And if either of us really wants something, we just go buy it. But I still get off on the colors.

Don takes me for a color bath every fall. He drives me around the stately homes of Galesburg and I gasp at the amazing leaves. This time, I happened to look down at the red roses beneath the trees. Absolutely breathtaking. Red, orange, pink. I might as well be drunk. So I started with a batch of red roses. I’d been wanting to do a garden quilt.

I have several ways I make roses, but my favorite is with spirals.

After cutting spirals, I glue them to felt. The felt is red because the color will show through. That’s a promise.

Once they’re all stitched, you can see the form better from the back.

Here’s how they look cut out.

I intend a sunflower and some hollyhock for this quilt as well. Yellow birds as an accent.

This is just pinned up and the leaves for the roses and the hollyhocks aren’t finished yet. But I’m excited. With all those fall leaves falling, we’ll need a garden in bloom. It’s just like Valentine’s day.

I’m worn out after doing a bunch of big pieces. Big is of course, relative. I consider anything past 33″ x 43″ largish. I like workin that size. But the last ones have stretched larger, and I’m tired of shoving large wads of fabric through the machine.

I’ve been working on a white garden piece. The idea came fromThe White Garden, a speculative fiction about Virginia Wolf. She was thinking about an all white garden for the blackout, so that the moon would show on the white petals. I found some embossing plates that were wonderful prarie grasses. I put them on dark blue hand dye in shades of white and blue.

I’ve never had the dicipline to plant only white flowers. Too much of a color junkie. But I love the idea.

This is a visual path piece. It’s about 12″ x 45″ So everything has to be tiny.

So I made a strip of white and pale flowers. But then it needed moonlight and bugs. No one said the bugs had to be white.

How is tiny embroidery different than large pieces. Several things work differently. First off, I want to avoid a thick outline. So instead of embroidering on a sandwich of hand-dye, felt, stitch and tear, and totally stable, I left out the hand dye, and embroidered on the felt instead. Since I wqs using black outlines, I used black felt. Using felt reduces the bulk, but I found it could not be ripped out or sewn over. This is partially why I made a lot more bugs than I would need.

I could have embroidered tiny pieces within the piece. But I chose not to this time. It still makes for a lot of distortion. So I did a batch of moths, fireflies, snails and rocks.

Embroidering tiny pieces insists upon simplification. The usual shocker-shader colors are too much. A simple range works better: gold and green, white and blue, green and blue.