Sunset Unraveling

Today I thought I would show something I've been working on - on and off - since I bought some really bright solid fabrics at the Quilt Convention in July.

These have a bit of a 'batik' look and feel to them and I sat looking at them for quite a while wondering which pattern to try out that would make these fabrics really stand out.

Then this photo came along on Google posted by Laura Boisse and I was sold on making an abstract of this sunset.

There were so many fabric colours to choose from so I decided to only cut a 1.5" (3.8cm) strip from each piece and then iron them onto interfacing, and then sew it down the sides onto a piece of batting.

I first quilted lines onto the entire thing and even added the sun and shine onto the lake.

I cut out a tree shape to start the foreground, but I was not happy with this.

I even looked up a few other quilts of sunsets and decided that this was the road most travelled, so I had to find some other way.

Here you can see that on the bottom edge of each strip it wasn't sewn to the strip just above it.

I wanted the fabrics to start a little fraying on those edges - because there is method in the madness....

I decided to rather have branches coming from left and right and add a silhouette of a bird.

This photo is so small (who knows what happened)
and when I want to enlarge it, it goes all fuzzy.....



Anyway, you get the idea... I also added a strip of black to the ground area.

 Then I decided to try out my machine embroidery functions and I made little leaves all over the branches with twigs and so on.

The edges of the strips are coming along nicely....

And here we have the finished Art Quilt - it measures 20 x 25"

This is called -   "Long day unraveling"