I've been thinking a lot about my wonky house and trees. I've decided to go with the four seasons idea, and have pulled all my fabrics. I've also been thinking about how I'd arrange them in a quilt.
First, in more traditional rows, like this.
Then I thought of the cyclical nature of the four seasons, and thought about arranging them a bit like this, with the houses in the center, surrounded by trees. The trees in the border would blend seasons into one another, as they do in real life..
These are tiny little drawings from my sketchbook. You may have to click each photo to enlarge.
While I hate being too "cutesy" I thought of some additional elements that would help identify the seasons in each house - a porch in summer, a mini quilt on a clothesline in the spring, a pumpkin for autumn, perhaps a Christmas wreath on the door in winter... I don't know if I'll actually include these in the finished quilt, but it's better to have too many ideas than too few.
How are your ideas coming along?
6 comments:
I like your idea of central houses with trees of the season surrounding them. I have begun building my house. I decided to do only one house in the center of the quilt and put the trees all around it. The house looks sort of like my house. I have many trees in my yard, so I will be featuring different trees in different seasons. I think this will be a quilt in progress because I may wait for each season to decide what I want to feature. This quilt will evolve. I am having fun and it is a nice way to get "side-tracked" from some other intense stuff.
I have the design for my four buildings ready. The sky fabrics should arrive today. I know I have tons of greens and other colors for trees in the fall. So, I'm pretty close to jumping in... gotta figure out what I want to use for my fence row, though.
This sounds like a fun project. I like the idea of little touches of the seasons on the houses.
If you wanted to go with the lines, what if you added a sun going across the sky? You could start with spring, and when you got to winter it could be an evening scene. I...erm, MomBean loves winter at dusk right after a fresh snowfall. Or snow lit by a full moon.
This is the concept I'll be using for my "places we've lived" quilt. I've been slowly making the blocks of the various homes Don and I have lived in, beginning with two different places in Germany and ending at our cabin in the mountains of California. There are 8 in all. I'd been trying to decide what to add, and as I've been following your blog, it came to me, loudly, that it'll be trees like the ones you're doing. I might even do words - they'll have to be smaller than the ones I normally make. (Grafenhausen is a pretty big word!) It'll be a while before I get back to that quilt, but I'll let you know how it's going when I do.
I'm in the minority, but I like the strip quilt idea (the first one) and I love the idea of the sun/moon. We live in a rural area and we have lots of trees - hadn't thought about making my house 4 times but if I do a wonky house, that would be fun and easier. I would put words around in the outer border.
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