As the snow piled up here in central PA a few weeks ago, with plunging temps, and then this past weekend with another snow storm, I found myself ready to think about warmer months. Often after creating a larger quilt, like Trees with Wildflowers recently, I’m ready for some smaller quilts where careful fabric selection and fun free motion quilting are called for. The past two weeks I created four smallish quilts. The two in this blog are: Beach Grasses and Stormy Beach Day.
Beach Grasses is a typical pieced beach quilt with sky, water and sand upon which I thread paint dunes grasses. It is surprising how long it takes to add the grasses but it is now a comfortable free motion movement of the fabric to create the grasses. Like most of my landscape quilts, everything is abstract and not specific to types of grasses. The art quilt is meant to capture the essence of the dunes along the ocean and the colors of such a glorious vacation day! I usually do the thread pa
inting in black thread but I had very dark green on my machine so gave it a try. It was fine!
The second beach quilt found me leaning into some of the blue grays floating around from a previous quilt. This smallish art quilt has a more gray sky and a rough ocean, created with free motion stitching, with the sand a bit darker than usual. Sometimes it is the overcast days which could become stormy that make a day at the beach more enticing with the sun completely hidden.
Both of these quilts highlight free motion quilting and careful fabrics to convey the feelings of sky, water and sand.
And puffy clouds in the second one. Maybe a storms a’comin’ .
Like them both. Nice job with the grasses.
L