I have had a summer filled with custom orders so not much time to create art quilts for my shop. The past two weeks I decided to look back at some quilts that sold quickly and use those as inspiration for some new quilts. Because I don’t use patterns and often I don’t have the same fabrics for creating another quilt in a similar design, the new quilts are always different but you can see the similarities as I compare them.
Trees 20 was my inspiration for the new Trees 23. This new art quilt is more rectangular,
wider than it is high at 20″ H x 27″W as compared to Trees 20. I also used some different fabrics and decided to highlight the stream through the middle of the quilt with more dynamic fabric. It is lots of fun to take a design and play with it, try some new colors or combinations and try some new free motion stitching too. I’m very happy with the new quilt!
The other quilt I used as inspiration was Trees 22 which was Trees in Springtime at the Lake.
I modified that design to be Trees 24 with Mountains and Lake also just finished this week. These are very different size/shape quilts and I was going for a different view with my new Trees 24 design. But you can see the similarities. I expanded the foreground as I wanted to try some new combinations of green fabrics and batiks and prints for stone formations in the design. I used more variety in brown fabrics for the new quilt trees which I think adds character to the quilt. For one of the light green sections in the foreground I tried some different curved free motion stitching which created a kind of “mound of green” in the foreground, some unexpected depth in design. I’ve included a picture of that section in a close up.
It is very scary to use new free motion designs as I worry I will ruin a quilt which has taken hours to create! But….it is rarely a disaster and usually I like it….still it is scary. Check out the mountains for some variety in quilt stitching too.