Starting with a drawing…
This series of 3 quilts started with a drawing of four peppermills on the table. The shapes were similar, but varied in proportions, and I liked the way that the overlapping shapes created perspective without the pesky business of making a realistic 3D rendering. I chose a color scheme that I rarely use, leaning toward adjacent colors (red and violet) with limited value range.
The background is heavily quilted because there is a lot of it, and the handpainted fabric is quilted with only a few hand embroidery stitches. This lavender/red fabric was made in a ‘scroll’ that I learned from Linda Colsh in 2015.
When I had arranged all of the shapes, I cut away the background fabric in as big a piece as I could manage. This scrap became a ‘gift’ for the composition of the next quilt. I was careful to save lots of scraps with this project in order to incorporate them into the next quilt. It felt like a very traditional way of working, to value all the leftovers. The challenging part was to find a way to also value the shapes of the scraps.