Fragments and sparkles
I spent quite a long time developing this quilt from my photos in Yellowstone last October.
It comes from a close-up of water in the Grand Prismatic Pool. I worked with Photoshop filters to discover more design in the patterns. One of the iterations created a kind of plaid effect, and all of the photoshop filters found a tremendous range of color in what appeared on the surface as golden sparkles on a brown background.
Those exercises led me to consider making shiny fabrics–the hand-painted silks in the ‘windows’ of the cathedral windows quilt blocks. I kept the notion of the plaids, as well, because a softer weave works really well for all of the hand-stitched parts of building a cathedral windows quilt. The silk squares were top-stitched by machine to give extra loft. There were 49 original plaid squares, and it took 91 buttons to fasten the quilt to a backing fabric so that the loose weave will hang well. 28″ square