Yesterday, I spent the morning going thru various items that my mother was thinking of getting rid of and she wanted to see if I wanted any of them. I scored some jewelry, some embellishments and a few books. She has enough quilting magazines to start her own library, but I don’t have any place to put them at the moment, so I decided to leave them for now.
In the evening, two of my cousins brought tons of food and drink over to the house and 2 other cousins (and parts of their families) joined us. It was so much fun to sit at the table with four of my favorite cousins and laugh and tell stories, and….well, you know the drill. It was a wonderful night.
This morning, I went to church with my M-I-L and S-I-L (who surprised me by driving in from Dallas). Afterwards, we had the requisite Mexican Food at my favorite restaurant.
As I had flown in on Thursday, I had noticed a “Wind Farm” that had about 75 wind turbines and Esther (my wonderful M-I-L) drove me out so that I could take some photos.
This picture doesn’t do it justice, but I would love to make a quilt with a darkish background and machine embroider the windmills. They are so graceful and tranquil and it would be fun to try to capture that in a quilt. I am hoping that I am on the correct side of the aircraft when we fly out on Tuesday….if so, I will try to get an aerial photo of the field….it was magnificent.
Also on the flight last week, I spent some time playing with the rust piece and gathering ideas for how to quilt it. I am posting some photos of my rough drawings here….you will probably have to click on the photo to be able to see any of my drawings. I am sorry that most of these are on their side…..I have NO idea why it is happening, and someone here at the Starbucks is playing an online game and eating up the Bandwidth so it is taking FOREVER to download each photo!!
The first idea was to make different types of flowers. In this one, I was playing with the idea of doing the background quilting to look sort of like venetian blinds.
The second idea kept the different flower types, but used background quilting that had curves that sort of followed the lines on the rust dye……
On the third one, I only used Sunflower types of flowers, which I have decided that I like better. In this one, I kept looking at the nails in the center portion of the dye and seeing fence posts, so I thought about doing the background sort of like a fence….
In the final one, I did the sunflowers larger and I really like this idea best. However, I have now decided that I will need to go ahead and quilt the flowers before I can decide on a background quilting design, so that will be one of my first projects when I get back home. Before I start, I will spend some time looking at pictures and drawings of sunflowers to see if I can make them a bit more realistic. I have decided that I want the one on the right to have a perspective where it is looking upwards. Since I am NOT an artist, this may be a stretch, but hopefully I can find something online that will help me. I am also going to look at the shape of Sunflower leaves and quilt those in along the stems as well. I will probably do some grass-type design towards the bottom.
I am planning to quilt the design elements in a thread that matches the rust and then do the backgrounds with a beige thread.
If you have any wonderful ideas, I would love to hear them!!!!!
One thought on “Another Texas Day (or two)”
Thank you for the wind farm photo. I agree with you about their grace and tranquility. I am just so amazed at the number of protests we get over here when any are proposed. Very imaginative use of the rust dyed fabric. It will look lovely when finished.