Farmers and Farmer's Wives

So, I jumped on the bandwagon a week or so ago and bought the book and started the Farmer's Wife Quilt!  I am a member of both the Flickr group and the Yahoo group.   The blocks are addicting when you start out.  I was making 2 a night but recently I slowed down.  I'm using my collection of Urban Chiks Swell and Sweet fabrics along with some Tanya Whelan florals and Lecien Flower Sugar.  I can't wait to see more blocks together.

AND speaking of Farmer's....


A few weeks ago we had a terrible hailstorm that ruined my vegetable and battered the pond lilies.


The biggest fatality was the cucumber patch.  This picture almost makes me cry.  I had to pull out all the plants and throw out the half-grown cucumbers.

 Since it was too late to plant more cucumbers, I picked up some pepper plants to replace the cucumbers:

 I went out a few days ago and took photos of the recovery effort.  The pond has recovered amazingly.  There are lots of new lily pads and about 6 lilies blooming!  More than usual.

 I lost a lot of tomatoes and the plants and fruits were bruised but they seemed to be trying to come back and a few have turned red (these are tiny grape-sized fruits that should be larger like Romas)

 The corn stalks were shredded by the hail but seemed to be coming back and growing taller and taller and the corn cobs already starting, YAY

AND THEN....  yesterday evening we had a rainstorm.  The wind came whipping in first, then it rained for about 15-20 minutes hard and then settled into a light sprinkles.  No hail.  This morning I went out to the garden and YIKES.  My corn plants were lying on the ground, yes, lying.  They are probably 8 feet tall now, maybe taller, and the roots were stool firmly in the ground, the stalks had not broken but they were bending down touching the ground.  Rosie had a good sniff and I was lucky she didn't decide to "mark" it.  I hope the sun will attract them back up straight again.  For now, I propped them up with a garbage can, lovely.  A couple of the tomato cages also blew down and covered the pepper plants!  I propped them up using a board.

I am seriously wondering how real farmers do it.  This is a fun little hobby for me, not my livlihood.  I have a much greater appreciation for farmers now.  And for farmer's wives and quilting.  I'm now working on block 7 and these are tiny pieces.  At least I can protect my quilt from hail and wind.

Passion

So I thought I was tired of sewing.  I just couldn't make myself finish the quilt I've been working on for a year or start the new quilt I'm imagining or make another shirt or skirt for the summer.  I felt lazy.


And then.... Suddenly I had a project!  The Mod Livin Best in Show charity auction Eero Aarnio Puppy decorating event came along.  Suddenly I'm staying up late and getting up early to work on it.  It's puzzling how this could suddenly make me so passionate.  Wish I could be this passionate about my job, hahaha.

Stay tuned for the final project....

Quilt Inspirations

I have one Kaffe Fassett book, Glorious Patchwork.  In this book, he displays photographs that inspired the quilts, along with photos of the finished quilt.  I really love this.  If you go to his website, the movie that plays has a mosaic of images.

I studied fine art and still remember how I started looking at the world differently when I started to paint or draw it.  When I began with black and white, I saw every object as dark or light and imagined how hard I would press the charcoal or Conte crayon to make that shade.  Graduating into color was harder and again, I began to look at every three dimensional shape differently.  A green leaf is not just green, it is darker on one side, the veins might be lighter, so I would add maybe red to darken the green, yellow or even white to lighten it, sculpting a three dimensional leaf on the paper.

So when I started quilting again a few years ago, geometric shapes around me began to pop out.  There is a sign near my office advertising a real estate company and their logo looks like paper piecing to me!

I decided to go out around my neighborhood the other day and photograph inspirations that might become quilts some day.  It's amazing the variations.  After taking photos, I realized I could either use one photo/pattern for a quilt or I could combine may patterns.  I made a few mosaics but I feel like this is just the beginning.  There are so many other ways to combine images and so many more images to photograph.

Let me know what you think of all this.  It was just an idea I had and I know I've seen others do it, Kaffe Fassett of course, also Cherri House, just wondering how you would translate images into quilt designs?  I haven't quite decided yet, just playing with the idea.