Judy W's Spiral: "Staircase To Heaven"

First I'd like to apologize for being tardy with this submission.  Between torrential wind wreaking havoc and felling two significant trees from our landscape, plus a delayed front deck replacement with construction materials adding to the 'disaster status' of our yard, my schedule went completely awry.  This is the first year in a long time that I can say I might be looking forward to winter!

Now, about the spiral theme.  I was off to a slow start and no firm ideas would gel.  Time was nearly up and very few doodles were striking my fancy.  My photo of the spiral staircase inside our Alaska Railroad train car just wasn't working out so I Googled spiral staircase images and found this one, although the original was in black and white.  Using my iPhoto tools, I chose a green color that reminded me of fiddle head ferns.  The image was printed on a June Tailor Colorfast 100% Cotton Fabric Sheet For Ink Jet Printers and heat set with a dry iron.

"Staircase To Heaven" embraces my love of curved lines, spiral staircases, fiddle head ferns when they first begin to unfurl in the spring, but most of all, I love the photo angle with its upward movement that leads my thoughts toward infinity and eternity in heaven.  The black/gold spiral border print was luckily in my stash, as well as the gold spiral braid.  I chose to extensively accent the spiral movement with predominantly green and gold glass beads.  The stair treads are machine quilted with a variegated green Blendable thread.  I machine stitched the braid with gold metallic thread.  I'm not sure the details will show up well enough in this photo but my husband said, "this looks rich".  I agree with him.  It really glows in person.