Alice's Serenity Quilt--Carol's Serene Lake

This is a substitute quilt for the first one I posted.  I wasn’t happy with that one, since technically speaking, it wasn’t truly an “art quilt.” For one thing, I didn’t originate the design; it was a traditional block pattern

Recently my cousin Carol Harrison, an artist who often works in watercolors, posted one of her paintings on Facebook.  I fell in love with this lovely serene painting, and I thought, “Maybe I could replicate that design in fabric.”  I emailed Carol and received her permission to use her image.

I was determined to use only fabrics in my stash, many of which are batiks and were backed with fusible already.  I used as a base a blue ombre with graduated shades of blue. Then I began the process of selecting the fabrics for the other elements in the painting.  These I cut out free hand with scissors or two different rotary cutter blades.  As I finished one layer, then I overlapped the fabric strips to make the next layer.  All went well until I got to the water, specifically, the shadows of the trees in the water.  Green shadows look fine in the painting, but green fabrics just didn’t look like shadows us.  So I switched to blue shadows, using various batiks.  But still they didn’t look shadow-like to me. 

Sue Benner taught one workshop I’ve attended, and her method was to use multiple strips of fabric to compose her landscape quilts.  I went to her website and studied how she treated water and shadows.  Following her example, I overlaid tiny cuts from other blue batiks onto the shadow shapes. This looked much better.

After the quilt was finished, I machine quilted, changing thread colors often, chiefly sewing down the fused edges and then doing some echo quilting.  After all the quilting was done, I thread-painted the red-brown grasses at the bottom of the quilt.

I’m happier with this quilt!  Carol’s painting is below.  Beneath is, a detail of the water and the shadows in the quilt.