Nedra’s Migration -- Loons of True Cove

 John and I became snowbirds 8 years ago when we he retired.  We began "migrating" to Georgia for the winter.  Our summers are spent on a lovely lake in Maine where loons frolic and serenade us nightly with their haunting calls.  Almost 20 of the loons on Lake Cobbessee call our True Cove home.  Losing their gorgeous black and white coloring in October for gray, they begin the journey to the coast for the winter.  Spring comes and with it are the beautiful loon.  An annual loon count is made every summer and includes the number of chicks that hatch.  Gray chicks can be spotted on the backs of the females until they are capable of swimming and fishing on their own. Migration suggested our annual journey as well as the loons.

                         

 My piece is an original block influenced by traditional  bird, geese and swallow blocks.  I choose blues and gray to represent the colors of the water and sky and the baby and migrating loons..   Cotton fabric is machine pieced and machine quilted.  An outline of a migrating loon is stitched in gray in the middle in addition to the straight line quilting.  .

Carolyn's Migration

 

I thought of all sorts of things that depict migration, but I finally decided on hummingbirds since they, and Carolina Wrens, are my favorite birds. May and June are the months that hummers make it to our area of North Texas on their journey back North.

 

I first viewed photos of all of the different species of hummers, and found to my delight that they come in a multitude of colors – everything from hot pink to green to purple, variegated and even a deep blue. And so my journey began into the fascinating world of hummingbirds.

Hummers are the smallest of birds. One species, which is only 3 inches long, makes the longest migratory journey of any other bird in the entire world. These tiny birds fly all the way from Alaska to South America on their Winter journey, and then migrate back again the next Spring.

 

My colorful hummingbird is made of various colors of hand-dyed silk fabrics.  The flowers and leaves are from a Kaffe Fassett cotton.  The bird was designed by fusing all of the various colorful components on top of each other one piece at a time with Wonder Under 805. Then all of the components were fused onto a hand-dyed 100% cotton background, and finally stitched with a variety of threads by Ricky Tims and Aurifil.

 

And best of all to my delight, I had my very first hummingbird visit to my feeder today!

 

Kathy's Migration Quilt

                 

                                     [  OK...  I made a slight change to our challenge word.  ]

With all the media coverage about "PEOPLES" from other countries wanting to and trying desperately to escape what's going on in their own countries and seeking asylum in other countries, I decided to morph our challenge word into  "IMIGRATION."

Here in Texas, our Southern Borders are shared with Mexico and Baja California.

And, most definitely, let's not forget our Largest State, ALASKA, that shares a very impressive border with Canada.   If you were at some of the most Northern sections of Alaska (near Prudhoe Bay), you might even be able to see one of our Country's other "Neighbors,"   RUSSIA !

In this "Migration" quilt, one of the images was "borrowed" from the Internet; the other image, "AMERICA," was made on my computer.

Note from Alice:  Kathy took another image of her quilt and asked me to substitute this for her first image.  

Alice's Migration: Flying Geese!

Two ideas occurred to me for this quilt.  One simple, another more complicated.  Waiting until this week to work on my quilt, I thought the simple plan would be most practical.  But alas, simple came out looking simplistic.  Even childish.  So I laid it aside and began working on complicated.

The old traditional Flying Geese quilt block design was my second notion.  But I wanted something more flowing, more swooping, more like how geese actually fly.  Google came to my aid and I came across a tutorial by quilt teacher Gail Graber for constructing flying geese along a curve.  Her step by step instructions were just what I needed.

First I drew the design, using a tool I've had for years but never before used--a flexible and curveable ruler.  Of course it took much trial and error before I came up with a design that I liked.  Once I did, I copied it onto drawing paper.  This was my master.  I then used regular printer paper to trace the design for paper piecing.  

Some years ago at the Houston Festival I bought four or five different half yards of an amazing fabric that has gradations of colors along its width, from dark to light and back to dark.  I used several pieces of this fabric for this quilt.  I knew I wanted my current quilt's background to be blue, so for the flying geese I chose a fabric for the "sky" part of the flying geese that, interestingly, had gradations that moved from yellow to orange to deep red and on to a dark red purple.  I did put in a few pieces of darker violet for the bottom few flying geese.  For the geese themselves, I used a gradation from lightest purple or lavender to dark violet.

When I started the paper piecing, I paired a light goose with the darkest "sky" background, then moved around to a dark goose with the lightest "sky" background.  Once the paper piecing was done (and I had tediously removed all those tiny pieces of paper!!) I decided to use reverse applique to apply the curving flying geese to the quilt's background fabric.  For this I used another piece of that gradation fabric that was primarily blue moving through pink and then purple.  Again, Gail Graber came to the rescue, as the second lesson in her series about making curving flying geese included excellent instructions for the reverse applique process, which I had never done before.  I bound the quilt with the same fabric I used for the quilt's background.  

Links to Graber's instructions:  

https://betteroffthread.com/2013/06/11/paper-piecing-curved-geese-a-tutorial/

https://betteroffthread.com/2013/06/18/reverse-applique-tutorial/

Andrea's Migration quilt

 When Cats Fly

11" x 14"

Raw edge fabric collage.

This quilt is the result of a brief email exchange that I had with Alice Baird and I am so grateful.  I mentioned to her that I was working with the migration definition of "moving from one place to another". My intention was to make something that had to do with my creative 'migration' since our first Material Mavens quilt in 2011. Alice thought of how many times she has actually moved.  This new perspective was my Ah Ha! moment as I moved from one part of town to the other in 2016.  Alice graciously gave me permission to use her 'moving' idea.  Soon after, the vision of a house flying over trees and rooftops emerged.  I wanted to make the house out of one of my favorite Kaffe fabrics using more realistic fabric colors for the background (blue sky, green trees etc.).  The house is rather small and did not showcase Kaffe the way I wanted it to, so decided to try using it as the background.  I then had the challenge of how to make such a bright, large patterned, busy fabric recede.  My original idea for just how the house would 'fly' was to put wings on either side, but as I moved ( migrated! ) with four cats, I thought it would be more fun to put the house on the back of a flying cat!  Now, as I had a flying cat, decided that my trees could be giant tulip-like flowers instead.  After all, this had become completely nonsensical, so why not?

Tricia's Migration

35 years ago when I first moved to Lincoln I noticed a few roads were closed on the first warm rainy night in March for "The Big Night". The Big Night is when the yellow spotted black salamanders and wood frogs cross the roads to get to the vernal ponds. At some point they stopped closing the roads and encouraged people to drive slowly. Not sure how one can really see a black salamander on asphalt at night.

When we downsized a four years ago, we moved to one of the roads that has a salamander and wood frog  crossing. We now go out and walk up and down to road on the first warm and rainy night in March to help the salamanders and wood frogs cross the road before cars come. I wanted to create a quilt with the sign, a salamander and wood frog for our theme Migration.

I took black fabric with highlights and machine quilted it to try to get it to look like asphalt. I photographed the sign and the wood frog and then printed on printed treasures. Unfortunately we did not see a salamander this year. I created the salamander from shinny fabric and fused yellow spots on him.