I've been busy quilting lately, but not taking photos or blogging. :-)
Early this week, I completed a wall-hanging, with the name "There was an eerie light in Marysville, after the fires".
This wall-hanging started as a hand-dyed Lisa Walton 'Aurora' kit (Dyed & gone to heaven).
The fabric in my kit was gorgeous - a dark pink, running into yellow-blue. The idea is to machine quilt all over and then use the supplied beads in whatever pattern you want. I didn't quite know what the fabric wanted me to do with it. There was a section in the yellow that reminded me of the clouds on Jupiter, so I borrowed several planets books from the library to see if that would inspire me.
I was quilting the piece in February - right when the bushfires were devastating Victoria, Australia. http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/bushfires/
You could not escape the images of burnt out homes and countryside. It was incredibly emotional to constantly see these images. While quilting, I kept seeing images of burnt houses and trees superimposed over my quilt. It got to the point where I had to find some black fabric and fusible web, draw up the trees and iron them to the quilt.
Then on to the beading. The supplied beads were mainly blues and gold. For the next few weeks, I was looking for silver, grey, black and red beads. Gradually I added more and more beads - some to represent burning embers in a stump, others smoke through the air, or flakes of debris blowing in the wind. Until finally, it was finished.
Close up of the smoke rising from the stump.
