Lavender Mountains: Planes, Trains & Automobiles Blog Hop!

"Lavender Mountains," 25" x 31", made by Pam Geisel, Jan 2016

Welcome to today's stop on the Island Batik Ambassador's "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" Blog Hop!

Today I'll share a quilted project made with brand new Island Batik fabric line "Desert Rose" and how you can enter a giveaway to win some Island Batik fabric of your own. (You can click on any photo to see it larger).

All of the Island Batik fabric that I used are available now. To find a location near you, visit the Island Batik Store Locator.

To make this art quilt I used four purples and two pinks from the Desert Rose Collection:

121507124

121505111

121514129

121514112

121503122

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And for the sun I used 121500343 from the Sea Salt-Sandy Collection.

The theme of this blog hop is "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" and back in 1996 my husband and I took the Empire Builder Amtrak train from Chicago to Seattle, with stopovers in Montana. One of my memories from that trip is when we were moving west as the sun was setting, it seemed to take a very long time to set. (And when we came back east it was over very quickly). The fabrics that I received from the Desert Rose Collection were the right colors to make a sunset quilt with.

I don't have photos of the sunset from that trip so I searched for images of sunsets in the mountains. There were several from the Blue Ridge Mountains that were wonderful examples of “Aerial Perspective,” which is how atmospheric conditions influence our perception of objects in the distance. As objects get further away, they appear lighter in tone, which is why the “mountains” in the background are lighter in color that the “mountains” in the foreground. Since I had four wonderful shades of purple to use and pink for the sky, I decided this would be my quilt for the blog hop.

Step 1 : Cut the fabrics at angles to represent mountains being careful to not cut straight lines. Leave about half an inch fabric for overlap, baste them to the batting and backing, then quilted along the fabric edges to keep them down. 

Step 2 : Use a variegated purple thread to do free motion stippling on the four purple mountains (more obvious on the darker and lighter purples) and couched a fun yarn at the edges of the purple fabrics.

Step 3 : Add the yellow fabric (taken from the Sea Salt-Sandy Collection). Couch some bumpy yellow yarn around the sun and added the clouds. 

Step 4 : For the clouds cut long, free-form oval shapes from the darker pink fabric, the lighter two purples, and from a sheer pink fabric. Quilted all of these down with a pink thread using curving lines going back and forth to catch the edges of the fabrics.

More about Lavender Mountains