Last fall I was contacted by a couple that wanted me to make a landscape art quilt. They had a location they wanted to hang it so they told me what size they wanted. They also sent a photo of another piece of art they owned and wanted the colors to complement that piece. Beyond that, the image was left up to me.
My first step was to select some fabrics to use and get their approval. The light blue sky and the white clouds are the only fabrics that aren't batiks. Of the batiks, half of them are Island Batiks that I got a few years ago when I was an Island Batik Ambassador.
The colors used in the inspiration piece made me think of purple mountains, green fields, and a deep blue lake. They also wanted me to use some yarn so I used some purple yarn with other colors in it to outline the three purple mountains. The customers did say that they liked the sky in my piece "The View from My Hammock" so I made white clouds that were similar in shape and also added some gray fabric as the bottom of the clouds. There's also a little bit of white yarn where the white and gray fabrics meet.
I also used some purple yarn that had some orange in it to outline the top two red/orange hills. The inspiration piece didn't have any red in it but the customer had some rugs in that room that had red so they requested I add some red fabric. I kept it fairly thin because I didn't want the red to overpower the piece.
The green fabrics start to take on the shape of the trees and I fussy cut the fabric that had trees printed on it so the tree images weren't cut off at the top. The mint green fabric right behind the trees had images of deer printed on it so I wanted to avoid having those images show too much. You can see a bit of their antlers, though.
There's some green yarn along the bottom of the tree fabric and also on top of some of the tree trunks. The flowered fabric is more of a meadow.
This lake has a bit of a sandy beach and areas where the shallow water is lighter. There is some blue and white yarn on the lake area and if you look closely you can see some organic oval shapes in the water that are the same blue as the lake but with tiny silver stars. This is actually the other side of the deep blue fabric that I used for the lake and the shapes are similar to the shape of the clouds.
While I did finish this piece and I'm posting it in January, the bulk of the work was done in December, lest you think I've been very productive during the first week of the year.
The customer was very pleased with this and I am also very happy with the way it came out.
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