Monday, May 19, 2025

New Quilt: Cottonwood

 Our 4 Common Corners call for the first third of this year was Cottonwood, inspired by our retreat last year in northern New Mexico up near the 4 Corners Region.  

We were there in October and the trees were in all their gorgeous yellow glory along the river that flows behind the place we had the retreat.





I had lots of pictures of the trees, but I decided to take a more abstract approach.  I actually started with all these gradient pom poms I'd made but never done anything with and thought I'd make a quilt in yellows and oranges and then accent it with the pom poms.  



I had this abstract idea in my head of tree branches arching overhead in a tunnel of natural beauty, so I drafted a fairly simple pattern and decided I would paper piece/string piece with oranges and yellows and use purples and browns for the "branches".  





It's all weird fabrics, velvets, upholstery fabric, silk, pseudo-suede, weird melty non-wovens, and whatever other non-cottons I found in the scrap bins.  I foundation pieced it on fusable interfacing.  One main challenge was that the fabrics varied radically in weight making it challenging to piece and quilt but I got there.




It was reall fun to use up lots of scrappy stuff from the stash,  just looking at these pictures I see lots of fabrics samples I've painted, dyed, and printed over the years and I love seeing them incorporated into something. 

Come back later this week to see the final quilt!


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