Autumn Gear Wheels

Autumn Colors - Yippee! My favorite color scheme - NOT!
Ok, what do I do now - I already skipped the Afghan Square. No way I'm going to ditch this one.
So now what?

Why do I not like autumn colors? Probably the promise of cold, wet and dark days looming ahead is what really turns me off.

On the other side, autumn has beautiful sides to offer - Chinese lanterns, ripe berries, red maple leaves, asters and pumpkins. So I decided to focus on this color palette - even though it is not the typical autumn color palette you would expect.
After making the spirals, the quilt seemed to be empty in a way so I took to my harshest critique - my daughter. She suggested a green bug. But the only ones I could find which related to autumn were ladybugs and stink bugs. Ladybugs were out of the question - way to cute for my liking. Stink bugs are edgy enough - but most of them are brown. BROWN! Ugh.

So - Gear Wheels! Just because I like them. Yay!

"Thinking of Nasrin" - Afghan Square, finally finished!

After taking forever, I finally finished my Afghan Square quilt a couple of days ago.

It went through a number of planning stages.
This was my original square:

Although the background suggested it, I did not want to 'turn traditional', and at first thought I could stretch, turn, mirror and replicate the shape of the orginal motif. Planning by photoshop and sketching looked like this.

Of course, eight of the blocks - i.e. all the ones that would have been not the original size - would have been pieced. But somehow this didn't really talk to me.
Then we had a left-over square anyway, and Barbara offered to give me hers, too, so I figured I could use three instead of only one. I also had a piece of a real Afghan tchador (if that's what it's called there), which I had dyed blue, and started figuring out how to include that.

The embroidered squares were inset into
circles, and a couple of other circles added

A lot of handstitching, some quilting on the the longarm, and quite a bit more handstitching followed.

Extra stitching added to alter character of pre-stitched cloth

green stitches on the yellow cloth were done by my son,
when he was trying out a bit of embroidery

And with all the refugee crisis, my involvement in and exhaustion from volunteer work the title simply suggested itself, because while I was stitching, I kept thinking about the woman who had made the squares, hoping that this work is enough to keep her well supplied for where she is, without having to think about possible leaving her country via a dangerous and unpromising migration to countries where things would be so different, difficult...

"Thinking of Nasrin", 60 x 120 cm