Green:Lost in the reeds

With moving house and then Ian having surgery it's been a long,long time since I’ve done any sewing. But with Ian back at work,and inspired by FoQ (lovely to catch up with Uta and Gillian),I’ve made the first in the backlog and have ideas for others.I'm on a roll! This one is one of a series about losing my wedding and engagement rings while collecting rare fen orchids on Catfield Fen.The reeds are taller than I am! You can read more about this green series here.

"Green"

After I returned from Israel I wanted to start on the signs-and-symbols-challenge, because that was the one most overdue. (I hate being overdue, which is a constant status of mine at the library, too....) Instead, with Gillian's new challenge on my mind I went ahead and did the one to meet my challenge, 'green'.

It uses a piece of green hand-dyed linen which had been begging me to do something with it. And it uses a study piece I made in an online class where we were supposed to make a sketch letting us be inspired by a famous artist (for which I chose a mixture of M. Rothko and J. Albers).

This is what it looked like before it became part of this challenge - it had some machine quilting and some hand stitching, but it just didn't seem finished, and I was still debating which direction would be the most appropriate:

So I turned it by 180 degrees, added to the batting and the background and put my green linen around it.

Some more hand stitching, some quilting on the longarm, and a few other things added:

And this is the completed piece (no tunnel yet, but I am working on that one...).

"Greening Rothko", by Uta Lenk

'Meeting' in Birmingham

Last week it was the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. Gillian is a standard there, and so is Margret, and this year I was lucky enough to be able to go, too.
So we took a picture of the three of us at the SAQA meeting.

Margret and I talked about how nice it would be to have a meeting where actually all of us could get together. Nothing planned yet - but perhaps one of the others has an idea where we could try to arrange for that?