Autumn colors -- Kathy

I am embarrassed at how far behind I got on IT assignments -- this spring I did very little but sew Quilt National entries.  But I finally finished the autumn colors quilt.

After I finished the Quilt National things, I decided I needed to do some cleaning of the studio and was sorting and consolidating a bunch of samples that I had made in Nancy Crow workshops a long time ago.  I came upon this piece,

noticed the colors, and decided it might be recycled into an "autumn" quilt.

My first thought was just to take the left-hand part of the composition, trim it to IT size and quilt it, but then decided it needed something more.

















There were no leftover bits of the autumn colors fabric in the bag with this piece, but fortunately in my cleanup I had also come upon some yellow, orange and red fabrics that were sitting there waiting to be put away, and I used them for fine lines.  Here's what I came up with:

"autumn colours"

Just this morning I finished stitching "autumn colours".

I started by scrap piecing remnants in that colour range.

Then I overlaid it with an enlarged transfer of a drawing by Ellsworth Kelly. This required a bit of puzzling around, with mirror image and transfer etc.

not yet correct orientation of the overlay

And hand-stitched over that.

Some machine echoing for the background.

Of course, I ran out of bobbin thread less than 10" from the end, but that's the way it goes. And I had just about enough thread left to put that on the bobbin to last me to the very end:

And this is the finished piece (minus the tunnel, which will follow in due time):

Now for the signs and symbols... yeah.

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!