"Girl Caught in a Thunderstorm"

 I finally finished "Girl Caught in a Thunderstorm" for last month's challenge. I was gone on vacation to Ft. Myers, FLA for 3 weeks, so wasn't able to finish this until today. I layered the landscape first and appliqued the girl with the umbrella. Then I layered on a sheer dark blue organza to make it appear hazy, and added horizontal quilting lines to assimilate rain. I added some yarn couching for the storm clouds and added some white batting fibers over the top to appear as wispy clouds. I posted the picture under photos but I have also attached the photo here. Comments are welcome. Pam Clark

Strata quilt

This month for the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge, we were supposed to make something that was geological in nature, but it was supposed to be in colors that weren't the norm for rocks. Last year I took a class with Scott Murkins, who was also our quilt show judge. His specialty is strata quilts. I had made several blocks in that class, but couldn't decide how to put them together. When this Challenge came out, I thought by combining four blocks, I could abstractly simulate a geode. Since most geode's centers are light, I made this one dark. I know this is a little bit of a stretch of the imagination, but I love the colors in this little quilt that measures about 16" x 16".

When my sister, Nancy, and I were younger, we had to walk 1/4 mile to our mail box everyday in the summer. We loved to pick up rocks, take them home, and crack them open to see what they looked like inside. We were always astounded at how beautiful they were. We'd find an ugly old gray rock and when we cracked it open with a hammer, there was no telling what we might find. Our favorites were the ones that had flecks of blue in them, which were quite rare, but very beautiful. When we found some that had gold or silver flecks in them, we always wondered if it was "real gold". Of course, it was probably iron pyrite or something, but we always had high hopes that we had found the mother lode. This quilt is symbolic of the flecks and veins that we used to find in rocks. We visited a rock shop where the owner cracked open the rocks and then polished them and they were spectacular.

In this quilt I used metallic threads to quilt it to add those silver and gold flecks. It doesn't show up well in the photo, but I hope you get the idea.

Shedd's Aquarium

I finally finished my FFFC from 2 months ago, which required that we use an underwater scene, and that we do something different when finishing the edging. I faced mine. I was really happy with how it turned out. I used two photographs of an aquarium that I took when I visited Shedd's Aquarium in Chicago in 2008. I printed the photos on fabric and thread painted the whole thing. I embellished with beads and shells that I picked up on Virginia Beach last month. It took me hours to do all the machine stitching. Now my husband says, "What are you going to do with it now that it's finished?" I hadn't thought about that. I just enjoyed being involved with the process.

Forest Mushrooms

This is my latest quilt made for Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. The requirements were that we use fungi is some shape or form. I made the two white mushrooms separately, stuffed the one with fiberfil and used a layer of quilt batting in the other one to make them stand out from the surface. I appliqued them on. I wanted to depict moss on the tree in the background, so I used textile paint. I used a textile marker for the surface coloring on the mushrooms. I had some leaves that I had collected and dried from last fall and a few from a florist's arrangement. I stitched these on by machine. I was surprised at how supple the oak and maple leaves stayed. I thought they might disintegrate as I stitched them, but they didn't. This little quilt 13" x 16.6" only took 4 hours to create. My husband says if I hadn't told him this was a depiction of mushrooms, he couldn't tell what they were. I told him he needs to think more creatively. At any rate, it was fun quilt to make and something quite different from the normal quilt.

Road to No-Man's Land

Our Fast Friday Fabric Challenge required that we manipulate our fabric in some way and that the subject be a landscape. I had never tried a desert scene before. I started by pleating the sky. In order to prevent top-heaviness, I used trapunto on the mountains to flesh them out a bit. I tried ruching for the first time in the bush in the lower left corner. I also used some greenery from Hobby Lobby to balance out the texture in the total picture. When I first started, I thought this was going to be so ugly, but now that it's done, I'm happy with the coloring. My son and daughter-in-law have an empty spot over their love seat after they remodeled their living room, so I'm going to give this quilt to them, if they want it.

The first of the month I made a sunshine quilt to donate through our quilt guild. It's the water scene with fish, turtles, etc. It's not very artistic, but it's very colorful. I hope some little kid will like it. Our guild has donated over 4,000 sunshine quilts to hospitals, police, and social workers to give to kids who are undergoing stressful times.
Yesterday morning at 6:30 a.m. I finished the quilt I've been working on for 3 weeks entitled "Flight in Shimmering Moonlight". Our Fast Friday Fabric Challenge was to create a quilt that had wings somewhere in the quilt. It had to have 3 main colors: mine are aquas, purples and golds plus black and white, and it had to be fractured. I added a piece of sheer crystalette fabric across the quilt to represent the moonlight. That's my fracture, besides all the fractures of the mountain landscape. I tried a new fusing powder the attach the bird, the moon, and the flowers. It worked quite well, except that the powder crystals get all over and are sometimes hard to remove. I used these same fusing powders to mend my husband's work sweatshirt. We'll see how they hold up under duress. I also used textile paints to add a shadow to the backside of the white mountain, and I added one star (a crystal) above the mountain in memory of my Mom, who would have thought this quilt was so beautiful.

Flight in Shimmering Moonlight