Knew It...!

Knew that people might think that yesterday's blog was a quilt...sorry, folks, but it isn't, it's just a photograph of a big old tree at the Gressenhall Museum. Now this picture, here, though....it's a quilt... It struck me that as more than one person has said what a good quilt the photo made, that it might be a good idea to go with that idea, and make one. So, I printed out the photograph onto cloth, added the usual layering and stitched.

Immediately looking at the piece, you might not see the resemblance at first glance; there's a lot of stitch, the cloth is not a high thread count, so the print isn't as good as perhaps it might have been (knew I should have used silk...), and, besides all that, I've cropped the image and turned it upside down! But a bit of careful study, and you should be able to work it out.

What this made me do was to get past the block I've had about using photographs printed on cloth. We've all seen the memory quilts, with family photos used on them, and the quilts that take their inspiration from altered books, with Victorian ladies' photographs on them...I didn't want to make that kind of quilt. And I admire quilts that use photography effectively, like June Underwood's 'Consider The Horse Chestnut'. But I do take a lot of photographs, as inspiration or reminder. What I've done with this piece, is to use the photograph as an abstract. The fact that it is of part of a tree, is irrelevant...I've simply added stitching in response to what I see. No references to trees, leaves, anything... and that suits my way of working. So I'm really grateful to those of you who wrote and said, oh, nice quilt... without you, this particular piece (all eight inches square of it), would not have been made. And I'm glad it was. Hope you like it.