Nature Studies

Yesterday, I devoted the whole day to my "homework" for Pamela Allen's online art quilt workshop, "About Style." This week's lesson is about creating flowers, leaves, and trees that are not generic daisies, elliptical leaves, or "lollipop trees." So much good advice about composition and creativity goes into these lessons! And the classwork posted by the students in the class is turning out fabulous!

The first part of our assignment was to find artwork or photographs that featured different types of flora and fauna, and then to create six small studies in fabric on white backgrounds. All of mine are 7" x 9".

Morning glories growing on fence post- The rough fence post fabric was created on my needle-felting machine with hand-painted cotton fabric, hand-dyed fabric, commercial fabric, and wool roving. The morning glories are fussy-cut from a patchwork commercial print.

The heart-shaped leaves are from a hand-dyed fabric purchased on E-bay. The inspiration was a photo on a blank greeting card.

I am sure you are all familiar with the O'Keeffe poppy paintings. I tried creating the folds of the flowers from hand-dyed and commercial fabrics.

This one is inspired by a scrap of gift-wrap paper. The orange-pink fabric for the blossoms is from a commercial fabric.

These bachelor buttons, or cornflowers, are cut from the same commercial print fabric as the above flower, along with some deeper blue fabrics.

I tried making some wavy-trunk trees with airy golden foliage. The trunks are from a piece of black twill that I discharge-dyed years ago. It works well for tree trunks, I think. The fiery gold and orange is a commercial print.

I have never felt very successful at making branching trees, so I used an example of Pamela's to practice.

Then I used bits of a funky fabric to make some foliage.

Okay, not a daisy or lollipop in the collection!

Next assignment is to create a garden quilt composition. Pamela put three of mine together to show how the individual elements can be combined for a garden effect. It is pictured at the opening of this post.

We are supposed to make new ones, not use the studies, for this assignment. I like some of my studies so much that I will probably quilt them. This is so much fun!