Light, End, Tunnel!

I based my piece on the concept of 'feeling low, down or depressed'.

Sometimes things just go round and round in their troubled minds.

There doesn't seem to be a way out,  where life seems frayed around the edges.

I chose to leave it unbound, as life it often ragged nor contained or tidy.

I loved making this mini! It seems that just as I am hitting my stride, I have decided to bow out of this group!

C'est la vie!

Suz (Patchwork n Play)

Wild Blue Wanderings

My interpretation of the sub-theme of the color challenge took me a while to decide upon. I finally decided I was having such a hard time, I chose wandering paths with a dead end on one path. So here is my finished quilt.

Six Ways to Blue • November 2016

Six Ways to Blue
Quilt #169, November 2016
19 1/2″ high by 21″ wide
#4 in the Color Series: I’ve Got the Blues

I had fun exploring the idea of blue, and the use of blue in art when I made this quilt.  More info is on my blog, where I also manage to work in the artist who patented his own version of blue, Yves Klein.

I've Got The Blues: Efficiency

 This is my quilt for "I've Got the Blues".  I named it Efficiency: E-Fish-In-Sea.

I was directly inspired by the tiled floor at the City Museum in St. Louis, MO.

All the pieces are raw edge appliqued and fused.

A later of netting was put over it all and then quilted.

More details can be found at my personal blog: http://rachel-thelifeofriley.blogspot.com/

I've Got the Blues: Michael's Blue Eyes

The sub-theme for this challenge offered so many possibilities and in the end I chose to focus on my husbands' beautiful blue eyes.   The blue of his eyes generally appears in the medium aqua range, but that can change and I used the variations as the basis for this quilt.

When we first met, he did not wear glasses and those eyes were the first thing you noticed, along with his shy smile.  Actually, to be honest, the first thing I noticed were his legs!  He is an electrician and was always on a ladder working on wiring in the ceiling of my office so I mostly just saw him from the waist down.  But then there were the eyes!

Like many other quilters I've gotten caught up in hexies and this seemed the perfect application and batiks are so great for showing off blue in all its variations.

The background is a low-volume gray and white piece with "love" scripted all over, appropriate, right?!

For simplicity I quilted around all the objects, chose a mottled blue background and highlighted the glasses with my favorite black and white stripe binding.

That one brown eye?  Well, my eyes are brown and I made that pieced hexie with the black center for a piece submitted in the 2016 Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival and didn't use.

When I get to the label part of construction, I am always amazed to see the number - this is our 17th and I just find that astounding!

So, there you have it!  Michael's Blue Eyes, my inspiration for this challenge.  

I've got the blues...

Here is my offering for November. You can read a little more about it in 'I've got the blues...' at Rainbow Hare.

Dead End 1: I've Got the Blues

I struggled with the quilt for this quarter and you can read some thoughts on art and creative guilt on my blog

Rising Above the Blues

This final quarter in our Colour theme for our Four in Art group this year, the sub theme was "I've got the Blues" I guess this could be interpreted in a musical way or in the direction I have chosen, which springs more naturally to mind for me, working as I do in the Mental Health field. I've called my interpretation Rising Above the Blues.

I wanted to let the blues sink down to have the lighter shades rise to the top; the nesting tessellating blues subtly meshing and becoming distinct, which alludes to the thoughts and feelings that structure our moods, blue or otherwise.

Initially I was going to quilt it using an orange peel design but decided in the end to have the quilting denser at the bottom with the darker colours, lightening with the mood and colour and thinning out to give the idea of a more settled calmer mood with wavy organic lines. The bottom rows have six rows of quilting each, gradually decreasing to just one in the top row.

You can read more about this quilt over on my blog here