The Experiment Begins

Before I share the challenge I accepted I wanted to share Rossie's idea. I'm accepting her Process Pledge. Essentially it's about sharing the process I go through to design and make my quilts. I think I do a lot of process sharing already, but I'm going to be more cognizant of trying to document that process and post about it. I think it's a great idea, mostly because we can all learn so much with a glimpse into other people's processes. I emailed Rossie this weekend and asked her if she had a process flickr group, she said I should go ahead and start one, so I did. Feel free to go here and join the 'Quilting Process' group. We'll post inspirations, sketches, in process shots, and talk about and share our process. I'm pretty excited about it.

So, on to the challenge. I received soo many good ideas, it was hard to choose where to start. I will be doing more than one of these! I'm starting with Krista's idea of using a family heirloom as my inspiration. I actually chose two items that are related. First is my grandmother's silver birch china. It's pretty special to me, first because it was my mom's and my grandmother's but also because it reminds me of my 'up north' roots. I love the birch forests of Minnesota and Canada.
I also chose this framed piece of birch bark. My husband brought it home from a trip he took to his hometown, Wausau, Wisconsin. He picked it up on a run on Rib Mountain. My hubby loves the woods, loves Wisconsin and so I framed it for him and now it hangs in his office. So, those are my inspiration pieces.
Krista also suggested beautiful scrap box colors, but I changed her challenge a bit. I chose my neutrals boxes...one is filled with grays, browns, blacks, beiges...mostly solids, but some prints too.
...and then my whites and creams. That's what I have to choose from. I'm not sure if there will be a background fabric or not.
So I started by studying my inspiration pieces. What did I love about them? What was the feeling I wanted to create? The texture and intricacy of the birch trees, especially the bark is what I kept going back to. I decided to try to create an exaggerated birch bark texture. So I started playing with some fabric.
Then I moved to the design wall and sewed a few pieces together.
I decided pretty much immediately that I didn't want any vertical pieces.
I played some more...cutting, rearranging and sewing.

This is the piece I have now. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. It may be sliced into thin trees. I think for now I'll continuing building pieces. I'm not quite satisfied with how the dark areas look. Stay tuned and have a great week.