Down in the River to Pray

Did you guess this one???  I'm not sure who did the palm trees, but I do know who did the elephant. And mine was neither of those :). The rules of this challenge were - pick a word, pick a color, pick a technique (all out of a bag).  Then, the word had to be in the title of a song, and the song had to be the theme of the quilt.

This is what I wrote to describe my quilt.

I'm not super comfortable with art quilts, and that's what made this a good challenge.  I'd had this piece of fabric for a while and I knew it had the look I wanted for the sky.  Trying to find fabric to represent mountains, water, ground, etc. is always a challenge and I didn't want to have to buy a lot, so I was hoping it was in my stash.  Several different batiks did the job for the mountains.

Next came the trees, shoreline, water.  I was really liking it at this point.

I checked with a friend of mine who's an art teacher to make sure I had the perspective right.

Here you see the bench and the rust colored foreground.  Once I realized I had the title of the song wrong and elminated the bench, I knew that something else was wrong, I just couldn't figure out what.

The next few pictures show the angst I was having with the foreground.  What I finally decided was that the rust was all wrong.  So I went for the grass/pebble look.

Here I was tring to create a shadow under the tree.

When I finally realzied the rust was wrong, I began to just pile on possible choices.  I liked all the other parts of this quilt and it frustrated me that I couldn't get this part right, especially when it was right in the front.

This is when you walk away and just do something else.  Fortunately, I had some time left before the challenge was due so I waited for this quilt to talk to me.  Unfortunately, it didn't talk very loud.

I just pushed on until I had to make a choice.  After days of fiddling with the fabric, I knew I was getting close - or close enough for me.  I still didn't think it looked great, but I was at the point where I needed to just fuse this thing down, quilt it and be done!

It was finally time to quilt - yay!! I didn't feel like it needed a lot of quilting.  I went with just impressionistic quilting - I'm still not sure if I like the quilting or not.  

My technique was embroidery - not my strong suit.  So I decided to just do some birds flying by.

So here it is.  I think my favorite part is the water and the cat.  I love that it seems the cat is patiently waiting for his owner to finish so they can go home.

As always, I learned a lot.  Acutally, what I realized is that I'm really more comfortable with applique or pieced quilts.  I'll keep trying things outside my box, but hopefully I'll feel more equipped next time.

Happy stitching,

Karen