Saturday, February 04, 2012

Garden Play

Growing up, I remember helping my mom with the gardens. She always started lots of flowers from seed and we had a huge veggie garden too... There is even photographic evidence of my love of flowers starting early with a photo of me with a little rose bud that I had popped off one of Mom's bushes in one hand, and a "bouquet" of weeds in the other when I was about 3, so of course flowers are the main part of my piece.
"Garden Play"- 10.5"x13.5"

I had been cutting a lot of flowers, leaves and butterflies from my large stash of Wonder Under backed fabrics using a new die cutter when the theme was announced for this challenge. I took some simple flower shapes and fused up a bunch of random compound flowers, which were perfect for this piece. I normally try to use flowers that are "botanically correct" (thanks to the degree in Horticulture), but since I was doing this as from a child's view of flower gardens, I just wanted to use lots of color and flowers that were a bit more child-like.



I began with a background of painted fabric with a border, and fused some roughly cut fabric for the grass and stems. Then I added lots of my fused flowers and leaves, and quilted everything using clear thread. A sparkly pink ladybug and a couple dragonflies were also added (reminds me of my mom telling of my presenting her with a wasp that I had caught at the age of 3....). I topped all that off with some single hole plastic button-like flowers. I also added pearl beads as centers to the plastic flowers and some of the fabric flowers.

Keeping with my child-like theme, I decided to glue the bugs and beads onto the quilt with a strong glue instead of stitching them on by hand... The photo to the left is a detail shot showing the abundance of flowers a bit closer.

6 comments:

Marilyn Wall said...

Sue, I love the playfulness in this piece. I hope creating this helped you relieve some of your stress. It certainly says playfulness

Sue Andrus said...

Thanks Marilyn!, I'm thinking I will need to do a few more little "just for fun" pieces....

Susan B said...

What a lovely and charming piece! The whimsey, the simple shapes of the flowers and the insect's flight paths as quilting enhance the child-like quality. It is happy and child-like, but your adult art skills show through in the color and composition.

fastfriday said...

How sweet and innocent this seems. The simple colors and shapes make it very fresh and appealing - something a child would love.

Ticia Wicks

Cynthia Ann Morgan said...

Hi Sue, it's different than your usual style, but it's still recognizable as yours with the great colors and composition. It makes me smile
Cynthia

Linda Mac said...

This piece is very nicely balance and has appealing colors. Great.