Wednesday, March 26, 2014

What I'm Working On Wednesday

Last Friday, I featured the beginnings of a quilt inspired by a digital pattern I found on Pinterest.
Since then I've worked on tinting the black and white version to be able to highlight different parts of the pattern. I like finding secondary and tertiary patterns and playing with those.
All that play resulted in this single block:

My plan is for the finished quilt to include 9 blocks and would therefore end up measuring about 64" x 76". 
Because I tend to mentally complete images I can pretty easily imagine the interaction between the different patterns that will be created by just varying the colors and values of the stripe combinations. it's actually very easy to piece. Everything is either a strip or a triangle. No complicated set in seams here.
While I was working on this though, I noticed this:
Do you see it too? Don't sweat it if you don't. But, at some point I noticed a motif that reminded me of another motif that I'd seen and sketched in November of 2012. 
I was in Switzerland and visited the Paul Klee museum in Bern where I saw lots of amazing work, made note of many things, but made several sketches of a motif I decided to call "Klee's Trees".
Since then I've made several attempts to figure out how this pattern/motif could be interpreted in patchwork,
but never quite figured it out until my eye was caught by that pieced section. It took a bit of color tweaking and probably will be adjusted more as I become more familiar with the pattern, but this is what I've come up with:


One of the things I'm discovering is the possibility for play just within each block.
I can vary the color of the strips simply to create a bit of difference.
I can vary the color of the strips to emphasize a section or create a secondary pattern.
Or I can vary the color of the background either part or all to emphasize diamond shape of  the "tree".
I can even play with the values of the strips that make up the tree and background to make the entire image drop back into the background.
I'm sure I'm not done discovering things about this pattern and maybe even finding new patterns that are outgrowths of this one just as it was an outgrowth of the larger block.
I suppose that's why we all do what we do. You just never know what's around the corner and what little inspiration from the past will come back to play a role in your present and maybe even in your future.



6 comments:

Jane S. said...

Well those are wonderful! I like the color schemes and the shapes, both. :)

Andi said...

Your Klee's Trees remind me of menorahs ... missing a couple of branhes ;-)

Aliceart said...

It's always so helpful to see someone else's creative process. Thank you for sharing yours.

StaroftheEast said...

This is fascinating!

house on hill road said...

first, i love the first block and how simple it really is even while looking complicated! and second, i love that playing brought you back to another idea. wonderful!

Wona Chennault said...

they are beautiful and simply made...I was thinking that done correctly these would be easy to adjust to a quilt as you go...and also thought that for trees the trunks were missing but could be adjusted with a plain block under the tree that only had the sashing for the trunk...love that this block is so versatile and all the suggestions given