something lighthearted...

this summer light-hearted stitching has been the genre of choice

since last week's post the smoke blew away for a day and a half. and came back Thursday evening with a vengeance... thick, choking, make your eyes burn, catch in your throat, awful smoke

the whole summer has been like that, weeks and weeks and weeks of it and no end in sight

(you know it's bad when they  suddenly decide to station 100 firefighters in the middle of your town)

staying inside as much as possible is the right thing to do 

a friend in the UK just had a birthday and I had wanted to make her something special

a few years ago, at Christmas, I sent her a small table runner of generic buildings with snowy roofs, and a dark star-filled sky

she liked it so much she kept it on her table year-round and when I learned of that I resolved to make her a summertime version

 this time though, I wanted to depict buildings of significance in her small village

we were fortunate to have been able to visit her and her husband a few years ago whilst on an England holiday and we fell in love with their tiny village in the Peak District

thinking about their life there, I scoured Instagram and Google Earth to find photos of the buildings I wanted to depict:

their house, with it's beautiful purple door

the church where we went for a music concert

the library where she worked

the bed and breakfast where we stayed, conveniently across the street from their house

and the gate to the Bluebell Wood which has appeared on her Instagram feed, both in photography and paint

the technique is one I devised for a class I was teaching back in 2013 or so... a pieced runner of same-sized rectangles, changing the colour/print where necessary to depict sky and buildings, the foreground done in one narrow strip at each end

the details of the buildings are then appliquéd in place

(I've seen patterns using this kind of technique since then but at the time there were none; I came up with it to make the appliqué portion of the class easier for my students)

if you click on the photos with your mouse they will enlarge further and you can get a better look at the stitched details

below is Millie's Tea Room and B & B, the gate to the Bluebell Wood and the house

I expected the writing on the windows to be fiddly to the 10th degree but it was surprisingly quick and easy despite my trepidation

I had found two photos of the library (building on the left below), one with a light door, in the other it was dark

at first I made it light but after more and more detail was added to both ends of the runner I felt one end had far more dark values than the other so I switched out the library door to the darker version - it turns out that was the recipient's favourite version so all's well that ends well

in debating what time to stitch on the clock other than the obvious "Timex" 10 minutes to 2, I chose the time difference between Western Canada and the UK

I could have gone on for months adding more and more of the building details but time was not on my side so I chose what I thought were the most relevant and worked from there

the tumbled floral at each end is an homage to England being the prettiest, most full of beautiful flowers everywhere, country than I know

choosing the fabrics is one of my favourite things to do when embarking on a new project - the stacks and piles come out on the floor and in minutes I'm surrounded... riffling through greys to find those that look like stone, blues for that typical soft English sky, lavender fabric for the heather, green for the hills, the narrow strips of light brown on the sides are the path we walked up into the hills... and on it goes

I rarely quilt anymore so this was a treat to do and has inspired me to work on some unfinished quilts that have been languishing a bit too long

but first it's back to the brushes and watercolour for a while

I've been looking through books by British painter Ann Blockley who has a lovely style of painting flowers

this is my version of one from her "Experimental Flowers" book

next up is book-binding...