Picture exchange

The members of European Quilt Association organised a big quilt exchange program last year. Our Irish Patchwork Society is a part of it and I joined that fun too!

The program is called ‘Picture exchange‘.
You pick a picture as an inspiration for a quilt. You cut that picture in half vertically. You make a small quilt inspired by the right half of picture.
At the same time you send the left half of picture to your partner and the partner makes a quilt inspired by that half only.
You also make another quilt for some one.

These quilts are really small. 20cm by 40cm. So making two of them wasn’t a huge problem. The actual activity was all happened this year.

I submitted this picture.

A foggy winter sunrise in our garden.
I wanted to create a Sumie looking quilt for sometime and decided to use this opportunity as excuse.

On the other hand, I got this picture from my Dutch partner.

A beautiful sunset!
Instantly I decided to make both quilts with theme of the sun. And both to be as good to be together even I knew they would be separated in the end.

First, scrappy background.
I picked very small section of pictures to be used for either of them. The sky was full of various shade and changing quickly. Hence there are more fabric used. On the other hand, the sunset water is really calm and less piecing. Shading with mostly white was really interesting!

And then I added shadows of leaves. First it was too much and I drastically reduced for the final piece.

And the quilting.
For the sunrise one, I used several shades of white thread and change the quilting density to reflect the strength of light. And toward the outer edge, the quilting pattern is to reflect the stillness of fog.

For the sunrise, there are three elements, sky, hill and water.
Sky was quilted to blend all the colours. Hill was to add structural appearance and water with calmness as well as changing the motif size to express the distance.