And the Irish Cottage evolves....

Thought I would entertain you a bit with a glimpse at process. :)

The Irish cottage has definitely attracted my energy. It will be a long time in the production, particularly due to my travels, but one has to start somewhere.

This week I started working on fabric selection. You can see from the photo below that I do this in a very 'organized' way!

The shelves where I store my stash are over beyond the left of the photo. Basically I go through each cubby of fabric looking for possible candidates. There is actually some order in the seeming chaos. If you look closely you can discern the cottage walls and roof are on the ironing board, the sky/ocean are directly under it. The rest of the groupings on the floor begin to capture the various shades in the grasses and fields. The makings of a gravel road on the tip of the ironing board.

Having made the walk-in space of my stash collection difficult to navigate, I then moved towards honing down the groupings. This required that I get a little more specific on the range of various colors I will need.

I am still waiting for some larger prints of the photograph to arrive. For now, I worked with some tracing paper on an 8x10 print.

This really forces me to begin to study the print. I love the variations in color. Now I am challenged to really see how value differences contribute to the scene. I start to make lists for the various areas  how many levels of a particular color I will need. Slowly, I will begin to visualize how I might capture some of the feel of the cottage and land through fabric.

My next step will be to revisit the collection lying on my ironing board/floor and begin to hone it down. Then, I will visit a few of my favorite stores to see if there are any other potential candidates there. (How my stash inevitably gets built.) As I get closer to actually choosing fabrics, I will go online for areas where I just don't like what I have been able to find in my closet and stores.

While this 'honing down' is happening, hopefully, those photo enlargements will arrive and I will work on a full scale layout for the art quilt. Typically I work from a black and white print and blow it up at Staples to a full size layout of the quilt. That will eventually be transferred to a mlar overlay that I will use in construction. You can get a general sense of that process from this blog post I wrote from last September.