Dealing with the leftovers!

So what does one do with the leftovers?    An old saw in composition textbooks,  whether applied to wall hangings or garden landscaping is to have odd numbers and various sizes of things: e.g. in values: at least three, with a large amount of one, a medium amount of another and a small amount of a third.  We have (rather scraggly as they don’t like the droughts we suffer from in the SE USA) a little papa/mama/baby family of cypresses either side of our driveway!  But I hadn’t planned on it extending to my quilts!  though this seems to have occurred when I was looking the other way (probably at the online scrabble to which I’m addicted!).  

Years ago I made a little collage out of magazine advertisements; it was an exercise in an art class at the U:

I can certainly see why people like fusing because it’s so quick and easy to glue and stick!! at least with paper cut out from advertisements.  anyway this little collage has kicked around the study (yes I’m definitely not on the “best dressed studio list”! we never even got around to calling it more than a study!) for several years now and finally I decided it was time to make a quilt from it.

 

 

 

 

 

Of course it came out quite a bit differently as my quilts are wont to do.  The tree looked a bit clunky, the pale pink building in the back ground with the cut out (which probably occurred because I was cutting away some advertising wordage) looked very odd, and the foreground seemed too deep, the right hand didn’t appear to be related at all etc etc .  Plus, I was looking at a painting by a friend and thinking how much I loved the colours in the painting and was following that for my colour scheme.   I wanted a nice spooky feeling despite the lavender – I like the strange contrast of a colour associated with little old ladies and the gothicky hallowe’en feel to the house.  And that determined the title: Lavender Gothic. It’s about 35 by 45, stupidly I didn’t measure it before rolling it up in the quilt store aka the guest bedroom which is now tidied for guests, so they don’t have to sleep under 45 quilts!

But no sooner had Papa LG been made then I started looking at the left over bits and thinking about what could be done with them  Generally I feel the leftovers are often tastier than the original dish but I’m not sure about this one..I think I might have added a little too much sugar to poor Mama LG (Storm Dance – well the trees seemed to take over!):

She is smaller: only 18 by 22.  At first I was going to balance that blast of pink with some pink verticals at the bottom left, but then I felt that the trees engaged in their own little dance had enough zest, movement and weight to compensate for the pink.  But they could still be added…so let me know!!

 

 

 

 

And I still have bits left over!   so I’ve pinned up this little fellow (13 x 17), not quite sure whether to finish him or not…the baby of the bunch.  Again comments invited…anything else left over though is straight into the compost!

Hope you all enjoy this season celebrating the winter (or summer!) solstice; I know I will if I can just get that darned Christmas cake made!!

If you have been, thanks for reading!  Elizabeth
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