Winter Is Coming

Sorry, this isn't really about Game of Thrones, but I had to come up with a name for this mini quilt and "Winter is Coming" was all I could think of. I'm not the biggest GoT fan, although I love the girls' names:  Arya, Daenarys, Cersei, Sansa, Shae.  If J.K. Rowling had only named Hermione 'Arya,' I'd be constantly referring to Baby A instead of Baby J these days.

But back to the quilt.  The Lowell Quilt Festival is next weekend and the Boston Modern Quilt Guild was invited to display our quilts in the Appleton Mills Gallery.  And you were just wondering what you were going to do next weekend, right? My Orange Peel quilt ("Orange You Glad You Married Me") will be on display along with the mini, so come see them in person!

The Guild hosted a challenge - make a mini-quilt using this color palette:

I love these colors, though there's something a little gloomy (or North-of-the-Wallish) about them.  OK, I'll quit with Game of Throne references.  Anyway,  at the Cambridge Quilt Shop they had these really lovely ombre fabrics in exactly the right blue and gray.  In case you haven't noticed, ombre (the shading from light to dark) is a thing these days, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.  

I think it started with Drew Barrymore's hair:

 Then the trend went on to color fingernails:

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Cakes:

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And even Jodi Arias's glasses during her trial:

Although I like them better on Michelle Chamuel.

And though I feel ambivalent about the trend,  it is pretty on these Moda fabrics:

Having just gotten back from Vermont, I still couldn't get that lake out of my head and decided to do a lake landscape, but more spare/modern than what you normally see.  Also, I've been avoiding free-motion quilting for so long I was ready to give it a shot and I figured keeping it simple would help with that (if you mess up on a simple top, it's not so tragic to start over). I started with my hill and windy sky:

The water I did freehand based on a piece I saw in a Japanese quilting book.  Not sharing that picture for copyright reasons.  Just kidding, not showing it because mine looks better when you don't compare it to perfection.

For the wind, I couldn't get this right freehand, so I chalk traced it and then followed the lines as carefully as I could.  Pretty inexact but I'm OK with it.

And here it is altogether:

I don't know how I feel about the red canoe; I like the splash of color but it seemed like I should embroider a person in it so people would know what it was. Mr. Responsibly's response to that was "Of course it's a canoe.  What are people going to think, there's a red banana in the lake?  And if you add a guy in the canoe then the whole thing becomes about the guy." Is that true?  And why is it floating untethered out there? I'm still undecided, maybe I'll add a person later - I'd be interested to know what people think about leaving it empty.

Here come the second wave of cousins - get ready for some baking!