Modern Landscape

Late last fall, I purchased the book Modern Color, by Kim Eichler-Messmer. It is a guide to dyeing fabric, especially in planned gradations, and then using them in quilts. I had already completed dyeing for the season by the time the book came out, but I was interested to read about her techniques and particularly interested to see how she used the hand-dyed fabrics. A number of the projects were fairly traditional, but near the back of the book, she had an abstract landscape quilt that caught my eye. And there were several more in the gallery section. I thought this would be a great project to start using my fabrics. I had a few gradations where I had loosely tried for dark and medium values, and I lined up different colors to suggest a landscape: sky, horizon, green fields, turquoise lake, brown fields.

It's hard for my camera to capture some of the subtle color changes, but I'm happy with it. It's quilted simply with mostly wavy lines, breaking occasionally into swirls, or waves, or grassy shapes. I used 12 different threads on the top, trying to match or complement each color area.