Showing posts with label frogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label frogs. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Lost on the Ocean

Quilt No. 107
August 2015

Frogs.  They keep showing up in my quilts.  It’s not so much that I love frogs.  It’s pictures of frogs that I love.  I have frog calendars, and frog stationary, and more than one Kermit the Frog hanging around the house.  I have a frog cookie cutter, frog salt and pepper shakers, and a plastic frog next to the kitchen sink that dispenses soap.  With the exception of the dispenser, I did not buy any of these froggly items.  People see frog stuff and they immediately think of me.  It’s pretty humbling.

I do admit that I have allowed the inspiration of frogs to guide my purchases more than a few times – and all of those purchases were fabric.  So, whenever I can, I like to add a frog or two into my quilts.  Sadly, this does not happen nearly as often as I’d like.  So my collection of frog fabric is growing in leaps and bounds.

In Lost on the Ocean, a particularly exotic frog is sailing on his lily pad.  The sun is blasting down on him.  The ocean is swirling.  A mildly frantic concern is starting to nudge at his consciousness.  The heat penetrates his skull and unleashes a psychedelic vista.  He begins to long for the comforts of home...or maybe even just a bit of sunscreen... 

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Reach for the Stars

Quilt No. 94
August 2013

There’s nothing quite like frogs when it comes to frolicking. Even a little snow won't slow them down.

Reach for the Stars was entirely inspired by fabrics I liked, leading me to buy them at different shops with no particular quilt in mind (which describes 99% of my fabric collection).  This is the very best way to buy fabric – the possibilities remain infinite.  Eventually these favoured fabrics came together to give a sneak peek at what frogs do when we’re not looking.

When the quilt was finished I figured I’d conquered the daytime world of frogs...but what kind of things did they think about after the sun went down?  Did frogs have aspirations?  Did they have their own way of reaching for the stars in the dead of night?  In The Frog Who Jumped to the Stars Franz tackles these very struggles in his own froggly manner.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Acute Frog



Quilt No. 92
March 2013

I agreed to do a demonstration at our quilt guild on how to create a pattern suitable for appliqué.  This was sure to be the proverbial piece of cake.  I always have a couple of quilts of this type in various states of completion.  It would be a simple matter of collecting up all the constituent bits when the time came.  And that time was somewhere in the very distant future.   

Fall and Christmas ripped by like an uncaring tornado.  January, living up to its reputation with white and bitter cold, loomed up on the schedule.  Abruptly, it was less than two weeks until I was to do the demo.

My quilts usually involve scaling up my art work or existing drawings or photos into a pattern that I can then use to make the various shapes for the quilt.  I start with a drawing of a cactus, and I end up with a cactus on a quilt.  Plenty of stuff happens in between those two points. This is tedious work, suitable only for the not-easily-bored.  It involves creating line drawings, and transferring these onto acetate sheets, then onto freezer paper.  Ultimately it yields the pieces that are sewn onto the background. 

There’s always plenty of all those items basking on my quilt table.  Who could have ever predicted that my demonstration prep would fail to coincide with an in-progress quilt?  When have I ever had all quilts completed?  Never before had this situation occurred.  I can only surmise that some sort of conjunction of the quilting planets had aligned to conspire against me.  I was finished every quilt. 

A new project would have to be started, but I didn’t have enough time to jump into a major quilt.  I needed a minor quilt.  A cute frog would do.  But I had to hurry.  And I had to break down my process into steps I could describe, something I’d never before intellectualized. I usually just work in wordless surge of creation. This was more like deconstructing a recipe - taking the cake apart and coming up with the flour, eggs, and milk that were the starting point.

And so I picked a smiling red-eyed tree frog, taken from a calendar.  There was no time to get too original!  Whipping through my preparations, I realized that it had to be not so much a cute frog as an acute frog – according to medical terminology –  “brief and severe”. This episode was definitely that and the usual chronic process – “long and dragged out”– was a null option.