Evolution of a Design in Progress - Entry #2

The subtitle for this entry could be "Getting Out of My Way" (with a nod and thank you to John Mellencamp from his interview with Charlie Rose on PBS).  Yesterday I admitted that the obvious answer to the question (what should I do with my leaves?) was Trees!  If you've been reading my entries for a while, you may know that trees are among my favorite things which makes the answer to that question even more obvious.  But I am convinced that what kept me from recognizing that simple answer was an ingrained conviction that answers had to be more elaborate, more artsy, more cerebral, more cosmic, and there I was with blinders on my brain .  No answers remotely fitting any of those "more" categories came to me.  Actually nothing came to me

I had to get out of my way.

I sat down and drew a very rough pencil sketch:

At that point the trees were very straight as they frequently are in a forest, and very few branches are visible.  There's a path that leads from the lower left to right of center where it meets the horizon.  There are two swirling lines that start in the upper left and end up in the right bottom third.  The first line didn't please me so I just took a purple ink pen and altered its course.  That's the line of the leaf fall.

Or it is right now.

After sketching that, I picked up "tree trunk" fabrics and started tearing them.  If I wanted straight trees, the fastest way to get them was to allow the grain of the fabric to dictate the degree of straightness it would give me.  All I did was choose the width of the tree.  That worked very well until one of my favorite fabrics took it in its head to head straight for a while and then veer off near the bottom.  I almost, almost, tossed it aside; my idea was for straight, straight, straight trees.  But then I thought, "Get out of your way."  

And I let it be.

And here's the really lovely thing I saw today on my driveway:

You can bet if I don't use this in my quilt or in a quilt, it will appear somewhere, somehow.  It's a Leaf Echo!  

Here's a close up.  It's what happens when a leaf freezes to the ground; the ice crystals form around it.  Then when the ice crystals melt, the leaf can blow away leaving a hint of what it was - in this case, an oak leaf!

This isn't the leaf, but I couldn't resist.  It's obvious I've amped up these photographs to make the most of the texture and melting ice water trails (lines on the quilt's path? trees leaning this way and that?) on my driveway and also the color (quilt, again?) in the last one.  But aren't they just something?  Inspiration, certainly!

More tomorrow.