The Blue River Quilt, FINAL Answer!

Yesterday I went to a warehouse sale being held nearby. Arlene Blackburn, a local fabric artist, has opened an internet fabric store, and she invited the local guild members to come by on Saturday when she opened to the public for a few hours. I did. And I bought several pieces! I first selected a bundle of fat quarters by Robert Kaufman...the Elementals Collection: Nature (lily pond colorway). Then I also pulled several bolts of batiks off the shelves and got a yard of each.

When I got home, I layed my new fabrics on the cutting table to admire them...and take a picture, of course. I walked into another room to get the camera, and as I returned to the sewing room, I had to laugh! I was struck by the similarity of the colors of the wonderful new fabrics I had just brought home and the quilt I have recently finished...they were practically the same!

I am not very good at cutting out pictures, so please excuse the jagged lines! But look at the similarity between these new batik fabrics and the hand dyed fabrics of my quilt (which hangs on the sewing room wall)!



Come to think of it, I am not sure I ever shared pictures of the *final*, final quilt. I know...I *thought* I had this finished several times, but truly, NOW it is finished!



The last time I showed this, it had lots of beads in the river in several curling swirls.

Well, I wasn't happy with the look, so I scattered even MORE beads on it, until it looked like it had blue chicken pox!

Not good...





To me, the swirls and sequins in the river were over-powering the quilt...that was all I could see!



I removed most of the river's swirls as well as the scattered beads and immediately liked it better! I slowly began to add bugle beads in a more orderly pattern. I wanted to create continuity between the orderliness of the beading at the top of the quilt and what was in the river. This is the finished product:


The final result still has beads, but not so much that that is all you see!



The placement of the beads was intended to represent reflections on the water.

There is still one swirl that is more heavily beaded, but the other swirls have more bugle beads than any other type of bead and are less heavily beaded.

This is the label on the back: I named this "Shoulda Putta Frog on it"...sort of tongue-in-cheek! Over the many months that I have worked on this, one of the girls in my Monday group kept asking where the frog was...so I put one on the back. Plus, "The Blue River Quilt" sounds so boring..."Shoulda Putta Frog on it" sounds more intriguing...at least for NOW. Having just finished "Shoulda Putta Ring on it", this can be part of my "shoulda putta" series!

Of course, in years to come, this name will no make sense to anyone.