Lake Series, First Lessons Learned

Each lake picture is created intuitively. The tone, mood, time or type of day is determined by the first scraps of fabric laid down. The rest builds from there.
After Lake #1 was quilted, I added oil stick pastel work to blend in edges of the clouds and add crests to waves.
It still needed stronger accents, so I got out my white acrylic paint and crested those waves.
As I was "fixing" this piece the symetry of the receding waves on each side bothered me. To remedy that, I machine embroidered beach grass with a variety of threads on one side. At this point, I stopped fussing with it and got on with Lake #2
One of the first decisions was that the height for the other 99 (?) needed to be increased from 8 1/2 inches to 10-11 inches. This gives more space for the main focus ... the lake. The width of 13 inches works well and will remain the standard dimension for all. So that "fixing" with pastels and paint wouldn't be necessary, I took a bit more care about getting details incorporated in the first step of contruction. I was pretty successful in doing that with Lake #'s 2 and 3. However, I felt a need to accent the the crashing to shore waves with paint in Lake #4.
There was still a bit of blending with oil stick pastels in the first five pieces. On Lake #6 I finally got it. To let the fibers ... fabrics and threads and quilting ... tell the whole story.
I'm on a roll and have completed ten pieces. To view them, click here OR on the album in the sidebar. I tried to remember to take a photo before machine quilting each one. Two got missed because I was so into it and wanted to get that next step done before having to fix dinner, walk the dogs, do the laundry, and stuff like that.

Future photos will be added to the album as I complete the pieces. I'll try to remember to add a note to indicate an addition when my posting is not about this Lake series.