"The Lake" Quilt Study

This is a study for the large installation, "The Lake", which will be 9'x 7'.  This small version has a number of purposes.  The prime one is to give me a clearer vision as to how I want to present "a moment alone on the beach".

"The Lake" Study - 21"x 17"

I had already worked out the coloration and wave action on the horizon and middle ground as you can see in the photo below.

Again, I'm grateful to our older son for creating a Photoshop template for this project as he had done for "Prairie Performance".  It's great to drop a photo of a finished panel into place to see how it looks with the others ... how it fits into the whole picture.  I can see quite a bit of work ahead with the oil stick pastels and paints to blend all of those separate panels into one big lake.  Although, some of those areas are shadowed in the photographs because they were snapped on different days as well as time of day.  At some point I'll retake photos of all of them at once so they'll have the same lighting conditions to give me a truer picture.

In the meantime, I needed to work out a solution for the beach grass.

The blades extend over the waves lapping to the shore so they couldn't be put into place before the water was quilted.  My solution was to layer the blue tulle netting over the whole scene.  After the sky and water were quilted, l layered slivers of cut fabric as a base for the blades of grass over the blue tulle covering the foundation fabrics that make up the beach. 

Then a sand colored tulle was layered over the whole beach area.  I quilted a line along the water's edge and trimmed away the excess that extended into the lake.  After concentric lines were quilted to accent the contours in the sand, I free-motion quilted lots of beach grass blades with two different variegated threads.  I've also drawn blades with colored pencils for an added dimension ... old grass and shadows.

I'm still thinking about the sky.  The sky is okay for this small piece, but it's not the brilliant blue perfect summer day sky with a few scattered high clouds that I think I want ... something similar to this photo taken by my nephew.

Or, like the scattered high clouds on the day we toured Fort Sumter.

This may necessitate the removal of the quilting above the horizon line for that row of panels and reworking the sky above the horizon.  Although, a lot of shading with oil stick pastels may soften what's there, pushing those indistinct clouds further into the distance as seen in the skyline over Charleston.

center panel, 2nd row of "The Lake" installation

 (21" x 17")

I won't know until the sky panels are composed ... and that begins tomorrow.