Helpers

 This is Calypso, she's such a good helper!  The sky is quilted (and my arms are stiff because I'm out of practice quilting larger pieces).  Time to start thinking about the tree that'll go next to the door. 

Quilting

 The quilting phase has started!  Still using my small 20+ year old Bernina, and picking out almost two  dozen spools of thread.

Ready to Stitch!

 Garages and ping pong tables are good for all sorts of things.  Ours was just the right size to use for pinning my current project.  Now it's ready to quilt!  Then I'll be appliqueing a tree and stitching a vine on top.

here, everything is pieced, ready to quilt before adding the tree on top

Hills

 Suddenly it's starting to look like a landscape!  Next up, the door frame.  

More sky...

 Here I've added some pink at the horizon, and you can see where the stars will appear in the doorway.  Top edge still isn't this dark in reality, it's just the lighting, but the rest is pretty close.

Cerulean Blue and Other Hues and Shades of Meaning

Here's the sky, in progress, for my current project.  The request was for cerulean blue, but of course color is very subjective and words often fail us when it comes to developing a shared understanding.  A watercolorist may see cerulean blue as the color that comes out of a particular tube of paint, while a birder pictures a warbler.  I'm fascinated by how we each perceive the world, and the colors in it.  I regularly talk to my quilt students about color and value, and about how our perception of these change depending on the placement of the fabric.  For example, a medium value fabric will look dark next to a light fabric, but it will look light next to a dark fabric.  And, sometimes we don't see what's in front of us, but what we picture in our mind's eye or remember from our childhood box of crayons.  

My fingers are crossed that this is close to the desired effect - certainly the sky at dawn is not one hue or shade.  The bottom row is still TBD, as I'm looking for a pale fabric that might incorporate a touch of pink.  The colors in the detail are a bit more accurate than the full shot because the light doesn't reach the top of my design wall well, so the full shot is a bit dark at the top. 

detail

Spotlight on Cerulean Blue | Winsor & Newton (winsornewton.com)  

Pleiades!

Sometimes, when you find the right fabric, it's easy to create.  I ordered two constellation fabrics from eQuilter.com, and even though I only needed a small cut of each, their customer service was fantastic.  Of course, I prefer to patronize my local quilt shops, but once in a while you need something extra and this is definitely it.  The rest of the blues came from my stash, 'cause why not collect fabric to use for dark starry nights?  The scale of the print was too large to use "as is" so I cut up the constellation and pieced it back together with the stars closer together in order to make the final constellation smaller.  The finished width of this section is 7", and it will be seen through an open doorway.

Feeling Grounded...

These are the squares that will represent the "ground" in the landscape I'm working on.  I have rearranged them, added some, subtracted others, and hand-colored a few.  It's time to stitch them all together while I'm feeling grounded and before I start second-guessing myself (although I might just move one or two of them around again.)  As a unit, I think they're looking earthy and unified.  They'll tone down a little more after quilting.  The photo doesn't quite do it justice, but sometimes my smart phone is just too smart for its own good and registers highlights that the human eye doesn't see.

Final Version

Here's an early version and the final one side by side so you can see where I started and where I'm headed... do they look different to you?  Some people might tune in to details that have changed, others might see the big picture and tell me I could have stopped rearranging them ages ago!

Early Version

Final Version