Bonsai - Fabric Selection

And now we move on to the fabric palette for this art quilt:

I have been collecting silk fabrics for some time and thought this piece had an elegant look to it that would suit the use of silks perfectly. I used the orange background fabric and my watercolor painting as a guide to help me select. The two most important features in the painting are the tree trunk and the plant foliage. The tree trunk needed to contrast well with the background, and I had a vanilla colored raw silk fabric that seemed perfect for it.

I didn't want to use fabrics for the foliage, but instead I wanted to use a mass of stitched threads and yarns. I will talk more about that in a future post, but for the purpose of selecting fabrics I knew I wanted this mass to be blue/green primarily.

The pot fabric needed to coordinate with the foliage, so I chose a Japanese blue green print that I had picked up at Road to California a couple years ago. I had another raw silk in a light value blue-green that I used for the lip of the pot.  

I am so glad to use the Japanese fabrics in my stash for this quilt. It obviously makes sense given the Bonsai subject matter, but that’s not the main reason. There is a vendor at Road that carries Japanese fabrics and I have been attracted to them for a long time. Each year I buy some. They are a little pricey, which is fine if you use them. But for a few years I was just buying them and putting them in my stash. Last year I decided I wasn’t going to buy more until I used some of what I had. So here I am, using some of it. That justifies my past purchases and the ones I am sure to make at next year’s Road to California show. A win all around!

The table fabrics were also from my stash. I had some dark reddish brown prints that seemed to work perfectly with the orange background and blue-greens.

An entirely stash made project. That’s a good feeling!

Here are all the fabrics together:

My next post will be about the tree trunk.  Thanks for visiting my blog!