Northwest Garden Lady - Part 2

This is a continuation of a previous post about the making of the Northwest Garden Lady art quilt.  I take tons of pictures of plants in my garden and wanted to use some of my own photos for the flowers and foliage to give it a Northwest feeling.  Here are some of the pictures that I used.  They include zinnias, chrysanthemums, hellebores, Japanese anemones, coneflowers, and feverfew.  

All of the pictures were sized to the right scale in Photoshop and printed onto EQ Printables Photo fabric sheets.  They were fused to the background, along with fabric leaves. 

I also love our strawberry tree and made the tree out of more pictures.

I made the face, wine glass and glove out of fabric pieces and added Steam-A-Seam to the back, so that they can also be fused to the background.   Here's a progress picture.

So far, so good.  

Inspiration from photos

The group of friends that read and studied "The Artist's Way" with me earlier in 2015 are raring to go again with a new book and exercises aimed at stretching our inner quilt artists.  One of the first exercises is to look through some of our favorite pictures for inspiration.  Then we need to determine what it is the we like about the pictures.

I really like to hike and take photos, so I have a ton that I've taken over the last couple of years.  So many of them are in the Pacific Northwest forests, which are heavy with Douglas Fir trees, and have an under-story of vine maples, huckleberries, salmon berries, ferns and wild flowers.  I also have a lot of photos of amazing scenery.  What I think I'll start with for this exercise is pictures of the trees.  Here's a few that I've picked for inspiration.  I don't know if they will work or not, but at least I've got a starting point.

Olympic National Park

Multnomah to Waukena Falls hike, Oregon 

Oregon Columbia gorge

Cape Horn hike Washington

Angel's Falls hike Oregon

Columbia Gorge Oregon

Mt Adams Wilderness, Washington

Lewis and Clark Park, Washington