Redwing Blackbird

While taking my morning walk with my neighbor, along an abandoned railroad track, we were looking at wildflowers and cattails, and I was reminded of a walk with my sister, in which I took cattail pictures. Our walk in Monroe, Washington around Lake Tye, had bunches of cattails and red winged blackbirds. My photographs with the sun setting in the evening, created a color saturated blue sky, and rich intense colors on the cattails, and back lit the blackbird, making the red markings glow.

I had wanted to make a quilt with this simple design, and my memory was jogged. I went home and printed my favorite picture, and created a line drawing with a Sharpie fine point pen onto a plastic sheet protector. If you cut them apart, you get two pages, and they are a lot cheaper than the over head projector sheets. I put the line drawing into the computer scanner, to save it, then printed it out in "Poster format" onto 4 sheets of paper, to enlarge it. The size worked good, and I kept moving the bird to the right, creating more open sky, because I did not want the bird to be dead center in the composition.

Now for the fun part, fabric selection! Digging through my box of hand dyed fabric, I found a rich blue with some mottling, do to scrunching the fabric during the dye process. It is the perfect size, just a bit longer than a fat quarter. So now my creative juices are flowing again, and I can't wait to get started on it in the morning. So after the blahs, all it took to get me going, was taking my regular walk. May the Muse strike you as easily!