Strawberry Fields Forever ... an art quilt

My quilt guild's quilt show is coming up and one of the categories is a Burpee challenge. Participants picked a number out of the hat and were then given that numbered page of the Burpee seed catalog. The challenge was to make an art quilt inspired by the something on the page ... the colors, the flowers, the names of the flowers ... whatever. I hadn't worked on a quilt in ages and I thought, "Why not?" Maybe joining the challenge would get me back to my sewing machine and jump-start my quilting again. I got page #30, which you can see here:Lots of reds and pinks, which I don't use very often. Great, now what? Well, after looking over the page, I zeroed in on this:Hmmm ... "Strawberry Fields" ... I liked it! Just had to figure out what to do with it ....

Now this was back in January, with a deadline of the August meeting (which is now only 2 days away). Plenty of time, I figured, so I put it on the back-burner for a bit ... occasionally thinking about it, but never doing more than that. But as August approached, my apprehension level rose ... and when they reminded us at the July meeting that the quilts were due at the next meeting, I was beginning to get desperate. So when my mom came to town last weekend (a surprise for my 40th birthday) and asked me what I wanted to do on "my day", I said "HELP!" Hey, my mom is an award-winning art quilter, so who better to ask, right?! So we brainstormed a bit and came up with this:Don't ya love it?! And it didn't take much time at all (well, if you don't count the 7 months it took to get started LOL!) After we came up with the idea, she showed me how to use a picture of my feet (yep, those are my tootsies) to make a template for tracing onto Wonder-Under and then gave me some tips on stitching and embellishing to finish it off. It was a lot of fun trying something new and making an art quilt in my mom's style ... and I've gotten a little bitten by the quilting bug again, so who knows? You might just see some more quilting from me in the future. Too bad it's too late to enter anything else for the upcoming show ... but I'll be ready for the next show in 2010! Thanks, Mom! I sure did enjoy having you here ... love ya!!

Here's a close-up of the beading ... sorry for the bad pic, but it's so hard for my camera to get a good close-up, even using the (supposedly) correct setting.Now to cross my fingers ... the winner of the viewer's choice in this category gets a $25 Burpee gift certificate! Plus I'm going to donate the quilt to Ami Simms' Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative ... hope someone actually buys it LOL!