“3 Beeches” started with an act of magic. I made the largest piece on the first day of the wet cyanotypes workshop I took last July with Lesley Riley at the Hudson River Valley Fiber Art Workshops. I was completely experimenting at that stage and just arranged the leaves, randomly sprayed some baking soda and water, and put the fabric out in the sun. That’s when the magic happened because the shading beneath the leaves happened serendipitously and I know that I couldn’t have created the effect if I tried.
When it came time to quilt the piece, I let the magic be my guide. I quilted around each leaf in a dark blue thread to emphasize the leaf and the shadow and then added some veins inside the leaves. Then, I hand quilted some meandering lines to echo the sense of movement already in the cyanotype. The leaves looked to me like they were floating in a stream so I used the quilting to enhance the sense of motion. I carried these same lines of quilting into the deep blue background as well.
