School of Fish

Here's another quilt that I submitted for the Good Hope Exhibit. I created a mosaic effect for the water with basic patchwork and then I raw-appliqued the fish and the coral. That's as far as I had conceived the design because I thought the water patches would make the whole thing busy enough. But when I looked at the quilt, it needed something else. Maybe because the fish were in horizontal formation and the coral was vertical, the entire effect felt constricted. I sat with this quilt for about a month trying to figure out what else it needed. I showed it to Bob and he suggested air bubbles for the fish, then I added the algae, both at an angle to balance the rigidness of the other elements.
This quilt was a good experiment in combining a couple of different techniques. I'm looking forward to taking the lessons I learned from this project and applying them to a more complex quilt in the future.