Corals

My time at the studio this weekend has paid off in a great way. I've been itching to make a quilt about corals but I've found them daunting at best. Corals are a fabulous riot of shapes and colors, a true feast to the eye. In this sense they are a perfect subject for a vibrant quilt. But distilling these amazing structures into simple two-dimensional forms without sacrificing their essence was a challenge that kept me awake at night.

This weekend I skipped happy hour and stayed home to study corals. I went online and looked at hundreds of images of reefs, in broad landscapes and in captivating close-ups, tying to understand something new about them. I didn't know what it was that I needed to understand, but I allowed my intuition to guide me until I knew I'd gotten it, even if it was a feeling that couldn't be vocalized.

I went to the studio on Sunday and willfully emptied my head of all the colorful coral images in my head so that I could cut out simple shapes. The image on the left is what I came up with.

Then I went to my fabric stash and found the perfect fabrics to begin building my own coral reef. Here's the stash, and the riot of color can now begin.