My SkyWatch Friday quilt in the making....

I had thought a long time about making a quilt based on my participation in SkyWatch Friday. When my quilt guild announced their "flight challange" it seemed the perfect opportunity to do both ideas together. I started this quilt in January 2009 and finished it in April 2009. Had to have one photo against the sky :-)
Beginnings
Getting an idea in my head is always the easy part....figuring out how to turn it into a quilt is harder. I knew what elements I wanted and had to decide how to put them together. I wanted some of the traditional quilt blocks...."Flying Geese" and "Birds of the Air" and I wanted to copy some of the photos that I have posted on Skywatch.

Ann, at Nature Tails and Camera Trails happen to post a wonderful Mallard duck shot about the time I was beginning to think about this. It was posed to show flight, but also show all of its colors. I asked her permission to use the photo and she also helped me make a pattern from it. Above is Ann's duck photo....great catch!.....and below my working pattern.

I cut out the different pieces and fused them to fabrics of the right color and then onto the blue sky. Roy at Fenlandwalker had been posting Mallard photos, too, so he nicely provided me a whole lot of good ones to study the colors. Thanks to both Ann and Roy! You were a big help with this!

When you fuse fabrics you have to sew them down in some manner to insure they will stay where you put them. I'm not good at doing that on the machine, so I chose to use blanket stitch around the edges of each piece and then add more decorative touches to get a feather look.

This is the finished duck once the quilt was quilted.

Clouds are a traditional SkyWatch photo, so I bought several cloud fabrics and used them throughout the quilt. This section was to be just clouds with quilting that mimiced the "Flying Geese" blocks soaring across the sky. Sorry this looks so wrinkled. My hand quilting is not the best, but I didn't feel the size of the stitches mattered much on this quilt!

This was a photo that I took at Henderson Slough when the Snow Geese were migrating. I wanted to somehow capture this idea.

I couldn't do as many birds as I needed and I couldn't get them small enough to suit me, but was fairly happy with the over-all result. Got lucky finding that fabric for the cornfield! All I had to do was fuse it on and trim the edge. I used a permanant marker to add the black wing tips to the birds and a few other details of trees and more distant birds.

Another shot of them.....should have been before the last one :-)...did very little quilting on this area.

I knew I wanted a moon and this was the photo I used to make my pattern.

I finally figured out that I could use two layers of the white fabric with the "craters" cut out of the underneath piece and let the dark sky fabric show through as the craters. Figuring out what to do for quilting was harder. The moon quilting is only through the two moon layers to hold them in place. Then I quilted around the moon and across the sky in a few places. I intended to have more of my quilted flying geese going behind the moon....until my husband pointed out that geese cannot fly BEHIND the moon....duh! Artistic license, maybe? I dropped the idea.

Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Evansville, IN....I used this once in SkyWatch when I was doing steeples. I got Mike to draft me a drawing of it big enough to fit my sky section. He is an engineer, so he's better at that sort of thing, then I am :-)

A nice cloudy fabric to set it off and some colorful "flying geese" blocks to hem it in.

I quilted around the blue areas between the clouds.

My sunset section is generic....a must for any SkyWatcher! This is one photo that I looked at getting color ideas.

I didn't know how to do the bands of color and ended up doing it the hardest way possible! I don't know why I didn't just cut and fuse them. Instead I cut slices of fabric and laid them out in a way that suited me, and then turned the edges under and blind stitched them together....not too stable in spots and way too many layers of fabric in others! A learning experience to say the least! This is when I was pinning the thing and trying to stitch it.

I cut out some generic silhouettes of a farm and trees and fused them on. The hand quilting is minimal...more to hold the whole thing together then anything else! Before I did any of the hand quilting, I machine quilted along some of the dark borders separating the sections. As usual when I come up with something "artistic", I was "winging it" most of the time and didn't know the proper way to do a lot of it. That is what I like about quilting. If you are not a perfectionist, you can make it up as you do along and come out with something you are satisfied with. You don't have to follow the rules all the time! I did work very hard making all my "flying geese" blocks look the same and the points showing....I don't mind doing the traditional stuff right.

I love labels, so I used some left over Flying Geese blocks to frame my information on making the quilt. Thanks to the SkyWatch team for agreeing that I could call the quilt "SkyWatch Friday". I will be putting this in our local quilt show in September. It was a fun experience, but I'm glad to be done with it, too!

Hanging on the wall from a distance, looks best!