The Crux of an Idea

Well, this is weird.

After returning from that 3 months at the Mayo Clinic with my friend, after she was gone and I was going through her stash that I'd inherited, I came across this batik and added it to my "water wall" because it would be perfect to incorporate into a quilt highlighting the man-made pool on the Plummer House grounds. That pool was set back into a shady area thick with trees and ferns and vines, and I remembered the purplish colors reflected in the water along with the greens.

I'm thinking about this now instead of proceeding with the Dolphin Fountain because of an accidental juxtaposition of two fabrics from the last snow-dyeing. It was pure chance that I laid the fat eighth over the fat quarter and suddenly saw in it that Plummer House grounds pool. I grabbed the batik off the water wall to see if it worked with those two and saw that it did. Since this would be pretty straightforward requiring little working out of process (while the Dolphin quilt still has me pondering over technical approaches), I want to move ahead with this one before the inspiration fades.

Plummer House Grounds fountain - photo from an internet google

So I decided to take a quick look through my reference photos to remind me of the details of that pool and surrounding areas, and to my puzzlement, none of them bear out this memory of purple in the surroundings. Many of the photos, in fact, are very poor because of how darkly in shade the pool was, and apparently I was more focused on capturing reflections. So yes, this is weird, that my memory does not match reality. Maybe it's just my photos, I thought. So I also googled images of the grounds, and still no purple. In fact, I discovered this pool is actually a fountain, which was not running the day we were there. 

My photo from a blog post that showed up in a google search

Which brings up another weird thing. While googling those images, I clicked on one to discover it was from my own blog post about our excursion around the grounds. Have you ever had that happen to you, finding your own photos in a google search? You can read that post here and scroll down to see more photos and narrative about the water features. As I look at them now, I have no recollection of this fountain pool having that "unnaturally blue" look. But there it is in my photo, if not in my memory banks.

I'm taking it as a sign of artistic growth that I'm not letting any of this "reality" lead me away from my original design colors (although seeing that blue makes me feel better about the blue in the one snow-dye which I was feeling uncomfortable about, thinking it wasn't really accurate). I was thinking about this as an abstraction anyway, a hint at the real thing. And as often happens, scarcity of fabric will drive the design. As I pondered how to work with what I had, I already started wondering/worrying about the quilting, until I suddenly remembered this batik I bought maybe a month ago. I often catch myself picking up a fabric because the design on it strikes me as one I could translate some way in my own surface design efforts. I was taken in not only by those waves, but also by the colors within them - intriguing. And as it turns out, the batik itself is a perfect match to coordinate with the purple/green batik should there be any left. But what made me get this piece out and study it again was the thought that in those lines was the answer to my quilting design question, a much different kind of wavy water line than I've used before. Pretty exciting.