The Coven On Weber Canyon Road

The first quilt of the new year, or should that be the final quilt of the last year?!

The Coven on Weber Canyon Road, is based on the holiday I took with Janice and Mary in Utah last year.  Weber Canyon Road is up where Janice & Roger's cabin is, and the quilt is based on an actual barn.
A number of the elements in the quilt are significant. I'll explain them as I work my way through the quilt.

In construction, the sky and grass area is a single piece of my own hand painted fabric.  I didn't like the mountains I had painted on, so I appliquéd better shaped mountains over them. The buttes are also my own fabric.  The barn is all batiks.  The trees are commercial fabrics.


The barn and fencing are true to the photo.  I enlarged the photo and traced those elements, which gave me the initial proportions.  I then played around with their placement to try and make the scene look more interesting.

The viewer should have the feeling of looking down on the action (though I am not sure that I have completely caught that) because Janice's cabin is uphill from the barn.










On the roof of the barn I have roughly appliquéd some Angelina fibres, that shine as the light hits them.

The large pine tree was constructed after I fussy cut pine branches, and sewed them down to look like boughs.  The other trees are constructed in the same way.

I could have cut one large piece of fabric, but really, it doesn't look right, though I'd be hard put to say why.

The tiny pines at the back, are actual pine trees from another pine tree fabric.

In the background of the quilt are the red coloured buttes.  These distinctive shapes said 'cowboy films' to me!  I really wanted some in my quilt.

After quilting I realised that the butte in the middle was much too strong.  I didn't have the will power to unpick it, so I covered it with while tulle, to dull down the colour.  Also, I didn't want them to be very red, as I knew they would overwhelm the quilt.

The tulle also serves to remind me of the smoke we encountered on our trips from the fires burning out of state.




The figures are from photos of the three of us, that I printed onto white fabric (having spent hours trying to get the proportions correct).  I thread painted them and then appliquéd the figures to the surface.  I can assure you that Mary doesn't have thick legs, but they just kept looking like that.  A trick of the light I'm sure!

Janice is watching a dog, who is watching her.  I just know Janice is telling that dog to behave!  Part of the fun with the figure placement, is that in reality, it is more likely to be Janice climbing into someones field, than us.

There are two dogs because Mary loves dogs (well, I think she loves all animals).  I am watching the dog run past with a rabbit in its mouth.  That is just my cruel joke on poor Mary.  Though this is a dead rabbit (easier for me to do than a horse), it reminds me of teasing Mary about the fate of the horses, at Dead Horse Point in Moab.

Though it isn't really clear in the photo, I hand coloured with soft pencils, parts of the grass and all the shadows (except the barn's).  In retrospect that was not a good idea on a large area as I did it after I had appliquéd the elements on, and the colouring stretched the fabric.  Yikes!  I had to do some pushing of excess fabric under some of the elements.  Also, it was somewhat wasted on the grass (which had caused the most distortion), as most of it simply rubbed off onto my quilting gloves.  I also used a fairly dried out black fabric marker to darken the shadow sides of various elements, such as the trees.  I went over the marker with dark thread, and highlighted the sun side of the trees etc, with light thread.

For the binding, I initially cut binding that matched the background colours of the quilt, i.e. blue for the sky area, green for the grass area.  However that binding didn't seem to work.  Instead I went for mottled orange, picking up the colour from the main tree, the barn and the clothes.  The binding is really bold, but serves to hold the action within the frame of the quilt.  I don't want the viewer to wonder what is going on outside the area of the quilt.  I want the viewer to be caught by the things that caught me.

As always there are things that just didn't go right.  I'd say to plan, but I only really work with part of a plan in my head.  I was terribly stuck with how to quilt the grass.  I sketched ideas, I looked up other people's quilts to see how they handled it and I even dreamed about the grass.  Once I decided on the 'v' shape, I started quilting like mad.  However, it was more densely quilted that the upper section of the quilt.  This and the colouring led to some distortion.  I didn't want to quilt in the sky area more densely, because I would lose the receding distance effect.  After several attempts to do what I knew could not be done, I bowed to the inevitable and put a small rod pocket at the back, to weight the quilt flat.  Once the quilt was bound, it wasn't as bad as I had expected to be honest.  The photo at the top of the post is without the rod at the bottom, so you can see it isn't too bad.

 The other problem with the grass, which I didn't think about until I had quilted too much to unpick, was that it made the back of the quilt none too pretty when viewed close up.  I decided to remedy this, by just not showing it to anyone!

I was going to just put a fake back on, but I'd used a favourite bit of batik fabric and I liked the effect, as it mapped out the front, but in a ghostly way.

I really enjoyed constructing this quilt.  The making of it reminded me of my dear friends and a holiday that I will never forget.