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| Mrs Midas A Four-in-Art Quilt, August 2015 No 3 in the 'Literature' series |
This quilt was inspired by the poem by Carol Duffy, which you can read in full here. The poem comes from a collection called The World's Wife, in which Duffy examines, sometimes very comically, the lives of the women behind a collection of famous men. Mrs Midas is a poem from the point of view of the wife of a modern Midas, "the woman who married the fool who wished for gold".
It's full of beautiful and vivid imagery, and terrible sadness. Unable to embrace his wife any longer Midas has to move out to their "caravan in the wilds, in a glade of its own".
"You knew you were getting close. Golden trout on the grass...And then his footprints glistening next to the river's path."
The colours that the poem evokes are what influenced my quilt - I really wanted to get across the feeling of the gold, beautiful but unexpected in contrast to the greens of the grass and the wooded glade. It is made using various kona and klona cottons and some gold silk dupion, and quilted simply in the ditch. I had quite clearly in mind some ideas - the (rather wobbly) flying geese which represent Midas's footprints in the grass, and the stylised applique leaf - and I knew I wanted to make an improv quilt, and for it to be abstract, which fits in with my plan to make each quilt in the series progressively more so. (My previous two quilts are here.)
I'm not satisfied with the pictures of this quilt and I want to take it outdoors when the weather is more reliable, but I do love it. There are many practical details I would fix but I managed to get out what I had in my head!
Watch out for the reveal of our final quilts on 1 November but meantime please do visit the other participants and check out their quilts for this round of the series.
Elizabeth at OP Quilt
Betty at a Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com
Jennifer at Secondhand Dinosaur
Nancy at Patchwork Breeze
