Four in Art 4: Birch

With many apologies again to my Four-in-Art friends for my lateness, I'm dropping in to share my quilt for this quarter, Birch. Our group has been working this year on the theme of Literature, and my fourth quilt is inspired by Anna Karenina by Tolstoy.  It's a really wonderful, atmospheric novel, full of the most human characters (and, bonus, its a whole lot easier to read than War and Peace).

I wanted to make a quilt about the power of a book to evoke a particular image or feeling.  I last read Anna Karenina quite a long time ago - on the Trans-Siberian railway, in midwinter - and the image in my mind has always been of snowy birch forests.  I had a look back at the text of the book when I started my quilt and could only find one reference to birches, so my memory of the book is probably all muddled up with memories of the journey, but never mind!  That's the image I had in my head.

I wanted to make each of my four quilts for this series progressively more abstract.  This quilt has turned out less abstract than I intended, but it's still ambiguous.  It could be a forest of birches,

or it could be the bark on one birch trunk.

It is heavily quilted to suggest more trees, or bark texture.

The 'coloured' strips are the same fabric as the body of the quilt - I cut a large section and ran backwards and forwards with variegated aurifil before cutting and piecing it.

To be honest, I'm not sure this quilt is really finished, but it completes my four on the theme of "Literature" with Four in Art.

The Moors: inspired by the works of the Bronte sisters, about the use of
weather and climate in literature to heighten mood

Haiku: inspired by a poem by Basho, about deceptive simplicity and
whether we have to 'get' all the references to enjoy a work

Mrs Midas: inspired by the poem by Carol Ann Duffy, about vivid imagery

We have a shared blog here, and you can find the other quilters here:

Betty on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com
Elizabeth at Occasional Piece
Nancy at  Patchwork Breeze
Rachel at The Life of Riley
Simone at Quiltalicious
Susan at PatchworknPlay

We are a friendly group, who all have very different styles and approaches, who come up with an overall annual theme to work on, sometimes with quarterly sub-themes for extra inspiration. The group is kept to a size where we are close enough for us to communicate easily with each other, but a spot sometimes opens up so if you're interested in joining let me know in a comment below.

All members have to do is:

• Desire to expand their creativity. 
• Have a body of work that members can review, preferably a blog.  
• Make a year commitment to the group and do their best to make deadlines unless some crazy life occurrence happens. 
• Be willing to review other Four in Art work and leave a comment within the first week of publishing.