The Endeavourers, #6, Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, "The Pond"

Today's the day for the sixth quarterly reveal of The Endeavourers art quilt group, and 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' is the theme of our reveal.

When I first learned this was our theme I initially felt a bit despairing as nothing came immediately to mind except Paul Newman on his bicycle and the song in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, but luckily we have a whole quarter and I started to really enjoy thinking about it.

Once I'd got Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head out of my head it quickly got replaced with Chopin's Raindrop prelude, which is a beautiful piece of music evoking the kind of lovely, peaceful, heavy but gentle rain you sometimes get (except where I live where more often than not it is accompanied by a high wind and coming at you horizontally).  It really makes me think of rain falling on greenery, on a still dark day, and so eventually I settled on the idea of rain falling on a pond and its surrounding plant life.  Since the raindrops also had to be falling on someone's head I added a frog, who is making the most of the wet.

Although I know someone who has a complete horror of frogs I love them.  I have the smallest pond liner you can get, about 1.5x2 ft, in a corner of my allotment and in a good summer I can come down and find seven frogs peeping above the surface which makes me very happy.

The pond in my little (15 x 16.5 inch) quilt is surrounded with marsh marigold, rushes, and water forget-me-nots.  Fish swim below the surface.

I used shot cotton, mostly Oakshott which is my favourite fabric to make pictures with, and began by appliqueing the fish and adding a little embroidered detail for their spines.  With some darker fabric
I also made a shadow in the water at the edge of the pond where vegetation would hang over.  I then made the surface of the water shiny and 'submerged' the fish by layering a piece of blue-green gauze on top of them.

The idea to use the gauze came from two things - my mother-in-law had made a lovely shimmery cushion cover by sewing a piece of gauze over an appliqued pattern and I was reminded of this when I used tissue paper to protect the blackbird quilt of my last post while pressing it and really liked the softened effect as the image showed through.

When I'd added all the foliage and flowers round the edge of the pond I finished up by adding some quilted rings for the ripples in the water made by the falling raindrops.

I added some squiggles and lines in the background to suggest more greenery, and it's quite a textured quilt because of the quilting and free-motion embroidery which I used to add details to the leaves and flowers, which also have french knots: but the water is still and calm except for the ripples.

I am very intrigued to know how the other members have tackled this theme - you can find all the quilts on our blog together with links to each member's own website.

15 x 16.5 inches
Shot cotton and gauze
Raw edge applique
Free-motion embroidery and quilting