Inspiration....

I have a "first finish" this week!  I finished putting the borders on my At Piece with Time!

I took it to the long-arm quilter today.

I had the opportunity to go with "the boss" this week to Asheville.  I love Asheville for a myriad of reasons -- The Biltmore House, the mountains, the art community, the Folk Art Center...but most of all I love the Asheville Cotton Company.  That's a wonderful quilt shop.  If you ever have the opportunity to go there, take it.  They were having a sale, so I came away with six yards of material I absolutely had to have.

For those of you who don't know "the boss" (the hubby -- who owns the business that I have my "real job" with), let me take this opportunity to tell you that he is as much "into" photography as I am "into" quilts.  And he's a wonderful amateur photographer who hopes to juxtapose his hobby into a full-time profession when he retires.  As a result of his photography, we stop at a lot of places to take pictures.  And this is good for me, because it slows me down to see life through a lens instead of through the eye of a needle.

Because let's face it, as quilters, sometimes we burn out.  We can look through our stash and look through our patterns and sometimes there is just no inspiration.  We get very comfortable in our own comfort zones of favorite blocks and color schemes and techniques.  Bill is a landscape photographer, so we spend lots of time outdoors.  This really helps me, because in my humble opinion, the good Lord is a wonderful Master at color.  He puts colors and hues and values together that I have never thought of.  Spending time looking through a lens, really concentrating on the things in nature, right in front of my nose (or lens, in this case), really slows me down to see colors and flowers, and vines in a different way.  As a result this tends to rev my creative engines in the quilt room.

 Even vegetables and fruit can teach us a lot about color and value.  These pictures were made near the original Mast Farm General Store in Valle Cruis, North Carolina.  The Mast family also have a little B&B that has a flower and vegetable area where we stopped to take these pictures.

 Have you ever seen such a gorgeous Sunflower?

I hope these pictures inspire you to use different colors in your quilt.  The way I figure it, if these plants can use all of these colors, there's no reason in the world you can't have them in your quilt!

Love and Stitches,

Sherri