"It's the Berries"

Does that phrase ring a bell with any of you? It's slang from the twenties, (no, I'm not that old)

that is right up there with "It's the bee's knees" It means that it's a good thing and that's what I named this quilt made for my small quilt group's challenge, "Common Object, Uncommon View".

I think that this challenge has given me the most grief of all the many challenges we have done. I have been thinking about it for along time and have taken lots of pictures, but nothing clicked. So I decided to go with a simple color change. Remember to click on each picture for a bigger view.

I took this picture last summer. I'm not sure what kind of berry it is, but I thought it was a pleasing design. I took it into Photoshop Elements and changed it into four different colorways and used the Posterize filter on each of them.


Then I printed each one on fabric and put them together with the black fabric shown above. I stitched around each berry several times with black Jeans thread, a very heavy thread, to give it definition, then sewed a seed bead on each blossom end.

On the black blocks, I used the corresponding colored jeans thread and the same color seed bead. Now that I see the close-up, I see that I have to erase some of the white chalk pencil that is still showing.

The quilt measures about 19" x 28" and a narrow black binding will finish it off. It's not due until September, but I wanted to get it out of the way. I might do a second one and have an idea or two. We'll see.