The gathering theme was a really challenging one for me. I began to wonder how far you can stray with a theme and still have it represent the theme. I had a ton of ideas from African women walking with pots on their heads, to starlings gathering in a tree, to gathering thoughts, to gathering storm clouds, to telescopes gathering light to view the universe.  I finally settled on windmills gathering the wind to create electrical energy. I loved seeing the windmills spinning in the North Sea while flying into Europe and when I was driving  in California. So that was my inspiration.

I wanted to silhouette the windmills against a beautiful sunset sky. The sky fabric was created from small left over pieces of hand dyed fabric from another project. So I just overlapped them and stitched them down to create the sky. I figured I may as well be “green” in this project and use what I had in my stash!  The windmills and the foreground are created from one of my own hand dyed fabrics and fused to the background. In order to create the feeling that the windmills were spinning I oriented the blades in different directions for each one.  And I created the wind with diagonal flowing quilted lines across the sky. My inspiration photo had birds gathering in the wind as well and those were stitched by hand with pearl cotton.  Of course I never plan well and did not realize that I did not have enough of either the sky fabric or the black fabric to bind the quilt. So I went through my stash and found a great orange batik. I think the orange binding worked better than a black one would have anyways because it brightened it up.

So here are my windmills “Gathering the Wind.”