In my other life as an astronomy professor TIME means a lot of different things to me. I think about how long light takes to travel from objects in the universe and how we are looking into the past as we look at those celestial objects. I also think about the curvature of space-time which can explain objects like black holes. To bring it more down to Earth I also think about the passage of time on our own planet and the seasons.  We mark the passage of the seasons to show the progression of time during the year, but we also use them metaphorically to represent the passage of time in our own lives. For example, “He was in the winter of his life.”

I am generally a summertime person since I like the warm weather, but I am fascinated by the scenery of wintertime. I love the bare trees and the gloomy skies. I do not like snow, but I love the way it looks. I have made several winter landscape quilts over the years so I decided that this was where I wanted to go, but wanted to do something different than what I had done before.

A few years ago I took a class using wax resist on fabric with Jeanne Palmer Moore, We used various kitchen tools to put wax onto fabric. Once the wax dried the fabric was painted using setacolor paints.  After the paint dried we ironed the fabric to get the wax out and then washed in detergent. One of the fabrics I created was pretty ugly. Not sure what I will use the fabric for  or what I was thinking when I created it.

So I took a photo of the fabric and edited it in Photoshop and changed the color to blue, which is my favorite color. Then I superimposed a photo of a wintertime tree that my daughter took on top of the fabric image making the tree photo semitransparent.  This is her wonderful photo.

Once I had the image I wanted I had Spoonflower print the fabric for me. I am very pleased with the fabrics I had them print for me. I am not really able to print large digital images on my home printer.  So here is the finished quilt that I call “Wintertime Blues.”