Interpret This!- My Last Piece

Hard to believe I've made a piece every month for a year with this group of talented women.  Here's the photo--

And here's my interpretation of the photo.  No realism this month, I wanted to abstract it.

I pieced the strips, then sliced them, offset the colors, and put them together with the skinny strips.  After machine quilting, I spent lots of hours doing hand embroidery, enjoying how the colors and texture of the hand stitching played against the quilting.  The yellow 'flowers' are torn pieces of hand dyed cheesecloth.

I thought the quilt needed more presence, so I backed it with a separate quilted mat- something I learned from a Jean Wells book.  The pieced part is bound with couched yarns, then attached to the quilted mat.  I really do think that dark mat lends the piece more presence!

Although this isn't a perfect rendition of the picture I had in my mind, I'm pretty happy with it.  There are some parts of this that I will be playing with in the next year.  Although Interpret This! is coming to an end, I'll be working with some of the members of that group this year.  We'll each  be working on our own goals, and I'll be blogging about mine.  Most importantly, it will be a piece a quarter, not a month- so I'm hoping to do more sketching, thinking, and developing of my ideas.  That's one of my goals, anyway.