yes, I did make a "bushfire quilt"

Yes, I did make a "bushfire quilt" ...



It is only small, and not as good as I would have liked to have the ability/time to make ... the one in my imagination looked a lot better ... lol
... what I was trying to do was create something that re-created all the thoughts/impressions/etc from the fires, and the weeks afterwards ... the smokey sky, fringes of burnt trees that are still on top of some of the hills 3 years later, the red sun in a smokey sky, the brown hills, the burnt black fire break, etc ... (and, of course, that "rain" of burnt leaves that we had a reminder of the other week ... the other week we only got little burnt bits of ?grass - 3 years ago during the bushfires we had whole big leaves and in some areas of town there were even whole branches, and in some places they were arriving still on fire ...)

What is really weird, is that I also finished a big quilt that year (I did them both in time to exhibit in the Canberra Quilters exhibition ;-) yes - me finishing a quilt IS weird, but that is not what I meant - the weird part is how this quilt is an example of how sometimes things seem to have an odd way of working out, in ways that we never could have imagined, but kind of like they were meant to be like that all along ...
- it was one I had started as a mystery quilt a couple of years earlier and then added to (so it was doubled in size!) and then I had put it aside and not quilted it yet ... because I had not been sure what to do for the quilting ... but when I dragged it out a (month or 3 after the bushfires) and noticed what colours it was - inspiration came!
... by pure chance, the quilt happened to be green and brown (like the colours of the coutryside/etc in the drought we had been having) and a reddish orange, like fire ... so I quilted yellow in the middle, for flames, black around that, for the stuff that got burnt, and blue around that - for the water that put the fires out and the rain that we needed to end the drought ...

It is a bit hard to see the quilting in this picture, but here it is anyway -



I have done what I usually do with pictures in here, and made them links to the (usually bigger) original - so that if you click on the picture it will take you to a bigger version where you might have half a chance at sort of seeing the quilting/etc - lol)

btw ... did I say it was a big quilt? - it was actually huge - it was 2metres square! LOL

I usually give my quilts a title too ... I called this one "Earth Wind and Fire - The Winds of Change"