More inspiration from Martha of Weekend Doings

Today's guest post is from Martha who blogs at Weekend Doings.

Hi everyone, I hope you are finding lots of inspiration for this month's challenge. 

I think the theme is super fun. I love nature and it is definitely a great influence on my creations. I love taking photographs of my surroundings and sometimes the smallest details captured by the lens of my camera serve as inspiration for my projects. 

The greatest influence that I get from nature is color palettes. I don't know about you, but many times I find it difficult to choose fabrics. So when in doubt or when searching for a spark in creativity I always turn to nature. 

I want to share with you a couple of my projects and the pieces of nature that inspired them.

The colors of my Feathers and Patchwork quilt were inspired by the colors of fall. I created this quilt for Christmas of 2013. So when I decided to start this quilt fall colors were all around. Bare branches and brown leaves were abundant and the mossy surfaces were starting to pop up everywhere. So I couldn't help myself but grab inspiration from those lovely autumn colors and translate them into the color palette for this quilt (one of my favorites). 

Another project that I borrowed inspiration from nature was this Half Square Triangle Quilt. I took the photo of a beautiful rose in my garden that caught my attention. The bright pink and the different shades of green seemed the perfect color combo for a summer quilt.  

There are so many ways to use nature as inspiration or to incorporate it into our projects. Nature offers us infinite sources of inspiration and I'm really looking forward to seeing your projects inspired by it. 

Isn't she talented, and those pictures are so beautiful! Thanks ever so much Martha for sharing with us how you are inspired by nature... 

Hope you are all getting on well with your own interpretation of NATURE! 

More inspiration from Martha

Here is Martha from Weekend Doings to show you her fantastic improv quilt...

Thank you so much Nat and Lucy for inviting me to be part of this month's challenge. I think super heroes are a fascination to kids and adults alike. They spark our imagination and bring out the child with in us. I'm really happy to be sharing with you my Superheroes Quilt that I recently made for my four year old nephew.  He was totally smitten by the characters on the quilt (and so was I).The creative process for this quilt was very spontaneous and basically inspired by the fabric itself. I happened to stumble upon the superheroes fabric while shopping for fabric for another project. And instantly fell in love with it. By the time I left the store I had the design of the quilt already planned out in my head.

 

The fabric is Superhero By Illustration for Robert Kaufman. It is a panel of about 3/4 of a yard with perfect seam allowances between each frame. Which makes cutting super easy. I wanted to have the superheroes flying over the city landscape, so I did improv piecing using light gray Kona cotton for the background to achieve that effect.

I used the newspaper print as the focal point for the quilt back. And quilted it with straight lines all over. I think the simple quilting adds to the whimsical yet modern feel of the quilt.

This has been one of my favorite quilts so far. It was a great leaning experience as I've never done improv piecing on a quilt before (and I'm sure it won't be the last).

Thanks again for having me. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here at Le Challenge and I'm really looking forward to seeing all your Heroes projects.

Martha.

Thank you for sharing your brilliant quilt Martha! 

I hope you're all working hard on your projects, only 14 more days until the link party!