A Purple Patch

Whenever I wonder around our garden I see something different, or rather every day my eyes notice different things. Maybe because today I worked on my next ATC in my 100ATC project in shades of pink and purple that it suddenly came to me that we have a lot of different purple, violet, mauve and pink plants in our garden.

When I give talks about my quilts, their colour and inspiration, people automatically assume that my inspiration comes from my garden but in my case it happened the other way around. My quilts formed the inspiration for the garden. I was never much into gardening, perhaps because I'm moved around so much. Until I got married I never had more possessions than could be fitted into 2 suitcases. Of course that changed and we did have gardens which John tended to look after. We were away for long periods of time while he was in the Merchant Navy and after he got a shore job it was one which moved us around regularly. It never seemed worthwhile to put our hearts and souls into a garden whichwe would soon have to leave again. But when we moved here it was to a job which was local and to a place where we hope to stay forever.

By that time I had already started to make prize winning quilts, which typically use a lot of colour. So it seemed natural to follow that example in our new garden which by the way was located in a field exposed to a stiff westerly wind most of the time and which was 900ft above sea level. Not exactly a spot conspicuously suited to gardening but we've planted more than 300 trees which now give us a lot of shelter from that wind and we have learned which plants do well in this inhospitable climate. And after 11 years the garden is maturing and giving us lots of pleasure. In fact, I walk around it (it's about 1 acre) every day and every day I find new things to admire and very often those things eventually find their way back to my quilts and mixed media work, so in a way it's a circular influence.

This latest ATC , which is no. 68 in my 100 ATC project, uses a fabric/paper collage as background into which an image from a vintage book found its way. This was overlaid with a transparency from Lost Art Creations, featuring pinkish suns with yellow centres and finally I glued on the text which seemed to suit the card. I added colour to this with a pink metallic rub-on.