Weekend Retreat

I spent the whole day yesterday either thinking about, or working on, my July BJP. I was delighted to have this uninterrupted time just to be creative.

I started by collecting and washing the shells I want to attach to this month's piece. I collected shells at the Jersey shore on July 1st and when we were camping at Lake Huron July 7th. Many of the shells were too big to be included and these are the ones that I settled on. I decided to attach the shells as the last step since they are heavy and fragile.

Then I pieced the base. I added a piece of hand painted blue fabric to the right of the photo to bring the size up to 8 1/2". I couldn't find a nice brown for the sand so I painted four pieces of brown. Setacolor paints don't have a brown (at least there wasn't one at Michael's), so I mixed Siennna with Black. It turned out to be a little more orange than I wanted, but I wanted to get started so I just picked the best one of the four.

I decided on the horizontal photo because I liked it better - no sky to deal with and no mess of footprints in the sand.

Then I selected some threads and machine quilted the base. This is how it looked after the quilting. I had planned in my sketches to bead my sunglasses with reflections of sun umbrellas, based on a photo that my niece took at the shore. But when I was working on it, that idea took a back seat to some new ideas for the sand. I will see how that unfolds as I am a little uncertain with that direction at the moment. The shells are going on the bottom left corner.