Whisper Block #1

Remember the children's game - we called in "telephone" - where one person whispers a sentence into someone's ear and then they in turn whisper it to the next person and so on down the line.  The last person says the sentence as they understood it and often a LOT has been lost in translation!  I'm not sure that this game really had a winner or loser; it was just a little fun activity to pass the time of day.

Well, I joined an activity at my local quilt guild that is based on this children's game.  We are organized in groups of five.  The first month everyone comes to the meeting with a picture they like.  The picture is given to another member in the group.  So each of the five go home with a picture and create a 12 inch quilt block based on the picture.  You don't have to make the exact image.  You can use the colors or the theme or just one part of the whole picture.  The next month you give the picture back to the owner and the block to another person in your group (all the exchanges have been planned by the coordinator).  The second month each person goes home with their own picture and a block.  They are then to create a block based on this first block.  This goes on for five weeks and at the end you have four blocks from your original picture.  The fun is to see how the elements were "whispered" from one person to another through their creations.

It sounded like fun when I signed up.  And then I received the picture:

And I sort of panicked!  There were so many elements in the picture and there was that darn perspective with the downhill and background.  Several months ago we had a speaker at guild who talked about "looking through the window"...how to create perspective in a piece. Of course, I didn't attend that workshop and now I was wishing that I had.  So, I pushed this to the back burner for quite awhile.  I took the picture to several people and asked them what they saw.  The husband commented on the thatch.  A friend commented on the hill.  I saw very muted colors, a narrow palate and a grey sky.  In the end I came up with this:

I sort of cut off a bit of the grey sky in this picture.  The "thatch" is wool that I bought back when I made llama's for "this".

 

So, it's not a work of art, but let me tell you it was difficult to figure out how to fit that all into 12 inches.  And I'm not really sure what I could have done differently or better.  I hope my next picture is a bit easier.  And as usual, I learned a lot along the way.