Making Progress

Well, my feet and my nose are cold and I am sitting in my fleece so winter must be coming to Upstate NY. Now to get out those turtlenecks, the staple of my winter wardrobe. With our extra long summer, I have still be putting tshirts on in the morning!

And no, that is not snow in these pictures. It is travertine or calcium carbonate which bubbles up through the various hot springs and geysers at Yellowstone. The picture that these two views were based on was taken in the Mammoth Springs area of Yellowstone in the morning when it was still quite overcast which gave the grey quality to the sky. The colors at Yellowstone are astounding and it is certainly my favorite of the national parks we visited in the spring.

We had to get up at 5:15 this Sunday morning to get my oldest on the plane back to her home in Charlotte. She had come to visit the mother of one of her friends who was recently diagnosed with multiple myeloma. She had a good visit as Maryalice was feeling a bit better after multiple dialysis and plasma tranfusions.

I AM making progress with my second Yellowstone piece as you can see. My quandary is that I don't have quite the graphic quality that I did with the first one which made use of quite a bit of black and very dark values. I have tried to use darker values but it may not be enough. I am relatively pleased with how it is looking right now as I am adding all the different shades of orange and orange/brown. The first one looks very simplistic to me now -- when does simple end and graphic begin? Maybe what I had needed to do was just to make the original one much bigger. Hmmmmm, but then it would have had large areas of the same color and that would have been boring as well. All these decisions....

Well here it is a bit more put together. I still have the tree to fully put in and then sew the top and bottom together so it is all one piece but looks like I will get it done by RAFA on Thursday.
As I do with all my projects, I just look at it as a learning experience and then move on to the next. At least, I have gotten away from dulling my senses by just doing mindless piecing when I am putting off doing the hard work of getting an original piece together. I will be doing plenty of that with my upcoming vacation where mindless piecing looks pretty good!! At least it will be nice and warm and sunny.

This is what the old piece looked like. You can't see from the photo but it is quite a bit smaller than the new piece.