The Twelve by Twelve challenge this time around has the theme of water. Living in Portland, Oregon, my mind immediately went to rain. The best part of rain in Portland are the frequent sun breaks (an actual weather term) and subsequent rainbows. Because of my trip in May, I had to come up with an expedited plan to have my quilt done and ready to post on June 1. I printed a photo of a rainbow in a landscape on cotton. I then printed a very faded version of the same photo on organza. I did not think to get photos of these before I got into the project too far.

I cut the organza into strips of varying widths. These were fused to the background photo. I overlapped the strips to give a more watery, misty look to represent the rain. I left parts of the background without the organza overlay to represent the sun breaks. Here it is with black borders, sandwiched and ready to quilt.

This is my first version with a detail. I quilted vertical lines to represent rain. In the sun break areas, I used a neutral thread. I added some rainbow fabric to the binding to keep it from being too boring.

I thought I was done. But, no, the sun break areas just didn’t read properly for me. While I was walking the dog, I realized what I needed to do. I pulled the neutral thread from those areas and did random lines of yellow/orange thread. What I mean by random is that I did not quilt one line of thread from top to bottom as I did for the rain sections.

I hope you can see the difference. It really show in real time. I found this piece of painted cotton that I used for the back.

Go to the Twelve X Twelve Blog to see what the other eleven have done.