Spices - A Trio

This theme said circles to me, and I struggled with it.  I had an idea of the tops of spice bottles with gorgeous warm yellow and orange, and deep earthy, rich colours, but for some reason I couldn't get it to come together.  So I abandoned ship on the first big idea, and thought about a smaller lifeboat sized idea.

 

I have a tendency to go big on these challenges and then struggle with getting them finished so my lifeboat idea was going to be small, only 6 inches.  So, still playing with that spice bottle concept, I came up with this illustration of three bottles side by side.    I had a lot of fun playing with shadows and highlights and selecting colours from my scraps that I thought would work.

This came together very quickly, though the little highlights were a bit fiddly, and I used fabric glue in addition to bondaweb to keep them stuck.

 I had the idea of matchstick quilting but after completing the first pass of straight line quilting I added a line between the quilt lines and I didn't like it.  So I ripped that one line out and went across instead for a grid. I managed to catch each of the pieces quilting in both directions.

Single fold binding to finish which as this was small I thought would be a good piece to practice machine binding and I hated it (I always get a neater finish handsewing the binding down).

But you know when you have a challenge in mind it informs other things or other projects inform the challenge idea in your head?  I took a curves class with the Quilters Guild who had Carolina Oneto doing a workshop online and it was a lot of fun.  

 

So I went back to playing with circles and came up with this idea the other day.  I just had to have another go at it.  

A project for another day maybe.  In the end what exists in the world is my trio of spice bottles.  Looking forward to seeing everyone's interpretation of the theme!