Summer Triptych #4 - Hannah

Hi Everyone!

We are going to take this week to talk about two projects! My two projects, the Day Lapse, and the Floral Triptych, which was available for purchase and download. 

I started by making my Day Lapse piece. I had a very clear vision in my head for how I wanted it to look, the sun moving from sunrise, to midday, through to dusk. I wanted to showcase the beautiful bright pinks, oranges, and purples that appear in the sky as the sun sets as well as the soft pale hues that paint it when the sun is rising. Vermont gets a perfect blue sky in the summer, so clear and bright. One can't help but feel cheered by the summer sky. 

I chose the Day Lapse because my kids and I spend a lot of time outdoors in the summer, especially lost in the woods around Addison County. We like to go on specific trails through the mountains and discover the wild floral and fauna that abound within the woods. I have great memories of woodland hikes from my own childhood and knew I wanted to pass down those memories to my children. 

I started out with the fairly simple pattern knowing I was going to have to fill in a lot with color. I marked up my paper pattern with notes for the colors I wanted in each panel and how I wanted the colors to be mimicked to maintain cohesiveness throughout. 

Color planning took a lot of work. Originally I had envisioned lighter colors, before shifting the focus to the brighter ones that I ended up using. The original greens I had picked out were too grey as well and I had to rethink which ones I used. I chose greens with more yellow undertones, those with blue undertones didn't seem to really work for this one. I used a lot of our strip bundles for the  Day Lapse. Doing so allowed me more control of how much of each color I used in a given spot, plus they were easy to separate. 

The first panel I punched was dusk. I began with the sky, which I did for each panel. I did this because I knew I wanted to use the #14 fine punch needle for the sky, setting it back a bit into the background. I also chose to use the #14 fine for the mountain as well, since both of these elements were farther away for the viewer. I wanted to add movement in my sky and used both Van Gogh and Amy for inspiration. She has a lovely rug, "Night Flight" which she used a beautiful swirly affect for the sky. I kept this swirl motion for my mountains as well. If you ever stop to really look at the Green Mountains you will notice that the trees aren’t in a perfect order. Their order is all over the place and making swirls in the mountains gave it that effect. 

I punched the grass with the #13 fine punch needle, just to give some added texture and to put the grass on the forefront of the image. Originally there was a lake with cattails but the picture, I felt, would look too busy with that added on. The grass color I chose was a value pack by Judith Hotchkiss. I chose 3 of the different shades to use as the grass and punched in a straight vertical up and down. Some had a slight bend in them. 

         

I also knew I wanted lightning bugs in the dusk panel and flowers  in the midday panel. For the lighting bugs and stars, I made French knots with gold and silver embroidery floss. I got great advice from Amy on how to create the flowers. She suggested that I punch three holes in between the grass. This allowed me to use some of the colors from the side panels in the middle panel, creating cohesiveness across the three images. 

I really wanted the Day Lapse to have the look of being painted, I found at times it to be really frustrating, pulling out and re-punching large sections until Heidi finally told me to stop and just finish it. She said that it would look completely different once everything was filled in, then I could go in and fix things as needed. That was the push I needed to get the whole thing completed. While I did fix some sections, I found, like magic, it all came together cohesively.

       

My floral triptych was much more straight forward. I solely used a #10 regular punch needle for this one. For color planning I worked with Christy and mainly used our "One of a Kind" skeins of Violet Jane. The exception was Misty Mountain Pass which I used for the background.

For the floral I wanted it to look like pressed flowers in a frame. The design pulled from my Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, the colors however are much more muted and soft. More feminine than many Pennsylvania Dutch images which tend to have saturated colors. I wanted the border to look like a wood frame. 

Punching the floral was fun and easy. I really enjoyed this one after punching the Day Lapse piece which took me quite a bit longer and involved a lot of pulling out and re-punching. This one was completed without any real need to pull sections out to be re-punched.

I love how sweet the floral ended up looking. The mint green softened the edges of the avocado like brownish green. 

I hope you enjoyed seeing these two pieces. How are your Floral, and other Summer Triptychs coming along? Next week I will talk about Heidi’s Summer Triptych, the Tropical pattern. 

please let me know if you have any questions on this piece, Heidi’s or any of the others, as well as techniques or color questions. We will be more than happy to answer them here!

-Hannah