art quilt design – tierneycreates

This post is a continuation of two series of posts:

Creative Inspiration (sources of creative inspiration)
Pilot Butte Adventures

Monday, I went on my first 2017 Pilot Butte hike! Nearly a year ago, last Spring, I started back hiking our local “mini mountain”, Pilot Butte.

Every Pilot Butte hike I take photos, it is like I cannot control myself, even if I am taking the same photos over and over again!

Monday’s hike I experimented with taking both color and B&W photos of the same scenes. I shared one of my B&W photos with some friends, and my friend Lisa mentioned the photo below would be a great inspiration for a quilt:

2017-04-03_12-08-01_287 — The steps to the viewpoint at the summit of Pilot Butte.

A light bulb appeared above my head: my Pilot Butte photos could serve as inspiration for a future art quilt.

So I thought I would share some of the photos from Monday’s hike that I would consider “creative inspiration”:

You likely noticed, except for the photos of the steps, the photos above feature trees.

Hiking up Pilot Butte affords 360 degrees views of Central Oregon; and I took many photos that looked like this featuring the wonderful Cascade Mountain Range:

However I am not attracted to mountain landscape scenes for art quilting inspiration as I am to structures such as trees. I think trees are among the most magical organic structures on earth! (Check out previous posts featuring trees such as Creative Inspiration: Winter Trees and Creative Inspiration: Fall Foliage).

As much as I love the trees, I will likely give the steps photo priority as creative inspiration for a future art quilt, I love the composition:

To see more photos of the Pilot Butte hike in B&W check out my post from 09/04/16 – Friday at the ‘Butte’ in B&W.

Postscript

Listen While I Walk

I always listen to an audiobook or podcast while I hike Pilot Butte.

On Monday I finished the last two episodes of a six-episode podcast – Missing Richard Simmons. This podcast explores the story behind the fitness guru and eccentric celebrity Richard Simmons’ disappearance in 2014. It is very interesting, I was completely drawn into the story by the middle of the first podcast.

Richard Simmons, whether you loved or hated him, helped and inspired a lot of people. This podcast gives you insight into his world from interviews from clients and friends.

“No tricks, gimmicks, special pills, special potions, special equipment. All it takes is desire and will.” — Richard Simmons

I love podcasts, I cannot believe how many free podcasts there are to download off of iTunes – on so many topics!

Watch for the Wildlife

One more photo to close out this post – I love this sign at the base of Pilot Butte:

I have hiked Pilot Butte for nearly 12 years and luckily no cougar sightings for me. I hope my record of 0 cougar sightings stands.

I wonder if any new hiker to Pilot Butte sees this sign, turns around and gets back in the car!

I wanted to return to my series of posts exploring my Sources of Creative Inspiration. In the previous post in the series, I explored Creative Inspiration: Quilting Mentors. This time I want to explore “Temperature” as a source of creative inspiration. Temperature? Like the outside weather temperature or the temperature of the room you are crafting/quilting in? Or like if you are “running a temperature” because you have a fever? No. When I refer to temperature, I mean the temperature that the color combination in a piece evokes in you. Does it make you think of a chilly winter day or a hot summer day? Does a grouping of colors give you the sense of cool and relaxing or warm and vibrant? Example: if you think of a palette of light blues and light creams you might naturally think of “cool”. While deep reds and oranges together in a grouping might make you think “warm” or “hot”. Last year temperature inspired a piece I created called It’s Getting Quite Warm In Here. As you see below the piece has a lot of red, orange and yellow in it, as well as sharp edge/points representing small flames. I was planning for it to be part of a series I planned to call: So How is the Temperature? where each piece would give you a feel of a range on a temperature scale: freezing, cold, cool, warm, hot and burning. Now that I revisit this piece with this post, it might just continue on with the series (so many ideas swirling around in my head).