Big Foot -- the story

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago... well, actually it was April 2007, I went on my first quilting retreat with my Beyond the Borders art quilt friends. We stayed at a B&B, "The Belle at Round Top." (This was prior to owning a digital camera so here is their website for the curious. It is a beautiful B&B and we were honored to be the first quilting retreat there.)
http://www.belleofroundtop.com/content.aspx

Having finished my first project early in the evening, far too early to stop sewing for the day, I started on the next piece in my cottage series. I planned to stray from my original "Happily Ever After" by zooming in on a-still-undecided-object in the picture. I began by building a hillside using rotary-cut fabric slivers, remnants from an earlier project in shades of green and brown. The last thing I added that night was an appliqued tree trunk. Imagine the quilt below with simply the sky, the hill and the light brown tree.


That morning before settling down to work again, everyone wandered by the communal design wall to comment on each other's progress. "What a great foot!" someone said. Imagine my surprise when I discovered they were looking at my tree! Wow, my tree did have the same profile as a bare foot! I quickly thought of the best name for my work-in-progress -- "Big Foot, the Tree"! I did not mind at all that my tree looked like a foot, instead I was quite happy as now I had both a great title for this quilt and an idea for the next piece of the series. Naturally the second quilt became "Big Foot, the Foot".


Both quilts start the same, with a clear blue sky, a rolling green hillside, and a mottled brown fabric for the big foot. But at that point they differ -- one features a distant view of a dark cottage with smoke swirling up from its chimney and an overhanging branch in the foreground, while the other features a flower garden partially trampled by an intruding foot.

I envisioned more quilts in this series -- an elegant Big Foot in a stiletto high heel with a sleek polished toenail peeking out, a sporty Big Foot in a tattered tennis shoe topped with a stinky rumpled sweatsock, etc., etc., etc. These quilts live in my dreams at this point (although I plan to make them one day ...).

Let's look back, for a moment, at how I tried to differentiate between the two Big Feet. To make the tree trunk look more tree-ish, I added mottled brown veins running up and down the trunk and clumps of grass growing closely around its base ...



To make the other look more foot-ish, I stitched the hairiest leg I could imagine adding a yellowed, scurvy-looking toenail on the toe.


This foot has flattened the flower garden, and yet one blossom remains pristine and untouched by the invading stomper.

One can only wonder if the big foot has crushed these flowers accidentally or not. What do you think?