Oh, To Be in California When the Irises are in Bloom...

The irises are blooming now in Northern California.
It's so fun to walk around the neighborhood and see all the colorful irises in bloom. I never can decide which colors I like best - they're all so luscious. And they all seem so fragile, you have to enjoy them while they appear, for they are gone from the garden so soon...

Here's an iris that's blooming in my neighbor's yard. She has drifts of purples, yellows and even some coppery bronze ones that are very different.

And look what I did after playing around with the iris photo in Photoshop... I used one of the artsy effects to create this painterly version of the iris. I just love the effect! It reminds me of a pastel drawing, or maybe a bold watercolor painting...

I can visualize this translated into a quilt, using batik fabric. But I'll have to think about how you could translate this image into a stitchery piece. The blurred edges are so soft and very Monet-like....I'm not sure how you could stitch that effect, but it's worth considering using blobs of color, outlined with light, to create that halo effect...hmmmm.

And as long as I'm mentioning iris, here's one of the first flower collages I stitched: the Bearded Iris Collage. I used a soft variegated thread (Watercolours' Harvest) that had soft apricots and lavenders. Although I stitched it to hightlight the apricot iris, you could certainly use lavender colors to create a lavender iris in the center instead.!
I wish I could stitch it up BOTH ways, to see both versions....(and then of course you could also try a pale cream iris too)...sigh...there's just too many yummy possibilities sometimes, and it's hard to pick just one to stitch...

And because there are so many different types of irises, I'm planning to stitch another iris collage sometime - I'm thinking I'll do a Japanese Iris or my favorite, the Pacific Iris (both flatter flowers that you view from above)....