FFFC #50 In Progress

Here's where I am on this month's challenge:

 The haiku I decided to go with is this:

sky painfully blue  

icicle piercing my heart

his disdain for me

I think it's a good haiku, and I sort of like the quilt, but I don't think that the quilt illustrates the poem.   The poem is about emotional coldness as well as seasonal cold.  I think that the icicle might not have been the best metaphor to represent that, because mental images of happy "winter wonderlands" are evoked by the icicle image.   

I started out with several goals this month.  (1) to finish within or reasonably close to the deadline, not a month later.  (2) in order to achieve (1),  keep it much simpler, and (3) work more abstractly (4) keep all my pieces at a consistent 12 x 12 size. 

I think I'll be successful on 1 & 2, but not 3 & 4.  This piece is more abstract than Cloister, but it's still pretty representational.  I started just trying to do something with silvery slashes cutting through the bright blue, but it was just sort of "shapes" that didn't really evoke anything.

So I decided on the sparkly fabric and the icicle shapes.  It seemed to need more background, and I was visualizing a windswept white plain somewhere in the far north, where even the sun, when it peeks over the horizon, is cold and blue.

The fabric representing the snow is white with blue spots, and it has snowflakes printed in white-on-white.  They were also a little too "happy" but I decided to use it because they're only very faintly visible.    I kept the icicle pieces long and planned to cut them off after deciding on an arrangement.    But it looked silly cropped down to a square - the whole icicle-ness of an icicle is how long and thin it is.  So I'm going to keep it at about 12 x 18.  

I now have to decide how to quilt it - I have not got any specific ideas yet, so I'm browsing through other FFFC entries for inspiration.