Like most of our work, Winter Night was inspired by the act of experimentally combining assorted remnants and scraps and ‘bargain bin’ raw materials recently acquired. In this case, I was lucky enough to find (in addition to other items) black microsuede, a small piece of wonderful deep red felt, a scrap of white spandex covered in silvery ground glitter and a section of delicate silvery mesh with silver glitter ‘falling snowflake’ pattern. The minute I unrolled the snowflake remnant, I knew I wanted to use it somehow as a ‘veil’, as I had seen this strategy of multi-layered quilting in one of the ‘how to’ books I study regularly for inspiration. When I spread it out across the black microsuede, Winter Night was born, and I quickly realized that the red felt would be the perfect color for the farmhouse, barn and silo. The white/glitter spandex, with extra thick batting underneath, became the snowcapped roofs and the contoured, snow covered hills of the land, supplemented with white and black embroidery thread used as quilting stitches. The windows and doors of the house and barn are also red felt, saturated with purple acrylic paint and left to dry, so that their deeper shading could be seen through the snowflake veil. The hanger consists of two poplar ‘stars’ and dowel rods, finished with acrylic paint (black and silver). The quilt itself measures 16” x 28”, the veil measures 18” x 30”, and the poplar hanger adds 4” more to the length, for a total of 34”.