Words of Comfort

The reason I submitted the word Comfort was because I was struggling with how to comfort my sister whose close friend had recently committed suicide. I was shocked when the word was drawn first, especially since one of the siblings of my daughters friend had then committed suicide as well. As I contemplated the word I thought of all the words I've tried to offer, but I've felt that the words mean so little. I then played with the images that came to mind of physically comforting someone.

My girls laughed at some of these and said they looked like the people were kissing. Something that is still icky in their lives (thankfully)!
Then I played with some simple images in Photoshop and finally found one I liked. I played around with the colors a bit too, trying to decide what color comfort is.

I decided that I wanted to write words of comfort on the quilt. I decided I would write the words on the arms. I'm not sure why I chose the colors in my first attempt but I did like them when I started out.

However after I put the quilt together I hated it! I quilted it to see if the quilting would make a difference - Nope. It seemed too busy and not the least bit comforting. I hung it on my design wall and tried to figure out the problem. Then one day as I was watching Quilting Arts TV one of the artists reminded me about using the color wheel to portray a feeling in a quilt. This is when I decided that the quilt needed to be monochromatic, and that it needed to be warm. I also decided that the embrace was more important than the words, and so the words were written with a brown marker on the background where they could still be there, but they weren't jumping out.

The embrace is what I hope stands out and brings the feeling of comfort.