Meadow Brook Inspiration
As a little girl I remember the family making a trip up into the mountains in late June or early July when the snow melted, to hike and swim in Three Creek Lake. Right before we reached the lake there was a beautiful meadow full of wildflowers with a creek running through it. This setting is the inspiration for my 2026 line of fabric with Island Batiks which I titled “Meadow Brook.” I pulled colors from those memories that made me think of the meadow and the fresh, summer feeling to begin my design process.Meadow Jean Well
In the outdoor setting, I find the different shades of green act like a neutral color when seen with the flower colors. The scene feels fresh and inviting with the blue sky above. If you get stuck when choosing a color palette for a quilt, there is some shade of green that can save the day, so to speak. Green is like “nature’s neutral.”
When looking for ideas for free motion quilting to quilt your quilt, I like to get out my tracing paper out and trace the plants, sticks and other textures with a organic line work. Here you see the “Meadow” prints in two shades of blue and two shades of green.
In this sketch I traced a pile of sticks and cleaned up the line work. In the colorway you see aqua, yellow, off white, and yellow green. This is a color palette in itself! These colors make me think of early spring after a long winter. Color has so much power when it comes to creating a mood in a design.
"Breeze" is all about movement, and here in Sisters we get a lot of breezy days. I asked my daughter, Valori Wells, to help me with the line work. Then I was very flattered when my granddaughter Vi made the comment that the print looked like a "breeze." I think it helps to have the design printed on the sky like fabric. I have always loved the blue and orange combination of colors especially when the orange is the accent color.
When it comes to “Ferns” we see out in the woods the leaves have very fragmented edges. When I put tracing paper over a pressed leaf and it automatically eliminates all of the tiny zig zag lines on the edges and the leaves are simplified. Printed on this deeper blue fabric it has an Asian feeling and could easily work into a blue and white quilt palette.
When you look closely at the ground walking in a meadow there are tiny pink flowers. I have never been able to figure out exactly what they are, but I do know that the pink color is seen along the Metolius river in the fireweed in the early summer. “Cosmos” are one of my favorite flowers to grow in my wildflower like garden. Their shape is a simple one and the pink flowers add so much to the palette.
When hiking in the mountains around Sisters you see lots of little marks on the ground. I took that idea and organized them in my sketch. I arranged them in natural rows. “Tracks” creates a loose stripe design that works well on batik cloth. Notice the orange print has a tine bit of aqua, the opposite of the blue and orange breeze print The orange is dominant in this print.
“The Nest” is one of my favorite designs from the first collection of batiks I did for Island. I asked if I could repeat it in this lesson and got permission to. In this print it reads mostly green which I liked against the blue sky. When you look at the sketch look at how the branches crossing each other create a secondary design. These kinds of connections are seen in nature, and I felt it worked well here.
“Brook” Is a close-up view along the edge of the creek where tiny stones had collected beside a small piece of wood. What intrigued me was the circular like shapes with the lines of creek water rushing by. When you look at the two colors of printed cloth II realized that they are complimentary colors opposite each other on the color wheel. And if you look very, very close there are shades of light blue scattered in each colorway.
“Needles” is another one of the original designs that I created with my first line of fabric with Island. In the photo you can see where I glued pine needles on to heavy cardboard. I then photographed and traced the lines. When the image was reduced in size you can see what happened. In this collection, it is titled “Lines and Dots.”
The last design is Queen Anne’s Lace. It grows wild along the rivers and in the meadows as well as in my garden. I am fascinated with the shape of the bloom as well as the wide variety of colors you see it in.
Below is the entire collection of Meadow Brook.
You can find the collection here.
