SIA Post: “Solar System Quilt”

Salazar, over on 14 Shades of Grey(https://14shadesofgrey.wordpress.com/2021/11/08/sia-inspiration-ellen-harding-baker/) is the curator for this latest SIA project, and she chose a really great one; a Solar System Quilt by Ellen Harding Baker. You can see an image of it by clicking on the link to Salazar’s blog above.

I went on a totally different route for this challenge, as you may have noticed.

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Give up? Well, I didn’t go for the usual “color matching” this time, with one of the reasons being that it doesn’t represent me, as I’m usually in all black. And while I’m clearly not in my most comfortable attire in these photos, I thought that my striped sweater was perfect for this one. Why? Because the stripes represent the cloud bands of my favorite planet in the Solar System; Jupiter!

I’m a huge astronomy nerd and have been since I was little. I loved reading and learning about the Solar System and Jupiter always fascinated me the most, with its enormous size and the cloud bands that gave it its “striped look”. All of the gas/ice giants were fascinating to me, but Jupiter just stood out from the rest.

Anyway, to keep this post short (I’m up really late writing this out), let me briefly explain why I chose to go this route for this SIA. As I stated earlier, I wanted to break away from the usual color matching that I usually go with. My outfits are really simple and there’s really not much to them, so I usually go that route. But this SIA allowed for so much freedom and imagination and I decided to take full advantage of that. I mean, I could have gone a number of different ways to interprete this piece, like wearing a shirt that’s similar to the planets Uranus and Neptune, or Venus, Mars or Saturn, all of which I have. And all of these would have still fit in well with my whole “thinking outside the box” thing, as the quilt itself is pretty much black and white, with tiny traces of color on it. If I wanted to do my usual color matching, I most likely would have donned my all black attire, a great look for me, but one that I always use. So I decided to take it a step further and style a look for the piece in a more subjective way, rather than an objective way. Make sense? As Jupiter is part of the Solar System, and the Solar System is represented on the quilt, it makes total sense to do it this way.

I’m quite proud of this one for that very reason and I had fun coming up with the idea on how to work it. And that’s what SIA is really all about; not about “getting something right”, as I’m so used to doing with most everything that I do, but having fun and being creative. It took my friends in SIA to help me realize and learn that.

So anyway, that’s my take on this challenge. Be sure to check out Salazar’s blog on Wednesday to see how creative and fun everyone else’s interpretations were. I’m sure that everyone was just as creative and more as I was!