Back to the quilts.

I’ve not done as much on the art quilt as I intended today. I started on quilting the wholecloth and the next thing I knew I’d been quilting for 3 hours and I ached. So I took a break and caught up on some email to give my arm a rest. Of course then I had to do a little on the wholecloth. I’ve been filling in some areas I had to skip on the last pass so it’s really bringing it life now and that’s too exciting to leave alone.

I did get some of the art quilt done, and I may go back and do a bit more when I’m done here. I wanted to finish the highlight on the hair as my first step today and it turned out to be a good place to start. Quite easy pieces to cut that make quite a difference to the image. I think these couple of pieces help the hair a lot.

Next step is the low lights and that was a bit trickier. I got all the possible fabrics out again. This time I also thought the background black might work. I was thinking I might then quilt the darkest two colours of the hair in one shade of thread that was darker than the lighter fabric but lighter than the darker one. It would make the change of colour more subtle and would help adjust both fabrics to the perfect colour. This seemed like the best of my options so I tried it first. As soon as I saw the black in place I changed my mind. I still think the plan would have worked but I think it was stronger than I wanted. That test also told me the blues I was looking at weren’t going to give me the look I wanted.

I did have one more darker purple but I wasn’t thrilled with the type of purple it is, on the other hand the same theory of adjusting it with the quilting thread applies. So I gave it a go. It’s not the perfect colour, but I like it much better and I think once it’s quilted it will look fine. As you can see adding the rest of the lowlights does add a lot of shape to the hair.

As ever my phone is having a hard time photographing these colours. When Tet gets back I will let him have a go with his camera again, but I suspect even that will struggle.

More on the art quilt

 I suppose at some point I am going to have to give this quilt a name it seems odd to keep talking about it but not have anything to call it. On the other hand it hasn’t told me what it wants to be called yet so I guess I will just have to cope.

The first piece I added today was largely to make me feel better. I found having the highlight where I knew it should get darker was just way too annoying so I fixed it. The shoulder now reads better for me. I like having the shadow under the hair too.
 Next I started on the hair. That’s a shade darker still. I wish I had remembered sooner how hard it is to photograph some shades of purple. I can tell already this quilt is going to be a pig to photograph. Oh well, too late to worry about that now.
 The hair does stand out better in real life but I can still make it darker if I need to when it comes to the quilting. I love quilting hair, there is so much scope to add texture and movement, and without the risks involved in quilting human skin.

The last piece for today is the start of the highlight on the hair. This is when hair gets to be less fun. It’s a real pain to cut out. It is worth it, that’s what makes this look like hair. As you can see I had a lot of trouble photographing these pieces. I’ve tried most of the settings on my phone and it seems this is about the best it can manage. Hopefully it is good enough for you to get the idea.

Art quilt – another colour starts to go on

So here you can see the start of another colour, and this is when things start to look really odd. As I said I don’t totally overlap layers so this one is cut short in a few places, because it doesn’t need to be there. Also it is currently in places that will ultimately be darker than the first colour not lighter so it will make the image look quite strange. There are quite a few more pieces of this colour to go in but this was as far as I managed to get for today.

I was asked how I go about choosing the colour for my quilts. Mostly I listen to the image and see what it says to me. This one was a bit excitable and seemed to be happy with a lot of ideas. I did consider just leaving it in grey scale as that is what I convert all my images to before I work with them. I also quite liked the idea of the shoes being in colour against the monochrome image. I thought about a sepia colour way but discarded that idea quite quickly, my last two were done in those colours and I wanted something different. The pose feels to clam for me to go for anything too bright so my flame colours were out. Green is just wrong for most humans so that wasn’t an option. That kind of brings me to blue, purple, or pinks. I’m not a fan of pink and getting a long enough run in the same colour is really hard so that leaves blue or purple. The image feels more purple to me so purple it is. I could have come up with simpler choices I’m sure, but hey who wants an easy life. I still haven’t decided what to do with the shoes though, just as well they go on top of the rest of the fabrics isn’t it.

Art quilt – first fabrics

I’ve tried to get the colour about right, but my phone does make these look blue so the final quilt may not be the colour you think it is. This is a mid shade within the design and I chose it to be the first one because it is dark enough to be a colour I want to read as further back but light enough to help the lighter colours read correctly which they wouldn’t directly on the black background. This piece (and indeed all the others) are cut with scissors, and yes that does take a while. This one isn’t too bad but the next piece while a lot smaller will take a lot longer to cut out. It’s just the way these things work. I’m listening to a lot of audio books at the moment as I am still working on my wholecloth so I carry on with them while I am cutting this quilt. Usually for my art quilts I watch DVD’s but that doesn’t work so well when I am alternating between two projects.

Art quilt day 3 third time lucky

The third pattern turned out to be a good size (thank goodness) and I was able to move on to making the template I will work to. It took several more hours to get to this stage. I decided to photograph it on my car as I don’t have a large space in the house and I wanted the model to get a sense of the size the quilt will be. I think she should be able to do that either from the car or the oil cans Of course the weather was perfect unil I took the paper outside, then the wind started gusting. Helpful.
I felt this was a good point to take a break and get back to my wholecloth. It seems I have got a lot quicker at the very dense fillers. That is great news. I would love to get this quilt finished (or at least quilted) before classes restart and I now think that might be possible.