Art quilts - shoes and things

 If you remember last time I showed the top of this thigh I had paused my quilting to add some more detail to the arm behind it. Now you can see what I meant. There is a shadow on the arm and her bracelet. Pausing when I did just made for a tidier edge. When I was working on the lower legs I also made use of the thread to do the feet. It saved a couple of thread changes at least. One of the downsides of doing this sort of work (and especially the way I approach it) is the number of thread changes. It's surprising how much time and thread that eats up.

 Once I had the bulk of the body quilted I went looking for threads for the shoes. Would you believe I had trouble matching those as well? I really think Moda need to bring out a range of threads to match their fabrics. I've got a lot of thread but I could only get close to two of the blues. I had an almost perfect match for the second lightest and decided to use that on the palest areas as well, after all those are just highlights right and using the slightly darker colour will just add detail.

The other shade I could match fairly well was the darkest although to be honest my thread was a little dark. I couldn't just leave the mid blue unquilted but I didn't have a blue thread even close. So I tried grey. I use a lot of grey as most of the time it blends in really well with other colours. Unfortunately I had a little too light and a little too dark and it didn't want to play ball.

Fortunately luck came to my rescue. I looked at the machine. The purple it was loaded with at that moment was very blue looking, and about the right shade. Amazing it's a pretty close match and was right in front of me. I did swap the bobbin thread I used with it so if the bobbin did show at all it would add blue to the mix not purple.  I used about 15 threads in this quilt and I really didn't have enough. I will be looking to extend my collection sooner rather than later.

 I really enjoyed working on the shoes I think the quilting probably adds more to them than any area other than the hair. Suddenly you can see the ribbons and the curves of the feet. In this picture you can also see that the background quilting has more or less kept pace with the rest of the quilt and in the one below why that is so important.

The body quilting really does draw in the quilt a lot and if the fullness in the background is just left it becomes really difficult to quilt in without tucks despite the fact it is all one piece of cloth so we know it must have fitted once.

As I said at the beginning I did roll back and take another look at the hair before I unloaded the quilt. I decided I couldn't add any more quilting. The quilt had enough distortion already I didn't want to add more. It is now pinned out being blocked to flatten everything before I trim it up.