Saturday, August 13, 2011

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.


7 comments:

Vicki W said...

Thank you for sharing so much of the detail of your process. I'm enjoying it and learning from it as well.

Ferret said...

Thanks Vicki, it's always good to get some feed back from the readers. It's hard to know what people will find interesting.

Liz said...

Ferret, I was stewarding at FOQ yesterday and a lady came and asked where your quilt was hung she was very disapointed to hear that you were not exhibiting this year. Just thought you might like to know you are missed!

Ferret said...

Thanks Liz. I just couldn't afford to come to the show this year, and I did need some time to do my own work. I've spent the time working on two new shw quilts so I feel it's been really worth while. I have been trying to send my quilts out to lots of other shows so people still get to see the work up close and personal.

The other problem was that the quilts I had available for the show were too small for the new rules. A lot of my art quilts aren;t big enough for the festival so will have to compete in other shows.

Liz said...

I am staggered that there are such restrictions, I can understand for a challenge where unknown numbers of entrants may make big pieces that may be difficult to display but not that your work must be over a certain size.
I may have been tempted to enter a garment in quilt creations catergory but not now having seen how they were displayed, a broom stick on a fence post did not do justice to any of the garments, in my opinion.

Ferret said...

I don't get it either. I can understand bed quilts have certain sizes. I can understand wanting to judge different sizes in different categories, but stating that art quilts must be over 1m on a side I don't get at all. On the other hand there are plenty of shows that will take the smaller art quilts so expect to see more of my quilts there.

If you want to enter garments I suggest buying your own display mannequins.They are quite pricey but if you hunt around enough you should be able to get nice ones for about 60 pounds. I did have to buy a smaller size than I would have liked but my size was over 200 and I couldn't justify that. As a quilter you probably have some spare wadding around you can use to pad the dummy if it has a removable knit cover.

Ferret said...

Ah forgot to mention, the downside of supplying the mannequin is the shipping costs. I am only entering my garments when I can hand deliver, which again cuts down on the number of shows they can go to.