New art quilt - day 1

I've decided to start this story right at the very beginning. With choosing the fabrics and producing the pattern. OK not quite the beginning. I've already selected the image and done some processing on it. The model sent me a whole selection of images and out of those a few leapt out as special. Once I see the ones that have something special I then look at them in GIMP. I look for good contrast and strange shapes. I look for details that might be distracting and I check for pieces too small to make. Once I have all of that working I have a possible quilt. The next step for me is to start thinking about how much detail I want and what colour I am going to use.

I was fairly sure I wanted this one to be purple but that is a tricky colour to get hold of. I did have a look both in my stash and at the shop but I couldn't get the range of shades I needed. Today I had another look at my stash. As you can see there is quite a lot in there, although not as tidy as I would like, but not a massive run of purple especially not in large pieces. However as I was playing with them I realised the longer run is the slightly blue purples which means I can run into my second choice colour, blue. So the darkest parts will be very dark blues which I think will work really well. the darkest areas are the hair in this quilt so her hair will be blue with purple highlights, cool.

Having sorted out that problem I got on with putting the full size image together. I knew it was larger than I had at first planned, but well. It's a lot larger. I haven't got it all into one piece yet but I think it is going to work. It should be quite imposing when it's done. While I was hunting fabric I also found my stash of extra large freezer paper sheets. That's going to make things easier, if only I can find my big tracing paper too.