Northwest Garden Lady - Part One

This fabric art piece was inspired by a picture that I saw on a social media site.  I loved that the garden lady was obscured by her hat of flowers and holding a glass of wine.  As in previous art quilts, I traced the design and had it blown up to size for my working pattern.

It took a while to decide how I was going to make the dress.  Since I have done collaged pieces before, I thought that the technique might work.  I started with a base of batik that had leaves on it, and cut blobs of fabric out of several shades of green.  I had some leftover leaves made from organza that I tossed in, along with yarn, rick-rack, thread, antique trims, wool roving, and Angelina fibers.  Here is the pile of fabric and enhancements that I used.

I layered the blobs onto the background, which was lightly sprayed with temporary basting spray.  Where the blobs overlapped, I ran a glue stick under the edges.

 Next, I cut and placed the pieces of all the other stuff to give me a nice shading from the front of the dress towards the back.  All of that was covered with green tulle.  I picked out shades of green thread for the quilting, and after backing it with a stabilizer, I quilted the entire dress.  

After it was quilted, I placed the pattern on top, cut out 1/2" seam allowance and turned the edges under with a glue stick.  Here is the dress placed on top of the pattern.   I really like how it turned out!

Stay tuned for more progress on this piece.  

Sunrise quilt

I had a lot of leftover yellow fabric from a previous quilt and a ton of hand dyed orange and purple pieces that I wanted to put into a quilt.  I saw a picture of one that was made from scraps in orange, yellow, gray, and white.  It was on my design board for a few months, and it really spoke to me.  So it became the inspiration for this one.

I decided to make all the square-in-a-square blocks 4" finished.  I cut a bunch of 2-1/2" squares, and a ton of 1-1/2" wide strips in most of the colors.  Then I piled them all into a bin and took them to the quilt retreat.  I made over 100 there, and sewed the rest of them at home.  I put the squares up on my design wall, and then made more to fill in where I decided the color needed to be.  As I made more, I moved them around a few more times.  When I liked the layout, I sewed them all together.  Here is what the top looked like before quilting.

I took it to Tami Levin and she used a digital edge-to-edge design called Deep Blue Sea.  

Here it is all quilted and bound.  There's a tiny yellow faux piping and a gray binding.   It's 69" W x 77" H.  I call it "Sunrise".  

I hope you like it!