Lady in a Forest Dress - Part Two

This is a continuation of a previous post about the making of a lady in a Forest Dress.

I worked on the moss and greenery components.  For the moss, I layered snippets of fabric, yarn, wool roving, thread and trimmings on top of tulle.  This was topped with Solvy and sewn in a grid of green thread.  When it was complete, I soaked it in water and let it dry overnight.  In the picture below, you can see that it is airy and somewhat transparent.  It will get cut and placed on top of other components, perhaps even solid green.

Some of the tiny components fall apart as it gets handled, but that's OK.  I like the 3-D effect of the "moss".

The next components that I worked on were the 3 tiers for the lower part of the dress.  I layered some of the same items on these too, but they started with a layer of fabric, fabric blobs, and then all of the snippets of fabric, yarn, wool roving, and trimmings.  These layers also got thread, some shiny doo-dads, and were topped off with tulle.   I made sure to work from light to medium to dark in each of the 3 layers.  When they were done being quilted, the edges were turned under and glued in place.

I made the sleeves and pinned them in place.  The sleeves and dress layers were all stabilized with a lightweight stabilizer.  I plan to insert some branch-like things as well as the moss before it all gets sewn to the background.

I also found a face on the internet that I posterized in grayscale.  You can see that it is pinned in place on the pattern.

I hope you like it so far!

Lady in a Forest Dress

I contemplated a fiber art piece to go along with the theme, "Bark, Branch, and Bloom" for quite a few months.  I flipped through all of my pictures that were taken on hikes of moss and trees and wild flowers.  I looked at all of the thousands of pictures I've taken of the flowers and foliage in my yard and on my walks.  And even though I had tons of inspiration,  I just kept hitting a brick wall.

Something that usually causes me to pause like this is, "Do I want to make something to meet a challenge that I don't want when it's done?"  Like many of you, I've made things that I think are hideous or just plain unappealing.  Some of those have made it to the free table to give away; some have been donated to charity, and some, quite frankly, have ended up in the garbage.  I don't hang onto unfinished projects... and stinkers certainly don't warrant a spot in the bins with my collection of quilts.   What I finally realized with this challenge is that it HAD to fit into one of the series that I've made in order for me to get jazzed about it.  

I finally landed on making a lady in a dress that would look like it came out of the forest.  What better series to add to than the one I had so much fun making!  I enlisted the help of one of my granddaughters to draw something up, then looked through some of the Pinterest pictures and some of my own.  Here are some of the ideas, as they've been pinned to my design wall.

 Once I had this idea, I started making the bark and branch fabric.  I started both of these with cotton fabric, added crinkled up tissue paper with diluted glue, and added color with both acrylic paints, fabric paints, Inktense sticks and Neocolor crayons.  Here are pictures of the two pieces that I made while they were still wet.

The next things that I made were the "moss" and "greenery".  Stay tuned for the next post about those components.

I hope you like it so far!

Green Scrap Quilt with skinny brown lines - "Skinny It Up"

This is a continuation of a previous post about the making of the 3rd green scrap quilt; this one with the skinny brown lines.

I quilted this one on my sit-down longarm machine with lime green thread.  I decided to echo the brown lines with quilting that was spaced 3/4" apart and 2-1/4" apart and add some bubbles in the large spaces.  It was a bit of a bugger to quilt since I had to stitch on the diagonal using a ruler to get the spacing.  Unlike a regular longarm, I was able to maneuver the quilt like you would on a sewing machine.  And that's the difficult part, because at times the entire quilt was in my lap.   

After I quilted it, I cut the edges a little more curvy than they ended up to make it more off-kilter.  I added 1/8" grosgrain ribbon to the edges to give it some stability, and then faced it.  

I'm not sure how you would measure it, but loosely, it is 42" W x44" H.  I called it, "Skinny It Up".

I hope you like it!