Garden Lady #10 - Part One - Winter Interest

Nearly everyone that I asked told me to make a winter scene for the final Garden Lady in the series.  She is going to be #10 and I'm going to name it "Winter Interest".

I found a digitally generated design that I liked on Pinterest.  I tried very hard to find the artist who was the source of this pin, but couldn't find it.  Dang it.  I really want to give credit to the originators of my ideas. It was pinned by Anouklaga, who has pinned many artists on her pages.  It is a very sweet and fitting end to my series of Garden Ladies.  It'll be a challenge to make so many wings!

I traced it and had it enlarged at my favorite blue print shop in Portland.  For this piece, I decided that I would definitely start with the wings.  I like wings to be transparent and so organza was the obvious choice for the fabric.  I made wings for my second Garden Lady the same way, which was to layer 2 pieces of organza between dissolvable stabilizer, draw on the veins, stitch it around the edges and along the veins, soak it in water, and press it into shape.  I found a couple of sheer fabrics at JoAnn's and decided to layer 2 different ones on the wings.  Here are the 2 fabrics, which I know are hard to see in the photos.  One is iridescent shimmering, and I put that one on the top.

I traced the wings onto freezer paper to make the pattern.

This was laid down on my cutting table.  

The next layer was Aquamesh, a product from AES.  

Then the two layers of sheer fabric.  And finally, the top layer of Solvay.  I traced the pattern onto the Solvay with a permanent ultra thin marker (this gets washed away!).

I pinned it all in place then removed the freezer paper pattern from the back.  I used gold metallic thread in the top and the bobbin of my machine and zig-zagged on top of all of the drawn lines.  

The next step was to cut around the outside of all of the wings, leaving a scant 1/4" from the stitching.

It got soaked for a few minutes to dissolve the top and bottom products, then laid out to dry, ironed, and placed on the design wall on top of the pattern.

 I hope you like it so far!

Garden Lady #8 - Part One

I got the inspiration for this garden lady from a picture I found somewhere - perhaps Pinterest, maybe a magazine?  I actually don't remember.  Anyway, there was a green dress and gardening implements, so it was a great candidate for my 8th garden lady.

The watering can didn't seem to go along with the rest of the picture, so I changed it to a glass of iced tea, and switched the iced tea in the lower hand and the garden shears into the upper hand (thanks to Al for this suggestion!).  I also changed the face to one that I found about hats on Pinterest.  Here are the inspiration photos and sketches.

I made patterns with freezer paper for the dress parts.

I picked some material for the skin and hair.

Then started thinking about the background.  I had 2 yards of a mottled gray with red circles that was promising.  Frankly, it was about the only piece of fabric that I had in my stash that was large enough to be the entire background.  It made me think about another season than the rest of my pieces, so it will become a fall themed quilt.  I pulled some reds, oranges and pinks for the fall colors to start the inspiration.  It'll probably change, though.  And, now the iced tea doesn't make sense at all.  Oh well, I love  a challenge.  

I hope it like it so far.