Northwest Gardening Lady - Part 5 - Final

This is a continuation of 4 previous posts about the making of the Northwest Gardening Lady art quilt.

I chose to do all of the background quilting in a dark green thread that closely matched the background fabric.  Before I sat down at the quilting machine though, I used a chalk marker to essentially draw out the design lines.  That way, when I was quilting it, I had lines to follow and could listen to my podcasts without too much brain power.

Here is the final quilt.  It measures 41" W x 50" H.

I hope you like it!

Northwest Gardening Lady - part 4

This is a continuation of 3 previous posts about the making of the Northwest Gardening Lady art quilt.

I needed to add the plants in the tall pot and the trunk for the strawberry tree.  These were made from fabric that I had in my stash.  The final selection of plants were the ones that I wanted to place at the bottom of the piece.  I had pictures of poppies, columbines, and hostas that spoke to me.  I printed them off on 8-1/2 x 11 sheets of paper and tested out the placement and size.  In the end, I decided not cover up the dress.   So, here is the top all ready to be quilted.

I printed a black and white copy of the quilt and then traced the outlines onto tracing paper.  Then, I fiddled around until I had some quilting lines that I liked.  Here is the quilting plan.

Of course, the quilting will not end up being so prominent once its on the quilt with the dark background colors. 

Stay tuned to see either more progress, or the finished piece.

   

Northwest Garden Lady - Part 3

 This is a continuation of 2 previous posts about the making of the Northwest Garden Lady art quilt.

The plant pots were based on pots that I had seen on a British gardening show, and some in my garden.  Here is the drawing of the large pot that I made on freezer paper.

It seemed like painting the pots would work the best, so I took out my paints and prepared for dying fabric and painted both of the pots.  They're supposed to fade into the background, so I may tone them down a bit.  In the picture, they still have the white background, which I'll trim when I'm satisfied with the final color and shade.

I also drew and painted the two gardening tools.  They also have the white background of the PFD fabric, which will be trimmed.

Stay tuned for the next post.

Northwest Garden Lady - Part 2

This is a continuation of a previous post about the making of the Northwest Garden Lady art quilt.  I take tons of pictures of plants in my garden and wanted to use some of my own photos for the flowers and foliage to give it a Northwest feeling.  Here are some of the pictures that I used.  They include zinnias, chrysanthemums, hellebores, Japanese anemones, coneflowers, and feverfew.  

All of the pictures were sized to the right scale in Photoshop and printed onto EQ Printables Photo fabric sheets.  They were fused to the background, along with fabric leaves. 

I also love our strawberry tree and made the tree out of more pictures.

I made the face, wine glass and glove out of fabric pieces and added Steam-A-Seam to the back, so that they can also be fused to the background.   Here's a progress picture.

So far, so good.