Garden Lady #5 - Part One

I got the inspiration for this quilt from a greeting card that was designed by Jane Newland.

I thought that it was really sweet.  I decided to try for a more natural face, arms and legs.  So I went hunting for inspiration and pictures.   Here are the sketches of the arms, legs, face and hat. My intention is to use the hat to cover the eyes. (I'm not that great at making realistic eyes!).

I decided to work on the background first on this quilt and wanted to use fabric and fibers that were already in my stash of supplies.  Here's the patterns pinned to the green and brown background fabrics that I selected.

I pulled out yarn, thread,  fabric, vegetable bags, antique trims, and doily pieces and put them all in a pile.

These were all snipped and layered onto the green background and covered with green tulle.  Here are the pieces all ready to stitch down.

I put a tear away stabilizer on the back and stitched the pieces with green thread - just enough to hold the things in place.

I hope you like it so far.

Garden Lady #4 - Part 4 and the final quilt "Don't Bug Me"

This is a continuation of 3 previous posts about the making of garden lady #4.

I added more bugs and things:

A couple of embroidered snails that my friend, Linda Taccolini, made for me.  She machine embroidered the snails onto white fabric with a tear away backing.  I inked the edges with Fabrico markers, added a little fray check, trimmed them, and stitched them onto the quilt with dark invisible thread.

A couple of caterpillars, also made by Linda.

And a few hand embroidered lady bugs.

The piece needed a little more flowers on it, so I hand embroidered several more in shades of pink, and did some stem embroidery too.  Then I hand embroidered a few more stems.

It's 32.5" W x 50" H.  I'm calling it "Don't Bug Me".

I hope you like it! 

Garden Lady #4 - Part Three

This is a continuation of two previous posts about the making of Garden Lady #4.

After making all of the foreground components, it was time to make all of the flora and fauna.  I used pictures from my garden to photoshop the echinaceas, which were printed onto prepared for printing fabric, then fused onto the background.  I added French knots in 2 colors on all of them.  The rest of the flora and fauna were randomly cut from quite a few fabrics and fused into place.  Finally, they were all stitched around the edges.

 One of my granddaughters said that I needed to add a butterfly and maybe a bird too.   And one of my friends, who is an expert in machine embroidery, suggested a snail, a butterfly, and I thought about a caterpillar and a ladybug.  I'll have to figure out when to stop coming up with ideas and finish the piece!  Here are a couple of the birds that were inked into the sky and a bee that was hand embroidered into the flowers.

I used 3 templates from Quilters Apothecary to stitch the arcs and free styled the circles here and there.  It's hard to tell, but I used several shades of green thread to do the quilting in the background, several shades of blue, gray, yellow, peach, pink, and metallic threads to do the quilting on the lady, the hose, and the water.  

So far so good.  Stay tuned for the finale.

Garden Lady #4 - Part Two

This is a continuation of a previous post about the making of Garden Lady #4.

I felt like I needed a little more definition on the face, so I took a picture of my friend and sketched it up.  I also felt like I needed to define the pants a little more, so I downloaded a few pictures from the internet, and sketched the pants onto the pattern and used it for the pattern.  Here are the pictures and the results:

It seemed like it was about time to pick the background and start working on getting that into place.  In addition to the hand dyed material for the pants, I had a hand dyed green fabric that seemed like it would work for this art piece.  I didn't have quite enough of the green, so I pieced in another green and plan to use the remnants of both to scatter the greens throughout the flowers to come.

Next was the hose and water.   I used another of my hand dyed green fabrics for the hose.  A gray and turquoise fabric was used for the nozzle.  

The water spray was made with 3 shades of Angelina fibers (white, gray, and gold).  I put the tracing of the pattern underneath the Teflon pressing sheet, laid the fibers on top, pressed them, and used the pattern to cut it out.

So, here is the background with all of the components in place.  I can't wait to start on the flowers that will make up the garden.

I hope you still like it!