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!