I always wanted to be a calendar girl

So, it turns out I’m Miss July... or at least my Handpicked art quilt will be, in the Quilting Arts 2010 calendar. This video clip from Quilt Market shows Pokey Bolton introducing the winning entries. I worked long and hard on my entry, so it is a thrill to be included. (By the way, for those of you I haven’t met in person, my name is pronounced LorEEN LEEdy, rhymes with Doreen Beedy. The way Pokey pronounced it is how most people say it at first. I often suggest that my first name rhymes with CHLORINE, and that seems to help people remember!)

The detail on the left shows the bright fruity colors used as well as the embellishments. There’s a little saga about the background fabric; it was a pale violet, but a little plain. To jazz it up and create more contrast, I painted swirls of white acrylic paint on it. It worked fine, then I proceeded to transfer the design with red Saral transfer paper. Big mistake. Perhaps I did something wrong, but that red line was NOT going to come out easily. After a thorough washing and scrubbing in detergent, the last of the red did go away. Now, how would I get the design on the fabric?

I ended up pinning the background fabric to foam core, then pinning the design sketch on tracing paper above it. I would lift up the paper, slide the piece of fruit underneath, and pin it in place. So, there was no design transferred onto the background fabric at all. For more info about how this piece was made, see this post.

A note about the beads: The large flat ones are made of dyed shell, bought at a bead show direct from the importer. To give you an idea of the price difference, this type of bead is often found at bead stores for 25¢ or more per bead. At the show, they were a mere $2 for a 16" strand, quite a bit less expensive. I arranged the various beads after quilting, glued them down with Gem-tac, then hand stitched them down.

Have a creative day!