Whimsical bird in progress

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted about the LIQ project but never fear, progress is being made ever so slowwwwly. Above is the rough sketch of the bird drawn in Photoshop for size and placement in the larger scene... the plan is to refine her when the bird is actually constructed. Sometimes I make a very precise sketch but in this case it seemed reasonable to wing it (pun intended.)

My original theory was that the bird would be some shade of blue with a red belly, but a dotted violet, orange paisley, and black on black fabrics ended up working out best. You have to keep an open mind! I first tried matching orange and violet points on the wings and tail, but didn’t quite look right.

The striped fabric seen above right had the violet and orange in it plus some other colors that added interest. For the legs (below), I wrapped gold ribbon around black rickrack. The feet are made of interfacing painted with gold metallic acrylic paint. This photo shows more of a bronze color, but the gold ended up working better.

After gluing on the points, I machine embroidered the wings and tail. They are attached at their bases, but left free on the tips to give more dimension. I had sewn the body to the quilted background with a machine zigzag stitch, then remembered there was supposed to be a “swish” behind the bird...oops!

So I ripped out part of the stitching, put the light blue swish under the body, then restitched it. Some simple free-motion-quilting was done on the body, a beak and bead eyeball was added, plus some beads along her belly.

She’s carrying a piece of fabric back to her nest, in case anyone is wondering.

The rest of the flock

The third sheep has been completed... since I forget to show it previously, above is the sketch for this project. Pretty impressive, no? It’s not much more than a scribble done in Photoshop, but all I wanted was the size and basic placement of the critters. Sometimes I do a very precise pencil sketch on tracing paper and line up the fabric pieces exactly, but for this project a looser approach seemed possible and more fun.


Here’s how #3 turned out...she’s looking up at something up in the sky. I wasn’t necessarily going to hand stitch all the quilting, but it just seems to have the right whimsical feel.

As you can see below, I ended up ripping out the quilting shown in this previous post on the darker green fabric. Now there are yellow beads scattered around. Dandelions, probably. (Non-Floridians may not know this, but dandelions don’t grow down here.) I’m tempted to add a lamb, which for some reason didn’t occur to me until just this second. The funny thing is, this little flock of sheep is just a sideshow in a much bigger image. 

Hope you’re having a nice weekend. We hiked around most of the day looking at the new spring leaves.

Feeling sheepish

Need some sheep for a grassy field? Here is one way to make them, using a punch needle with embroidery floss or other threads to make the fleece. If you’re not familiar with punch needle work, here is a nice tutorial on Planet June by June Gilbank. I tried 2 strands of white floss with metallic silver on the upper left, but it looked too gray. On the upper right is plain white floss, which seemed a tad dull. The lower left one is white floss with one strand of variegated thread... it’s pretty, but not a good sheep color for this project. On the lower right is the winner, one strand of perle cotton in a cream color. 

The backing is white Kona quilting cotton. After taking the fabric out of the embroidery hoop, it’s trimmed to about 1/8" away from the loops. Then it's glued around back with tacky white glue. (A bamboo skewer comes in very handy to press down the raw edges.) The black parts are ultrasuede, their eyes are a gold bead held with a knot of black thread, while the ears have a stitch of brown floss. 

Here they are in place with seed stitch quilting, consisting of 2 strands of variegated floss. It’s pretty hard to tell, but in a few places I colored over the dark green pattern where it seemed too prominent next to the sheep, using a light green wax colored pencil. Might need do some more. I’m not 100% sure that I like the quilting stitches... may try some beads instead and see how that looks.


These remind me of sheep pins I made eons ago out of polymer clay. Actually, these guys could be pins with a little pin back sewed on. Their face and legs might need stiffening, though. You could fuse two layers of ultrasuede together, maybe.
Hope you’re having a creative week!

Stitching Jenny

It’s been awhile since I last posted about Jenny but progress is being made slowly but surely. The background is mostly completed, and gold beads were added for the flower centers. I was very concerned about how to stitch her down, but after making samples decided to go for a low key approach. I used my sewing machine’s faux blanket stitch in a matching thread on the plum parts of the body, and hand stitched her hooves and belly. The ears, tail tip, and the gold part of her nose are not stitched down to create a little more dimension.

The blank green area on the left will be getting more “stuff,” so it hasn’t been quilted yet. I might add more decorative details to her, but want to see how the whole thing looks once everything is actually on. This is only about half of the total picture, the rest of it is still in pieces.

Below is a close up of her head. For some reason, her ears are my favorite part.

My hubby Andy and I are going to the World Quilt Show in West Palm Beach this weekend... should be fab!

Making cotton with paint... and cotton

Have you ever tried to represent cotton in a quilt? I’m making a cotton field for the LIQ project because Jenny needs something soft and cushy behind her head (just kidding.) I tried to find suitable fabric in the quilt shops that would work, but ended up having to paint it. The brown fabric below seemed like a good prospect.Below is my first try with white acrylic. The blank areas are supposed to show the gaps between rows, but they aren’t defined enough. Also, the overall effect is too contrasty and Jenny’s plum color is too similar in value. By the way, if you’ve never seen cotton fields at harvest, the plants are dead and brown with a fluffy frosting of fiber.The lighter ochre colored fabric below is the next victim. Tape is used to mask off the gaps, and a natural sponge works well to apply the white paint. The secret weapon for making the dots is an embossing tool (used for metal tooling.) It makes much better same-sized dots than a brush can. Below is the field in place with a green strip for the tree line. Because the field fabric is placed over a flip-and-sew pieced background, it has some stabilizer behind it to prevent the bumpy seams from showing through. I was going to FMQ it, but ran into an unexpected problem with the white thread... it looked darker than the white acrylic paint, plus the needle holes were big and wouldn’t close up because of the paint. The result looked like a line of light gray stitching. It’s hard to see but it’s now quilted with small random seed stitches. I tried several white threads and none of them looked white enough so had to deemphasize the quilting. Besides, with the stabilizer underneath, it was very hard to hand stitch! In retrospect, the paint might have stiffened it enough that the stabilizer was not necessary.

The foreground of this quilt will have some actual cotton balls, such as these below. I was going to use those craft pom-poms, but that seemed pretty bogus. These are just little rolled up balls of white 100% cotton batting dipped in water and allowed to dry. I was thinking of dipping them in highly diluted acrylic medium to help them hold together better, but this seems to work. They will be sewed on with monofilament thread after absolutely everything else is done, because they’re so fragile and inclined to fuzz up.I’m thinking about making some clouds with white thread machine-stitched on soluble stabilizer... we’ll see how that works out.

Follow the black and white road

There will be a patchwork path running through the LIQ project (a series of related whimsical wall hangings) so I’ve been trying out some possibilities. I considered various options, but was attracted to the myriad of black and white prints available. The first few images below are rough mock-ups of raw pieces of fabric glue-basted together to see the effect. The first one has a touch of violet...... while the one below has some added red. While I like these, it seemed like the maximum contrast would be obtained if the main image had the color while the road/path was only black and white.The one below has some sections with gray tones that lend an elegant touch.However, the more stark black and white one below looked best against the land and sky sample seen in this previous post. It helped to show it to some artist friends... they all liked the bold effect of this one.Today I pieced the first official path, which will run along the bottom, about 22" wide. It’ll probably be wrapped around some fusible stabilizer to give a firm outline. Will test the technique first though, to make sure it looks good.By some odd coincidence, I painted this a couple of days ago. I’ve been fooling around for some months with a painting of one of my nieces. It probably looks like she has a bathing cap on, but I just feel like experimenting so it may end up being a picture of a girl that doesn't look anything like my niece. I might paint patterns all over her face, for example. Poor kid!

Fabrics for land and sky

Back in March I posted about making fabric grass... today’s post is about choosing fabrics for the rest of the landscape. This project will be code-named LIQ for now since it’s not yet the time to get too specific about it. It will consist of a series of whimsical quilted scenes with various characters running around, such as Jenny. Below is a simple mockup of three fabrics intended to convey grass and sky.
I like the look of this overall... bright colors, interesting but not overwhelming patterns. But it is also clear that it would be ever so dull to use the same fabrics and grass colors over and over in each quilt. In a comment about the fabric grass post, reader Margaret had suggested using orange or red embroidery floss for grass, and that got me thinking about also using tones of yellow, gold, etc. to represent grass, farm fields, and wildflowers. It naturally has provided an excellent excuse to go into fabric acquisition mode, as evidenced below:
You will also notice in the sample (top) that the sky is not blue, but is a white tone-on-tone fabric. In the bird samples shown here, the sky is a turquoise blue. While I love blue, it seems to darken the whole image too much, while the white sky makes a nice contrast to the land colors. Of course plain white seems a tad, well... plain, so I’m also looking for white fabrics with a pattern either in white or a fairly pale pastel as shown below. It’s difficult to see the pattern on the white ones, but putting a blue or lavender fabric underneath will bring it out, hopefully.Notice to fabric manufacturers: Where are the white fabrics with pastel patterns? They’ve been very hard to find so far, but next week we’re making a trek to the largest quilt store in Florida, Rainbow’s End. They have over 20,000 bolts, so there should be some options available there(!)

As you can see by the photo to the left, my stash contains a good selection of various other colors to work with, just need to fill in a few gaps. In general the fabrics for this project are quite different than what I had been buying for my other art quilts, which are not especially whimsical. What LIQ requires are geometrics and graphic patterns with clear colors, not painterly or natural patterns with an “artsy” look, for lack of a better term. Hey, I’m just doing what the art tells me, you know?

Appliqué edges... testing some options

There must be dozens of ways to attach pieces of fabric onto a background fabric. For a whimsical project I’m working on, the question is which one to use? In the post about Jenny, she was still unattached (hmmm... perhaps she could try Internet personals.) Anyway, the birds below show a variety of treatments. Satin stitching, topstitching, machine blanket stitch, etc. There isn’t any blind stitching on these, but we know what that looks like, right?I made these awhile ago and hadn’t looked at them closely again until today. Probably my least favorite is the satin stitching. Maybe it’s just the way I do it, but it looks kind of rigid or something. Actually, I think the mix of techniques and thread colors is nice and adds to the whimsical effect. It just might be the answer for Jenny and the rest of the gang.

Hope you’re having a creative week!

Jenny in progress

This is Jenny, still in pieces but arranged so you can see her basic pose. I’ve been testing appliqué methods and hopefully this will work. The plum-colored fabric is wrapped around a medium weight stabilizer and glued with a tacky glue that won't soak through the stabilizer. Some of the details are acrylic paint, others are embroidered with various threads. The plan is to add beads for the flower centers. The mane is a piece of black upholstery fabric that has been unraveled. The striped part of the tail is a roll of the same fabric as the ear insides. The underneath leg probably needs to be shaded a bit. I might add a swirl of leaves winding around with FMQ* if it seems possible to do without ruining it(!)
*free motion quilting

Attaching her onto the background will be the tricky part, of course. Invisible stitches? Topstitching? Machine blanket stitch? The background isn’t made yet, so I don’t have to worry about that today.