Deborah Boschert, one of my Frayed Edges mini-group, is also part of a wonderful project called Twelve x 12. They have a blog here, and a website here, and even better…..well, not sure if I can tell you about it yet but there is something really cool coming in their future! So hold on to that thought. Anyway, Deborah now lives (sob we miss her) near Dallas, and the Dallas Quilt Guild is hosting a 12 x 12 challenge. The rules: anything goes as long as it is 12 by 12 inches. Deborah invited us to participate and send quilts to hand in the show this March. Well…..
I was totally, utterly blocked. I had NOT A CLUE. Not a whiff of an idea. Inside of brain darker than a cave in a coalmine with no lights. Nada. Nicht. Zip. Zilch. Then I had to walk the dog. This dog (note…there are fifteen photos in this post, and all are clickable for a larger view):
Isn’t he CUTE? Even from the hind view with curly little tail and dog butt, he is CUTE. Well, the good news is that the quilt is NOT of his hind end. I figured the cuteness of a dog’s butt is not necessarily appreciated by all, but how could ANYONE not love a pug mug? So, I scoured through the umpteen thousand (literally) photos on my hard drive, found the one above, and cropped the photo:
Then I decided to use value as my plan of attack for fusing up this puppy. At first I selected beige, tan, charcoal, and went YUCK. I wanna play with color. Back in the fused fabric stash they went. Out came the colored fused stash. I started with medium values…some lovely turquoises. Then lights, deep darks, and some transitional values. Not suprisingly, the light lights were yellows, the deep darks were navy and purple.
To get ready, I enlarged the photo to 12 inches on my computer, got out the large tracing paper, and traced his outlines. This tracing was my pattern guide in cutting the pieces of fabric for his sweet face. Here is the first bits:
Then a bit more work–you can see the tracing in the top left, the laptop with the cropped photo for reference, and the scattered bits of pre-fused fabrics tossed about (and note the yellow mug…I LOVE the fiesta ware!):
Here’s a close-up of the pug at this stage:
Then even more; I have added the background, but notice the face is kinda upright, not that cute cocked head, the quizzical look (note the green fiestaware mug):
Edges trimmed, but face is still upright…wrong!
So after uttering a few cuss words at having not noticed I was trimming him with his head in the wrong position, I sliced things off and fused up some more background–and yes, there is an “issue” with the shape of his head on the left, but I knew that would be cropped off so I ignored it:
This shows ‘Widgeon quilted (tho not the background…more on that in a sec):
and a close-up:
Here’s what it looks like from the back:
Next, I trimmed away the “middle-backing” and the wool batt I was using from under the turquoise background:
I then added cotton batting and the “real” backing and quilted the background, plus some of the major creases in his pug mug:
Finally, I had thought I would face the edges. I used an old rust colored fabric on the back, and for the facings, and realized it looked MUCH better than the turned/faced edge. So I found a better quality hand-dyed and made narrow bias bindings:
Last but not least…two close-ups.
Hope you liked the journey through the process. The quilt started out with a working title of “You want me to sit STILL?” (as in sit still so I can take a picture of you!), but that evolved into either “Walkies? Puhleeze walkies!” or “Cookie???? PLEEEZE cookie!” Eli (the dog is really his) and I both liked the Cookie version better, so that’s the title!
I absolutely ADORE this little 12 x 12 inch quilt… I think I did OK, because each time my sons see the quilt they start grinning, too! Of course, we are biased and utterly in love with the little dog-beast!
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What I can share, is the thread. On a quilt that measures 12 square feet, I used 46 threads on the top (in the green bin) and 16 threads on the bottom (in the bag on the right…also one thread was used both top and bottom), for a total of 61 threads. Here they are all laid out nicely, with the 16 bobbin threads in the top row (including four cones), and 45 of the 46 top threads below; the repeat was the lime green bobbin thread–aren’t they pretty????
