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Studio time… it’s a miracle!

Buoys traced

I actually had a little time to play in the studio and tidy up. I had not planned to participate in the Coastal Quilters challenge, which I blogged about a few days ago here. But……about a week before the 10 by 10 inch quiltlets were due I thought, hey…. I could actually pull this off, I have a week. I knew what I wanted to do with the photo… of ropes and buoys… how I wanted to zoom in. And I knew I wanted to do a color study changing the colors from yellow-red buoys and multicolored ropes to something else, but couldn’t decide if I wanted to do all blues, or go wild and use pink and coral and purple. So I decided to do both! I didn’t have the facings finished in time, but since I volunteered to do the paperwork and prep stuff for hanging them in Maine Quilts in late July, I was OK.

Here’s how I did it. First, I took the photo (by CQ member Jan’s husband Dwight… you can see their website here) and fiddled around with various cropped versions until I had a composition I liked. Then I enlarged it on the computer and taped tracing paper to the screen, and traced lightly with pencil. I needed to reposition the paper and photo a couple of times since my screen isn’t 10 inches tall to get the drawing / tracing in the photo at the start of this post.

Then I picked fabrics. I kept the values the same–the background is the darkest area, the center of the tops of the buoys is the lightest (except for the white thing at the top… can you tell I’m a transplant to Maine… I don’t know what the parts are called…blushing, blushing, hanging head in embarrassment!). I was thinking teal, but the true blues picked themselves. Then I wanted to go way crazy and use a printed batik for the tops, which led to the purple-pink version! I used Saral or Transdoodle transfer paper between the traced design and the fabric to transfer the markings (like using dressmakers paper to mark darts) and cut out the pieces of pre-fused fabrics.

Finally, after fusing up the compositions, I selected at least six threads per piece and quilted the living daylights out of them! FUN! Last step, a facing since I wanted a clean “no edge” look for these pieces. When they return from being part of the group challenge, I’ll mount them on stretcher bars covered with cotton like I did the crane or white flower: White Flower

One Response to “Studio time… it’s a miracle!”

  1. Marie Says:

    Pretty darn cool !