Luna

 So here she is.  The completed quilt - now named Luna.  And she turned out beautiful.

It is hard to tell from this photo, but the quilting is done with a programmed stitch - a few straight stitches, then a few zig zag stitches, then repeat this sequence.  This made the quilting MUCH more interesting. 

The other bit about the quilting is that the initial quilting lines were done with a metallic sparkling thread.  But after a while the metallic thread kept shredding and breaking and causing ALL sorts of problems (and some bad words). 

But of course by this time - I was committed to the sparkly thread.  But WAY too frustrated to continue fighting with it.  Luckily I had a variegated thread that had the same colors - and did not shred!  So I used it.  Will someone notice..... maybe......  but who cares!

Since my goal was to add interest to the plain background fabric, I decided to use a more flamboyant pattern of quilting - especially around the globes above Luna's head.  I think it makes it look like the globes are sort of vibrating with energy.  I am very pleased with that.

And I added some deep purple fiber across the globes and many beads around the edges.  And gorgeous beads in the center of each globe.
  

 You know I buy these sparkly beads when I see them with NO idea how or even IF I will ever use them - and then the perfect project just pops up and - hurrah!! - I have the ideal bead.  Life is good!

This is a detail of the lips and the earrings.

And here is her gorgeous eyelid.  I added some paint to her eyes to make them more interesting.  And then dots of glitter glue all over the eyelids to make them sparkle.

Sooooo - a big project - lots of challenges - but fun.  This was initially meant to be a sample for a class that I am teaching - but the store owner selected the Alyssa quilt because this one got a little too complex with embellishments.  We don't want to frighten folks away from what is sure to be a fun and easy class to entice people into trying art quilting.       I wonder what I will work on next????         barbara

Purple People

 So I decided to make another face using the same technique as the tiny quilts and the larger green one.  I really like this technique but YIKES did I run into a problem with this purple one.
I love working with purple fabric so I had a lot of scraps and really liked the face but finding a background fabric to put the face on - well that was a challenge.  I tried it on every color you can imagine.  One of the challenges is that the face is basically dark and I didn't have any good light purples.  I did try yellows and greens and pinks and even black.  None of them worked at all.  And I didn't feel like making a 90 mile round trip to try to locate the perfect fabric.

So I ended up using plain lavender.  I NEVER use plain fabric and only owned this one because I made a color wheel once and bought it for that project.  Well the color worked OK but it was sooooo plain and boring looking.  So I started to think about adding additional design elements to fill up the space and make it more interesting.

The photo above is of the paper pattern that I cut to try out my idea.

And this is how it looks when the design is translated into fabric.  I used the same scrappy technique for the element below the face and single pieces of fabric for the circles above the face.

I think that she is beginning to look like some sort of Space Warrior..... with planetary elements above her...... or something.

But I am still not happy with the PLAIN background.  Sheesh!  How do I work myself into these corners?  Next step is to quilt - maybe I can use an interesting stitch design and thread to add some oomph to the piece.  

Check back later to see what happens!
barbara