textile dreams – fibery wake up

Green Woman #6 – Background Piecing!

I said I’d be a while, but it turns out it took me just over a month to do the sewing, which is not too bad in terms of project speed.

Here’s what I started with:

Sewing the pieces together was a highly technical exercise, since every single one of the seams is curved. I relearnt what works best with this kind of piecing. Note to self for next time: Tight curves are much easier if sewn in two halves, which means half as many pins to stick yourself with at one time. Additionally, it’s much less likely that the fabric on the bottom will bunch up and end up under the needle of the sewing machine when it shouldn’t have.

So, here’s the result of all that sewing and ironing:

I think she looks pretty put together already. I’ll add the fine details and some shading with the quilting, I think, which will fit the original line drawing. But first, I need to get the white foreground and the various vines sorted out. This will take some experimenting, so I’ll probably show you the result of those experiments next time.

Green Woman #5 – Colouring the Background

The next step is both the fun and the hard part in the category “Playing with fabrics”. Starting with the finished face on top of the pattern, I needed to choose the right fabric for every piece in the background, and make everything fit together somehow. Here’s the pattern again:

The right version is approximately what I ended up with at full size. And this is what it looks like after colouring in the spaces:

Just to make sure that nothing is jumping out too badly in terms of contrast, I converted the image to black and white:

The face sticks out clearly, and the hair on top of her head has the lightest colours, as intended. You will see a big difference if you compare with a black and white version of the original, though:

If you look just at the background, ignoring the white foreground, you see that there’s much less contrast in general between the different areas than in the fabric version. I think the main reason for that difference is the choice of medium: coloured pencils versus fabric. I started filling in the background with all those light greens at the top of her head, but soon realized that doing the background in all those relatively light colours wouldn’t work. For the rest of the background I went much bolder in my fabric choices, trying to keep to the general colour schema as well as ensuring local contrast similar to the original. Another thing is that lots of the dark fabrics at the edges will be covered by the white foreground, so there will be much less of the darks visible at the end.

The next step will be sewing all this together, so I end up with a single piece of fabric for the background. I think I’ll be a while, I’ll let you know when I’m there.

Green Woman #4 – She’s got eyes!

Last time I ended up with a face that had an important feature missing: the eyes.

I was going to fix that next. The plan was to reverse-appliqué some bits of white fabric into the eye-sockets, but first I had to deal with the irises. Initially I was thinking of hand-embroidering them, but then I decided to try playing around with free machine embroidery. It’s something I always wanted to explore more, and might use again in different parts of this quilt.

Here’s my first try:

I layered the white fabric with a bit of water-soluble embroidery stabilizer, which I also drew the pattern on. I choose a dark red and an even darker reddish-brown embroidery thread, which fits the original colours well. I was quite happy with the first try, but did manage to turn the design the wrong way round when adding the second colour. So two more eyes it was.

I’ve made a little slide show to show you the steps for putting one of the eyes in:

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And here she is, and I think I got her likeness pretty well:

That’s as far as I can take the face right now, onto the background next. There’s lots of hair to add!

Green Woman #3 – Sewing the Face

Last time I decided to sew the face first, because the colours there will definitely influence whatever I’m doing for the hair. So, here’s what I did:

Step 1: copy the lines of the face to the shiny side of some freezer paper. The shiny side because it will be ironed onto the back of the pieces of fabric, and I don’t want to end up with a mirror image. You’ll need a permanent marker that writes and stays on plastics for that.

The letters are short for the different colours, and the tick marks will be used to pin the pieces precisely for sewing – particularly important for curves.

Step 2: Cut the pieces apart and iron them onto the fabric. The shiny side will stick onto the fabric when heat is applied, but not very strongly so it can be easily removed later.

Step 3: Trace around the pieces and add the tick marks. Here’s a detail shot on how that looks like:

Step 4: Cut all the pieces out, adding a seam allowance. Arrange in correct order for sewing:

You can see in the light green that the freezer paper is still attached to the back of the pieces at this point. Since my lines are curvy, I do need to remove it before starting to sew.

Step 5: Sew. I’m leaving you with a link to Ruth B. McDowell’s “Piecing – Expanding the Basics” for detailed instructions and lots of inspirational pictures. Here’s what I ended up with after quite a bit of cursing (some of the curves are almost too tight for sewing):

The light green fabric is thinner and more tightly woven than standard quilting fabric, and it also doesn’t iron as well. This led to quite a few wrinkles in her face. I’m fine with this, since what’s a few wrinkles between friends? Also, I will be quilting things quite heavily and probably most of it will not be that obvious once I’m done.

This is a pretty flat image for the moment. Obviously the shading is missing, and I’ll need to add at least some of it, probably while quilting. But I did make heavy use of the one way I have to directly add some dimensionality, which is by controlling which way I ironed the seam allowances. I’ll strengthen that effect later with some strategic quilting.

By the way, did you notice that she’s looking ever so slightly to the left? I didn’t until I traced the face a couple of times and noted the differences. I love how this project makes me look closer at the original artwork!

The next step should be pretty obvious: Giving her some eyes. I have some ideas on how to do them, but there’ll probably some experimenting first.

Green Woman #2 – A Plan for the Background

Last time around I showed you what exactly it is I’m tackling with this project, and now there actually are some first steps! It’s all black ink on paper though, no fabric involved yet.

So, here’s an A3 copy of the black and white drawing, overlaid with drafting paper. For the background, I’m obviously ignoring the white foreground, pretending it isn’t there. I’m also ignoring all the detail that weaves in and out of the rest – the vines and thorns, the leaves and flowers, and the tight spirals of her hair. What I’m trying to do is to figure out what makes sense to be one piece of fabric – similar colour, similar structure etc. The colour printout helps with this. Here’s the result of my first try, with quite a few false starts included:

A second version is in order, and already looks much better. Here’s both of them next to each other, so you can see the comparison:

Next, finding the right fabric. I pulled all the greens I can see me using out to get an idea of what I have:

My original thought was to do the hair by couching lots of yarn on top of the sewn background. Looking at those lovely fabrics, I want to try to go a bit more abstract. For the moment, the only fabrics I have firmly selected are the solids for the face. Since whatever I do for the hair needs to work with the face, I’ve decided to sew the face first before making any other decision. But that’s an adventure for the next post.