Green Woman #9 – I’ve got a top!

May 21, 2020 at 2:20 pm | Posted in Fiber Art, Patchwork | 3 Comments
Tags: Green Woman

Last time I was preparing to attach all the tiny bits to the quilt top. I’ve already talked a bit about choosing the right fabric, so here’s an example. The spiral in the middle of this section gave me a bit of a headache:

The primary colour of the fabic on the left is a sand tone, with some browns and a red mixed in, resembling a marbled paper. A good fit in theory, but I couldn’t find a position to put my shape on that really convinced me. Here it is somewhat getting lost against the lighter fabric in the background. So I made a second try, this time with a brown fabric that is much less structured. Admittedly, in the picture it now looks like it’s getting lost against the darker browns on the right side of the background, but the spiral part itself is now more visible. I thought about that one for quite a while, but ultimately went with the right version.

That done, more cutting and tracing ensued, and I kept finding bits and pieces in the picture I had missed. But finally, all the coloured pieces were there:

To get the final positioning right, I definitely needed the white foreground as well, so I proceeded to cut and trace that. Here she is with everything cut out and pinned down in its hopefully final position:

The bondaweb needs to be ironed on using a damp cloth, and of course the pins need to be removed first, so the ironing part was going to be a delicate operation. I had started to make a detailed plan for the order in which the ironing needed to be done, but somewhere midway I realized that it was actually easier to keep everything where it belongs if I did it all in one go. It doesn’t help that mistakes on that step are very hard to fix. I know why I usually prefer thread to glue! In the end, the only visible mistake is in a place where I did the step-by-step method and didn’t take the existing pieces properly into account when adding the new one. It’s not very visible, though, at least with a bit of distance. So, here she is, looking much closer to done now:

At the moment, she’s still hanging there, while I’m back to sampling. I need to figure out how to get the lady quilted! The quilting needs to do two jobs – first, all those raw edges need to be secured in some way, second, quilting gives me the opportunity to draw on top of the picture with needle and thread and add some structure. But more on that next time.