portrait play

Several years ago, my son asked if I would make a quilt portrait of his best friend in the whole world.  Her name was Florna and she was the most wonderful lady.  We still miss her everyday.  Catch a snippet of her here.

So back to the purpose of this post.  Last summer, while visiting with my daughter, I snapped a few closeups of her best friend, Winston.  He is quite the lover boy and will win you over with just a glance at his eyes.  I swear there is something magical going on behind those soulful, sweet, sad eyes.  

Fast forward to January 2018, where I am moving back to doing some things that I have missed terribly, but didn't realize how very much I missed doing it.  Rather than geometric, modern, minimal, quilts,  my first love is representational quilt art.  And creating faces or figures using fabric makes for thrilling moments when my vision becomes a reality.  Enough with the chit chat.  I'll reveal the  photos of my fabric collage of sweet Winnie.  

All glued together and ready to go under the needle. 

before and after.

The long (64") strips have all been sewn together with a last minute design change.  I have such a difficult time knowing when to stop adding doses of colors here, there and everywhere. That more is more conundrum.  So there was this problem to my eye, and I thought by adding that bit of purples strips on the left side of the blues would make it better.  Letting it hang around like that for a few days, I sewed it all up.  Fini!!!  

But, no.  The blues oval-ish shape hits a roadblock on the left side and that was bothering me from the beginning.  The "fix" of the purple's strips didn't make it better.  It only highlighted the abrupt end of the blues.  An afternoon of seam ripping and tediously sewing in strips to replace the purples, I feel a bit better with this composition. Fini # 2

There are still issues, to my eye, that could be improved.  Since it began as an experiment, I have learned from it, especially as far taking the time for preplanning as to how something like this will be sewn together.  And keep the original sketch composition.  Maybe using larger pieces, shaped into similar compositions are more easily sewn together and the design more easily adjusted.  

  Time will tell.  

Next ~ the quilting.