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Auditioning My Rendition … of Tinkerbelle

Auditioning My Rendition … of Tinkerbelle

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If you’ve been following along with me, you’ll have seen that Belle’s portrait finally came together. The next step is to find a good background for her, something that will really make her personality shine. I started by auditioning fabrics from my stash. Auditioning is simply placing the fabric on the vertical design wall and laying the portrait on it, then standing back to view it. It’s really important to audition on a vertical surface so you’re addressing the piece face-on and can absorb the full effect. What I was looking for is simple: do I get an ‘ah-hah’ feeling to tell me it’s the right one or does it feel flat or just wrong? Of course there are no rights or wrongs and you just have to follow what your head and your heart tell you is best. Here are a three worthy candidates I selected.

:belle on red-orange      belle on blue        belle on blue green

And here are my thoughts on each one:

  • I really like the movement in the pinky orange batik with the grey maple leaves stamped all over it but I struggle with the fact that Belle’s face is bathed in light and nothing in this background supports that. Or does it? Perhaps it’s the warmth that seemed to oppose the coolness of the greys and blacks.
  • The blue background worked well for my previous portrait, Jackeroo, but it’s a flop in this case. It simply feels flat and motionless and there’s no light emanating from it.
  • The green batik has movement and depth because of the blue/green shading. The lighter areas almost look like sunlight shining through a dense leafy foliage. It also has a subtle leaf pattern on it and while it doesn’t look so great in this photo, it ended up being my favourite. Now it’s time to prepare it for quilting so I can stitch the portrait down.

For you quilters out there, what tricks or guidelines do you use to select fabrics that play well together? And how do you know when they’re playing together well?

Thanks for reading my blog. Next time, I’ll describe how I prepare the background and what I do with the portrait.

Another dog leaps off the design wall

Another dog leaps off the design wall

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It always feels great to finish a portrait or any project, for that matter, doesn’t it? The latest portrait off the design wall is this black lab. It’s the second time I’ve used this lab’s photo. The first version was done in brown. This time I wanted to reduce the number of pieces to see how few I could use but still have a decent portrait. I also wanted to try making it in white, black and grey fabrics, to be more representative of the actual midnight black lab. I was pleased with the result but I think I am going to try adding more detail for better results in my next portrait.

The background fabric you see in the photo below is not pieced. It is a navy blue/cream striped fabric. I quilted it horizontally along the dark stripes. After quilting the background, I attached the portrait by zigzagging around the perimeter with an invisible thread. I free motion straight stitched, through all the layers, just inside the edge of each piece of fabric using a matching colour of thread. The final step was fusing and stitching down the internal border, a 1/2″ black strip.

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