Competition Quilt in Progress - Part 1

I have been working on a quilt to enter a quilt show here in Bangkok in June.   I was quite excited until I read the theme of the competition:
Eco quilt for the environment.  
Get the green back.
Turn over a new leaf for the environment.
Show the power of nature through threads of cloth and needlework, for a better tomorrow.

If you don't already know it, that is a theme that is sure to send me to sleep.  I know it isn't fashionable to say it but, environment?  Yawn!

After a lot of brain storming, and a huge amount of fantastical ideas on Alan's part that far outstripped my talent, I came up with my idea, 'plant a tree'.  Yeah yeah, hackneyed beyond belief, but falling asleep whilst watching an Inconvenient Truth, had not set me up for anything more challenging!

Drying the painted fabric.

First I painted the background fabric.  I made two different backgrounds, and this was the one that went wrong, but I loved it so much I decided to use it.  I painted the sky and sand first, waiting patiently for them to dry.  Next I painted the mountains, but used too much paint near the skyline.  Before I knew it the whole thing ran out of control on me.  At first I thought, what a disaster, and went on to paint a much smaller piece of fabric, but when the first one had dried, those disastrous runs of paint, looked so much like flames or flame glow, it inspired me to continue, using the flames as a sign of global warning.  Of course, should a judge ask me, those flames were a well thought out design feature! 

For background fabric, I used a commercial hand dye fabric, which I thought matched the colours of the quit front really well.  It was also in keeping with wanting to use a limited palette of colours, to emphasise the starkness.

The design was to feature two boys looking at a tree they had planted, with a dead tree in the background, and all set within a desert-like environment.  

To make the boys, I took a photo of a child, cut the legs off and manipulated them until he was sitting as I wanted him.  I copied the photo onto a piece of fabric with chalk, to use as a sewing guide.  I placed the fabric on heavy interfacing, and the whole thing in a hoop to try and keep it from puckering.  Then I thread painted the figures.

Here you can see both boys.  It is the same picture, with the limbs manipulated.  You can see where I have tested thread colours on the background fabric.

I used a similar method for the tree (though drawing it free hand).  Initially, I wasn't going to intensively thread paint, which is why I used a patterned background, but I got carried away with the fun of thread painting.

One thing to note when thread painting, it is not a good idea to do it on white fabric, as that really shows up if you have bare spots in your thread painting.  Also, given the colours I was using, brown worked really well.

I constructed the three limbs separately, more for ease of sewing than anything else.  I didn't use all the limbs that I sewed.  Once completed, I carefully cut them out.  Then I stuck pins in them and moved them around the quilt trying to get a feel for their placement.  

Next I got down to the fun of quilting, which I decided to do before adding the tree and the boys.  The mountains were the really fun part.  I used different variegated threads and straight stitch free motion quilting, except for where I outlined the mountains.  I did those using free motion zig-zag done on the slant, which gives an emphasised outline.  I used a mixture of colours for the flame glow. 

The sand was the hardest part.  I wanted it to look rather like parched, cracked ground, and I needed to use the quilting to give the scene dimension.  To do this, I made odd, circular shapes, which touched each other.  They start off really tiny by the mountains, and get bigger as they come into the foreground.  I used a mixture of yellow colours, to try and match the sand colours.  My big worry at this point, was whether this quilt would lay flat.  From the sand up, the quilting becomes progressively less intense, until the sky, which has little quilting by comparison.  Normally this would cause the quilt to 'wave' rather than stay flat, but for some reason this didn't happen.  The quilting gods were smiling down on me.  I think the quilting has worked out really well.  I encourage you to click on a photo, which will take you into a slideshow, so that you can see the photos clearly.

Next came the placement issues.  I had decided where the main elements were to go, and at this point, this was to be the quilt.  

Next came the biggest headache of the quilt, and what took me far longer to work out than actually making the quilt, the shadows.  They drove me crazy.  Try as I might, I just couldn't work out what the shadows would look like.  I ended up getting in contact with my arty friend Shirl, who lives in London.  I scanned the figures to her and asked her to construct the shadows for me.  Boy did we ever go off on a hunt!  It turned out that she too hadn't much of an idea about this either.  Shirl sent back various ideas to me and then started researching the topic (thank goodness, as I had not the slightest interest in doing that).  She has blogged some of our struggles, so if you are interested, click here.  It took me ages before I finally worked out what the main problem had been, we were working on making reflections rather than shadows.  I think we both gained from this experience, and are now both walking around observing shadows.

Meanwhile Alan was adding his bit ("I can't see why it is so difficult if you made the children").  Believe me, it may be easy to people who are very observant, but shadows really don't do what you think they do!  As a punishment (and out of sheer desperation) he was taken to the park and had to pose like the figures, so that I could see what the shadows looked like.  Ha!  He'll keep quiet next time.

In Part two, you'll get to see the finished quilt.