A New Challenge

This is a sketch from a photo that will become a landscape lap quilt... when I get my act together. The fabrics are merely a value exercise... the sky is okay, the large background mountain needs to be a tad darker, the next two ranges should be bluer, but I'm happy with the green hills, water, and foreground fabric -- which almost disappears at the bottom right. Of course this is simple and will be more 'realistic' which is what the customer wants. A double-click might show it better.

Progress reports as I go, now that I've figured out that a photo on my new I-Pad automatically shows up on my new MacBook Pro. The learning curve for that change is far from over though!

King-Size workout

Pressing on with Scott's king size and with the bottom half background, already feeling the stress of manipulating that much fabric. This is mostly improve with small mock-ups to follow and a bunch of fabrics in the right values and colors. I'm telling people who ask what I'm working on that it is working on me.

These mock-ups are a tip from an artist friend. The one on the left is an outline drawing with the most detail. The middle is a value sketch. The one on the right is a paste-up using fabrics that work with the values. I didn't finish the palm trees because that is not necessary (but it is a lot easier than making the large ones!) The tropical leaves will be on the sides that hang over the bed, with the beach on the top. He doesn't want a sneak peak so hope he likes it.

Here is a close-up of the right edge, which will be mostly hidden by large leaves, but shows how I'm keeping this monster on my work table - large paper clips - see one in the upper right corner! 

Scott's King-size

Our son Scott is still living under the delusion that his mother can do whatever he asks. His request for a quilt to go on his king-size bed falls into that category. He wants a Hawaiian beach scene, with palm trees. 

For a long time, this was way too threatening to even think about. Then last fall, when we were in Texas visiting our daughter and her hubby, she was working and the house was clean. I hauled out some drawing material and drew several sketches. One seemed to work best. When we got home, I put the drawing into CorelDraw, saved it as a .pdf and took it to Staples. They have a 36" printer so produced for me a full-size pattern. The pattern is too big to work with this part, so I printed it out letter size. You might have to double-click on these to see them better ...

I stuck it up on the wall and shuddered every time I walked by it. But finally decided this will not get made with shuddering. So I opened CD and did a value picture, filling each of the elements in the quilt with an approximate value, only in black, white, and grays. 

And after another few weeks of shuddering, decided to do the same with color. I'd been collecting fabric, but some of it was too gaudy, or the wrong colors. The scrap bins helped. I didn't put all the palm leaves on the bigger trees, but enough to get a feel for what it would look like. Those leaves, because they are against a light sky, needed to be lighter than the other foliage, otherwise the contrast was too much. 

Also, those areas will be a lot bigger so will be pieced for interest sake. Note that the foliage will hang down the sides of the bed, and the beach will be on the top, with some leaves too. I'll be adding more detail, like birds, butterflies, shells, etc. 

Here is what I now have to translate into the enormous size. I told him I wasn't sure I had enough muscles to wrestle with this, but he didn't seem to understand what I was talking about! LOL.

Seriously, I'll need some prayer for this project!