Saturday, April 24, 2010

Quilting the Cheese

This morning I went ahead and started quilting my freaky Lutradur portrait from last post.

I free motion stitched around all the details and made structure to my hair. It’s hard to quilt curly hair without looking like Medusa and to stitch a shadow on your double chin without looking like a beard, but all in all the stitching made the portrait come alive. I have to unstitch some stitches around the nose that does not look quite right, but I’m letting it rest until tomorrow. It was so much fun quilting this thing!
The grey stripes over and under the picture says SAYING CHEESE SAYING CHEESE SAYING CHEESE…, I guess the name of this piece is a given.

My sister is turning 50 soon, so I’m thinking of making her a smaller portrait for her birthday (of her obviously, not me). I would also love to make a new one of my daughter and of course my soon-to-be-3-year-old grandson. Well, I’ll see if my attention lasts that long or if I’m off to new adventures when I’m done with this.

Some of you have asked about Lutradur. It is a non woven web-like polyester fibre. It is a semi sheer material that is stiffer than fabric, but very easy to sew through. It takes printing with an ink jet printer, paint, heat and lots of other stuff that I have yet to try out. Mine comes in 36”*36” sheets which I cut to size to fit in the printer. I buy mine from Interweave.

For the other questions to my last post:
I printed a very soft grey picture right onto Lutradur in my ink jet printer. I had to use 2 sheets as my printer only take letter size.
I put fabric scraps behind the photo to add colour to a few details.
I added more details using fabric crayons; they had an oil like texture and were difficult to work with (hence the weird grin on my face). Another time I’ll try ink or regular fabric paint.

4 comments:

WoolenSails said...

Love how you used stitches for emphasis and shadow, really worked nicely. Wish I could see a closeup of your hair, would love to see how and what the stitches you used to get it to look raised and have shadow and depth.

Debbie

Victoria Findlay Wolfe said...

bravo! You jumped right in and landed on you feet! Lots of great details! the eyes and the hair look great! what is the saying cheese? is that a piece of fabric or did you print it out? How perfect! If you do it again for your sister would you use the same techniques or try a different approach...?

Vicki @ DottyJane said...

It's wonderful! Thanks for showing the details.

Unknown said...

it looks awesome!