Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Major setback: When I scattered the leaves over the muslin, there was a LOT of white poking through. Without creating hundreds more leaves, this wasn’t going to work. And even if I did create hundreds more leaves, I think the background would’ve been TOO busy and swamp the dragonfly (‘scuse the pun!).

So back to the drawing board… More thoughts, ideas, and possibilities later (and some more hours…) and I decided to use the remaining green fabrics and create a green gradient background for the dragonfly.

Some of the green fabrics laid out in a possible order:

The next step was deciding what to do with these fabrics. I thought of putting large patches of green over the muslin, then laying some leaves on it, but that looked weird. Next thought was to look at how I could cut the green fabrics in wavy lines so that I could get the effect of undulation (a la Ricky Tims). But I couldn’t figure out how to do that successfully! (Fortunately, I tested on small fabric scraps before cutting ANY of the green fabric!)

I then thought I could make uneven lines in the greens getting a geometric effect with long thin triangular shapes, but I tried that on four strips and it just didn’t look right, so I unpicked all those stitches and decided to go for very boring strip piecing of these 5 and 6″ strips…

Next: Create the dragonfly body and wing parts

Links to all posts about this quilt

• Evolution of a quilt: 1
• Evolution of a quilt: 2
• Evolution of a quilt: 3
• Evolution of a quilt: 4 (this one)
• Evolution of a quilt: 5
• Evolution of a quilt: 6
• Evolution of a quilt: 7
• Evolution of a quilt: 8
• Evolution of a quilt: 9
• Evolution of a quilt: 10
• Evolution of a quilt: 11