Rhonda Bracey: At Random

In addition to the usual monthly challenges, there are some bonus challenges throughout the year. Back in August, a bonus tutorial from Susan Brubaker Knapp was released: http://sewcalgal.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/2012-free-motion-quilting-challenge_27.html

I only got around to doing anything about it this weekend.

The challenge was to take a photo of something and convert it into a quilted piece. I decided to use a photo of a water lily I took in Bali a couple of weeks ago.

Here’s the original photo:

I converted the photo into a black and white image, then printed it out. I then stitched the outlines of the petals and leaves using an unthreaded machine onto a small quilt sandwich. I used an existing sandwich, which was a bad move, as it’s main colour was pink!

I used LOTS of different coloured threads, but I still wasn’t very happy with the final piece. Despite the thousands of stitches I did, there’s no way that pink background was covered, so the green leaves–in particular–look very insipid. I also didn’t check the placement of the centre of the flower before doing the stamens etc. so they’re out of whack too 😉

Here’s how my piece looked after about an hour of thread painting:

If I did this again, I’d use a black base, and applique on the big green leaves and the pink flower shape before I started stitching. I also WOULD NOT do the surface stitching/thread painting on to the quilt sandwich as it puckers up really badly with so much thread — I’d put it onto some tearaway/interfacing/stabiliser and do all my stitching on that before making the sandwich.

There’s a long way to go with my thread painting! Shadows and colour depth are two areas I really need to spend some more time on.