The next chapter of the making of "The Girl Next Door"

I got the fabric for "The Girl Next Door" back from Spoonflower in about 4 days. Not bad. I had her printed onto the cotton-silk blend fabric. One side is cotton like and the side that the image is printed on to is silk-like. She is a little dark but when you ask someone else to print your image you have to expect things like that. Overall, I think she turned out pretty darn good. Here she is on my portable design board.

 

The next step is quilting the piece. I print out at least two images on 8.5 x 11" sheets of paper. Two because I need to doodle the quilting pattern with a pencil. And one sheet is definitely not enough. Here is what I came up with.

 

I pin the paper on a piece of cork board that I have in front of my sewing machine. I use it as a guide. Which means that I may or may not use it as I'm quilting. The process of drawing the quilting pattern takes place to engage my hand and my brain. It may be a couple of days before I actually quilt the piece but I'm always thinking of it. When I finally sit down to quilt the piece I'm pretty sure of what I'm going to do. But sometimes I go off on a tangent and do something else. One thing that I do for sure is figure out where my light, mid and dark values are. It is not my choice with this piece that the quilting become significant. It is important but the image is more important.

 

 

I select my threads for quilting. Black and white pieces are much easier than color pieces because the color selection is narrowed to grayscale. One thing to watch is the warm grays and cool grays. Sometimes they mix. Sometimes they don't. The important thing at this point is to warm up on a piece of muslin and use some of the threads to see how they look together.

 

That's it for now. See you again soon!