This one is also sort of problematic because I realized that I made one of the branches grow from two directions....The fact that it started out life as a grape vine, sort of confused me...there was grapevine as well as tree in the original picture...I opted not to use the grape leaves because I couldn't get the look of them down well enough. Instead of being divided, these grape leaves were not lobed much at all and the fact that they were old (this was taken in October) meant that the leaves were limp and fluttery....not looking much like grape leaves at all.
I wonder, if I cropped it a bit more, taking out some of the door casing maybe like this, if it wouldn't be better. It still doesn't solve the branch issue...which I'm sure you'll be able to find easily in this shot.
The blobs at the far left are actually grapes..as well as the blobs in the center.
I'm still having significant problems controlling my machine quilting. The numbness in my hands just makes the fine motor control difficult. I'm hoping that with more practice, I'll be able to either overcome it or develop a method or style of machine quilting which doesn't look too bad. I rather like how the thread painting on these stems makes it look sketchy.
It was my intention to make even more thread build up on these...but I found that I was using a heck of a lot of thread and the way in which I was doing this was leading to too much distortion. Rather than doing this on just the top with a layer of stabilizer behind it, I sandwiched it and thread painted through the top/batting/backing. I then put another backing on it and quilted some more since the thread painting makes the back look so rough.
Practice makes perfect...and I've been trying to "do the work" a lot lately. You can't get better unless you put in the time. I'm looking forward to exploring more of my barn sketches and photos through quilting.
You can see the original barn quilt posting with the photos here:
http://michigoose-life-quilts.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html
2 comments:
Hi Lisa, Was listening to someone recently talking about thread painting. They used stablizer only when doing the thread painting and then added the batting to quilt it. It didn't distort as easily. Might be worth a try! :)
Sue D.
HI Sue, That's exactly what I did wrong...and realized it almost immediately.
I thought that since the batting usually acts as a stabilizer, there wouldn't be that distortion...but I was really wrong. I chalk this one up to a major learning experience. Using a tear away (or other stabilizer depending on what your thread choices are....I wouldn't use a disolvable with most rayons as I would be afraid that they would bleed) while thread painting, then layering it.
This would also solve my other complaint...I wanted to have some puffiness on the branches to give it some dimensionality, but since I thread painted it, that didn't happen. I added a second layer of wool batting, but of course since the cotton I used initially was so dense, that didn't help much.
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