Tag: Quilt

The Poncho Girl – A Portrait of Tana

A Portrait Quilt

I am overwhelmed with emotion when I try to write anything about this portrait of my daughter…I will try to just stick to photos of how it was done!

This photo, so quintessentially my Tana, was my inspiration for the quilt! I started working on it in January 2022, about a year from when she passed on.

Vectorization done on the Vector Q app

The collage came up pretty quickly!

What followed were a couple of trips—one exploring Rajasthan and another one in to Gujarat! Finally got back to working on it, hoping to finish it by her birthday in April!

Sadly, didn’t feel quite done on her birthday. Needed a lot of more quilting to add depth to it!

( Note that I am trying ‘contour quilting’ quilting on it, where the quilting follows the face contours)

This looks better, right? But I don’t like the way some of the lighter threads stand out against the darker areas! Gives it a harsh look! Not for my gentle darling, it wouldn’t do!

I used Inktense pencils to reduce contrast in the in-between areas and darken some stitching lines so that the threads matched the fabric!

Tip: A bit of Cadmium Orange or Burnt Orange does wonders to soften harsh contrasts in portraits, especially with our Indian skin types! It is great for lip-colour too!

A close-up of her smile

See the Inktense at work!!

The hair…

Were those the most beautiful eyes in the world that mirrored the purest soul that ever lived?

I cut out a poncho I had made for her and used it to dress her! The flowers and leaves were also cut out from the poncho.

The quilt was mounted on a ( mounted) canvas, which makes it easy to hang. It now lives in my living room where I can look at her while watching TV…

…or touch her, talk to her, smile at her every time I walk past her!

She smiles right back!

So that is my Tana in her poncho!

Who’s The Prettiest of Them All?

I bought this panel of the Frozen princesses To make a quilt ( or wall hanging) for my grand-niece who is a great fan of the two!

The Frozen Princesses Anna and Elsa are my grand-niece K’s favourites!

She was due to visit us and I thought of a quick gift for her. But how boring would this be!

So I came up with this idea.

K goes to the centre of the panel, while the other two look at her admiringly.

I printed her face on a printer-ready fabric sheet after calculating the size I would need to make it.

Everything got more complicated than necessary because I planned to put K on the right side. I cut out the pink princess ( is that Elsa or Anna?) before I realised that that would make my darling Princess K an ‘outsider’ because the other two had interlocked arms.

So I disengaged their arms and locked them with Princess K’s who moved to the centre. Ah, that’s the way I like it. The Disney Princesses look at her admiringly ( and a bit enviously?). The Resident Consultant did not think much of my original idea of a silver dress for his Princess. So I retained the silver yoke and made her blue dress from…a rayon grocery bag! ( Jaipur is a big exporter of women’s clothing. With single use plastic being banned in India, our shopkeepers are using bags made from export-surplus fabric and export-reject dresses).

The quilting was kept to a minimum. ( Also because I had just over a couple of hours for the quilting and finishing). I folded the lighter pink border to the back of the quilted piece, leaving the darker plum inner border to frame the quilt. No binding. The top border became the sleeve.

Not that my Princess minded the short-cuts taken to finish her portrait! She couldn’t believe what she saw.

“How? wow! how? wow…”, she exclaimed!

And here is the Princess herself, posing with her quilted wall-hanging.

Princess K loves her quilt!

Now that done, I have to decide what comes up next!

A Small Delay in Block Two…

Happy Independence Day to all Indians across the globe!
Not very good news at my end this morning. My laptop is bothering me no end! It has a screen all stretched out – just looking at which is driving me crazy. And the wi-fi is not working.
To get back to the beginning, it crashed a week ago back and had a lot of “bad sectors”. I got it back from the service centre with a new hard drive this morning. Thankfully, they have managed to save all the data, which includes all the detailed designs and templates for the Round the Year Quilt. (All except the photos, which they are still extracting from the old drive! I have my fingers crossed – that drive has all my pictures from the last ten years!)
But it seems they put in the wrong ‘driver’ and the screen resolution is all wrong. And they can’t find the appropriate ‘driver’ for the broadband! They have connected it to the net through a cable, but that is painfully slow. I can take a short nap in the time it takes to move from one page to the next!
To cut a long story short, you are not going to get the pattern for the second block of the Round the Year quilt until I can get it in some kind of working order!
This is being posted from my iPad, by the way!

While you wait and I can master my ill temper and get working on that laptop again, here are two more gorgeous Dahlias and a divine lotus that some very talented ladies have made! Enjoy!

Tina Katwal's White Lotus
The sacred White Lotus by Tina Katwal
Diptee's Gem - the Torquoise Dahlia
Diptee Raut’s Dahlia in soft aquas
Sobana's Indigo Dahlia
The Indigo Dahlia(or `Nilopatal’ as she like to call it) by Sobana Sundar

Dusk Dreamcatcher Round the Year Quilt : Fabric Requirement – Downloadable file

Dusk Round the Year

I had this horrible nightmare last night, where I had given the wrong fabric requirements for the “Round the Year” Block of the Month I am hosting! In the morning, I checked, but all seems to be okay, except the requirement for 36″  background fabric which I increased to 3.5 metres from the more conservative 3.25 metres.

I also saw a request on my blog for a downloadable file for the fabric requirement, which I think is a great idea.  As there are at least two `official’  colourways, to avoid confusion, I am calling the blue- orange -yellow version “Dusk Round the Year” !

I am so fascinated by the wonderful colours  that the setting sun paints across the skies – the brilliant oranges, golds and yellows – colours that can be rarely matched on canvas.   Some may claim that sunrises are equally beautiful, but being a late riser I am rarely up in time to appreciate those.   My quilt is, I hope, going to be evocative of  languid monsoon evenings – grey clouds looming while the blues, more brilliant than ever after the rains, struggle to make their presence felt  before the indigo darkness prevails!

Evening at the Pond Evening at the Pond

I do so ramble on, don’t I? So without much further ado, here is the Fabric Requirement -Round the Year – Dusk !

You will need Adobe Reader (available free online) on your laptop to be able to view this file.

For those of you planning to make the `Rainbow’ version of the quilt, I hope to be able to post the requirements by tomorrow.

Please note that the patterns and instruction files for the quilt blocks are being migrated to my store MadsPatch.company.site and will not be available for download here from 15th November 2020 onwards.

What You Can Do With A Single Quilt Block…

…and why you are going to enjoy this Block of the Month!

I am one of those people who jump headlong into a project and the enthusiasm peters out in no time. I often don’t start a great looking new quilt, because I don’t know if I’ll finish it. Who doesn’t hate the thought of adding to those sad orphan blocks calling out to them to do something, anything with them!? Besides, what a waste of money and effort, which most of us cannot readily spare. I don’t want that to happen to any of you lovely people out there who embark on “Round the Year”, my Block of the Month Quilt! So I decided to pattern all my blocks to be versatile, stand alone blocks. At any stage, you can say, “Okay, that’s enough, I am not going to make any more of these!” (Though I do hope you won’t!). There are lots of ways you can use them, just as many as you end up with. I was playing around with my laptop and here are the options I came up with. (One of the advantages is that we have fairly big blocks which finish at 18″ with a 15″ inset circle.)

So what if you decide to make only one block?

Quilt it and make into a small table topper 18″ square. Incidentally, this is a test block made by my online quilter friend Nikhat Syeda– hasn’t she done a marvellous job? Reduce the size of the square to 15″, which is a great size for cushion cover. You could make a set of cushion covers depending on how many blocks you end up with. Add a border, quilt it to make a stunner of a wall hanging! Another quilter friend Sobana tested the same block. (She has even blogged about it here – you must see the other wonderful work she has done!). She is going to use it as the centre of a quilt she is planning! I am waiting to see what she comes up with – but this does give you an idea of what you can do with a single block! I almost forgot to remind you of what I did with a single block – in fact , with a little less than a single block… I skipped the outer square and quilted the pieced circle into a pretty, round table top.   This is my friend Aliya Mir’s test block , which I have photoshopped to show you the look. Well, tomorrow evening I give the fabric requirements for the full quilt, do tune in! But before that, tomorrow morning I am experimenting with various quilt layouts here on this blog!