A Precious Memory…Mother-Daughter Quilted Portrait

From 2019 is this quilted portrait, meant as a gift for a daughter who had lost her mother…a precious memory from happier times, stitched onto fabric…

I made this quilt as a gift for someone who wanted to gift it to a friend who had recently lost her beloved mother to cancer…

I began with a coloured image, simplified it by removing the background and cropping it to focus on the faces, converting it to black and white and playing around with the contrast till I had an image that held your attention. I then posterised it on Pinetools, a free website, where you can do several great things with your pics online!

Here are some of the steps of the collage and quilting process…

In the absence of a design wall, I worked on a thermocol board!

I used the freezer paper method for the collage. I printed one copy of the posterised image full size on regular paper and glued it together. This is the guide. Since there were two figures, I worked on them one at a time.

I printed another copy of the image on freezer paper and cut out pieces from it, use them as templates to build the collage on muslin.

Building up the mother’s image…

You can see that I have skipped the really tiny curves on the templates. I was working only with glue, no fusible, so this was the way to go. If you have your fabric prepped with two-way fusible, you can cut out much finer detail on your templates.

The coloured clothes add interest to the monochromatic collage.

The figures are assembled and time to start on the quilting. I chose a dark background so that focus stayed on the mother-daughter duo.

Contour quilting…
The mother is done, except for a tiny detail…
That blue earring adds a lovely 3-D effect to the quilt
The quilting for the daughter’s hair

And an earring for the daughter too!

Something to jazz up the daughter…
I was really happy with that striped t-shirt, which was also collaged.
I shaded out the quilting on the background too

Though the background quilting was a simple meander, I shaded it out from the figures, changing threads from black, through blues to white.

Here is the back!

Admire the quilting from the back!

And here is the final quilt!

A Precious Memory

Hope you enjoyed looking at the process as much as at the final product!

To my quilter friends, Happy Quilting!

First Look – Quilting the Round the Year Dreamcatcher Quilt!

  
A lot of hiccups initially, but I think we are on our way…

Of Blocks and Bees…and Some Honey!

My facebook quilting group Desi Quilters started a virtual bee in July this year! For the first two months, I requested some fellow quilters to make my blocks while I was visiting my son in the USA.

For September, the ever-gracious Vidya  was the queen bee and she decided to wait for me! She had a long wait, as I did not have white poplin and she wanted a lot of negative space in her block!  And a lot of squares…Her block has finally been sent on Monday , as have the blocks for the next 3 months!

This is Vidya’s block . I played around with the squares till I found an arrangement I liked for her modern block. It was the first time I ironed the seams flat and I found it difficult to match the seams – with so many squares to take care of!

Bee block for Vidya
Modern block with squares

The queen bee for October was the gorgeous, artistic Brinda. Brinda’s block(s) gave me much heart ache and I am not very happy with what I came up with finally 🙁 I have only small floral print fabric in my stash and she wanted polaroid picture blocks! Anyways, this is what I made for her…

IMG_1270

November Queen Bee was the gentle Nirmala. She wanted sail boats for her block party. That was a quick make! I only read later that she wanted only solids for it 🙁 But since she was okay with it when I showed it to her, I mailed it to her anyways!

Bee Block - Sail Boat
Sail boat for Nirmala’s Bee

The last block was for the Star of our group,Elvira! Elvira has a wonderful eye for colour and sews oh, so neatly! And this was the block that gave me the maximum trouble. First I cut it wrong, then I sewed it wrong.  I ran out of black thread, and the thread that I found was really linty. Nevertheless, I managed to  finish it and post it – for the first time, in time! This is Elvira’s Double Star Block. The colours are slightly darker than what they appear here. I just hope she does not look at it from the back 😉

A double star for Elvira's Bee
Flying geese double star for Elvira’s Bee

So that was about the bees and the blocks! What about the honey? I shall post about that later today…