Falling in Love — A Portrait Quilt

A portrait quilt—all in colour—of a joyful young couple, using fabric collage against a pieced background, with lots of thread-painting.

Last year, a dear friend entrusted me with the task of making a wedding anniversary gift for her daughter (whom I shall simply call A). It was to be a portrait of A and her husband, to be called, what else, H!

I chose to combine two pictures, taking the gorgeous couple’s faces and figures from one and placing them against a background of a yellow maple tree during fall. The couple had met and fallen in love in Canada, so this seemed only appropriate!

The quilt which turned out to be much more difficult than what I had envisaged. For one, both of my subjects were smiling broadly!

That gorgeous smile!
H’s smile Falling in Love portrait quilt

H’ s eyes were behind his glasses and getting that shading right is always a problem.

Details of the thread painting!

H had a delightful dimple, but how do I portray that in a fabric collage? Not to forget getting that beard right.

The full face —with the dimple!

Then there was A’s beautiful long shiny, silky hair with highlights in reds, auburn like the colours of fall around her!

Glowing with happiness!

Let us not forget the clothes and the accessories.

Details of A’s leather jacket with its zipper
The Adidas strap!

The maple tree in the background was not easy!

The maple tree in fall—I appliquéd some branches and leaf cut-outs randomly on the pieced background

I wanted to show some sunlight peeping through the tree, to reflect the joy on this couple’s face.

The sky peeps out from between the yellow leaves.

Despite the long, long hours it took, it was all worth it and I had quite a sense of satisfaction and achievement when it was finally done! ( I do not recall exactly the dimensions of the quilt, but I vaguely remember it was about 32” x 40”)

So I now leave you with a couple of videos of the quilt.

Falling in Love— the gorgeous couple! May they continue to smile together lifetime after lifetime!

I hope A and H love the quilt as much as I enjoyed making it.

Quilted Bookmarks!

This is what I have been busy with over the last few days! All scraps from previous quilts, except the green background fabric for some of these. I hope the recipients of these gifts will enjoy using them as much as I enjoyed making them!
This first one is foundation paper pieced. The free pattern is on this blog. I did plan to bind it, but felt to lazy to do so eventually!

Rose stem – foundation paper pieced…the free pattern is available on this blog.

The rest of the book marks are all raw edge appliqué, free motion quilted. I used Heat’n’Bond on some shapes. Other shapes – I just cut them out from plain fabric, put a drop of school glue on them and placed them on the background and ironed to make them stay. Free motion quilting was done to join them to the background.

This next one is the peepul or Bodhi tree; I used invisible thread for the quilting.

Bodhi Tree book mark – raw edge appliqué!

Yellow poppies…I used Derwent ink pencils to add interest to the back!

The yellow poppies magically become red from the back with the help of some ink!

All my bright and beautiful Fossil Fern fabric scraps coming to good use here…

What flowers are these? Poppies again? Your guess is as good as mine!

Up next, two daisies, yellow from the front, purple from the back.

I loved using up so many scraps; some as tiny as half inch!

This one here is a snapshot of a field of yellow daisies. Again, I used Derwent ink pencils to shade and define the flowers and stems. (In case you are wondering why there is no pic of the back, it is because I haven’t added anything there!)

Such a cheerful bookmark, wouldn’t you say?

And the last one is my absolute favourite – a field of red poppies! I like the back too, with splashes of red ink to indicate the  flowers!

A field of red poppies, standing tall; this one is my absolute favourite!

There are a few more still being made; I thought I would take a break and share these with you!

Why don’t you also put your teenie meenie scraps to some good use? What pretty gifts these make!

A Quilted French Rose …

   I have been gathering some Kaffe Fasset fabrics and scrolling Pinterest and the Internet  for a suitable pattern to showcase the gorgeousness. And then, a few weeks a beautiful quilt showed up on my Pinterest! The French Rose quilt pattern by Heather French was used to make a delicious quilt in  Fasset fabrics. I wanted that for my daughter. 

The pattern is available on Amazon, but not in downloadable format nor do they ship to India!  Needing instant gratification, I had to draft my own pattern. 

 

The drafted pattern.
 
I cut out some fabric from my stash to see if the pattern would work…

 

I added an extra petal ring to the original four in the Heather French pattern
 
The Rose is about 6″ on a 10″ square. I made a sandwich with the batting and backing and straight stitched 1/4″ inside from the outer edge, using a walking foot. I zigzagged the inner edge, just to secure the ring better. 

  
In no time I was done with the flower and did some echo quilting around it. I trimmed it down to 9″ so that one width of the green fabric would suffice for the binding.  But look at what I discovered as I reached the last edge of my binding! 

 

Discovered a tear on the binding!
 
There was a tear in the binding fabric! This is how I got around that!

 

A petal stuck on the binding to hide the tear!
 
And so we were done. 

 

Before soaking overnight.
 
I soaked it in water overnight to fray the edges, but…we were not yet done! Discovered this the next morning! 

 

A stain on the washed quilt
 
A stain that wouldn’t go away. Simple enough to handle, right?  Just stick a leaf on top! 

 

A ‘falling’ leaf hides a stain in the little quilt!
 
So here it is, my little French Rose quilt – with falling leaf and petal! Sweet, isn’t it? Can’t wait to get the Dreamcatcher quilt over and done with so that I can start on this one.

   

The littleFrench Rose quilt inspired by Heather French’s pattern