I've gotten a lot of my Animal Quilt done and I'm ready to begin the borders. I had this grand idea to make the borders 10" wide and make one with an arctic, savannah and jungle theme with additional paintings of animals but this seemed really daunting to me for some reason. Maybe because they're quite large? I didn't want to screw them up and have to start over? I dunno, but for whatever reason I was dreading doing them. I am really struggling to get excited about them. They're big, complicated animal/nature scenes and I'm worried about them. Period. Just worried about them.
I also keep going back to the footprint theme. I thought before I would have footprints that would fade away as the animal progressed showing that the animal is disappearing. Then I thought I would simply put the footprints of the animals on the back of the quilt. At least they would be somewhere, right?
After sleeping on the problem, I thought I should figure out something else for the borders. And I don't why I hadn't thought of this before but it would've saved me a great deal of worrying. Footprints. I can put the fading footprints around the border.
So I decided to paint more fabric and quilt the footprints on the border and paint them black, gray and light gray and see how that works out. And I think my border will be 6" wide instead of 10". That should give me enough room for footprints and keeps the attention on the animals and it sends the message that these animals are endangered. So win, win all around! I'm really pleased with this idea and my excitement is back!
I've cut my fabric and I've decided to go with "ground" colors. Mostly, browns, greens, yellows and once they dry, I need to work on the footprints.
I've been thinking about the footprints or animal tracks. I'd like to show them fading or disappearing. So how do I do that? How to get the best results without ruining the fabric I painted? I think that's the most challenging part of making something that's not a pattern out of a book. You have to visualize the end result of if you do something one way vs. another and that's not easy. For example, I could draw the animal tracks on my painted fabric, quilt them and then add black ink to the print to make it stand out or I could draw, ink then quilt it. Which would give me better results? Would the ink bleed too much into the surrounding color? Would it look bad - black bleeding into green or yellow? Could I control the bleeding? Experience tells me - not really. I could use a less liquid like product like Inktense pencils. They go one like a color pencil but you lightly get it wet to make it more inky but you have more control. But the color isn't as intense as inks and probably wouldn't cover another color well and just look muddy. So how else to get the tracks on the fabric? I could dye more fabric black, gray, light gray and cut out the prints, fuse them down then quilt them. That would eliminate bleeding and I would have control. This is a lot more work but probably the best.
So I tried it. I had my Cameo cut out a wolf (or dog) paw prints just to see how it would look. I dyed some fabric, cut it and laid the paw prints out on my borders and I hated it. It just looked like gray blobs that didn't really work against the colors I had. I could dye more fabric in brownish colors and that may have worked better but I wanted to make some progress so I went back to the idea of drawing them on myself.
This time I used the oil paint sticks. I roughly sketched out the paw print with my frixon pen and then used a stiff bristled stencil bush and worked the color into the outline I drew. I used wolf, cat, rhino, bear and giraffe prints. After the ink set overnight, I tossed them into the dryer for 30 minutes on high heat. That took off the frixon pen markings and my paw prints look more like they are a part of the border. Like an animal just walked across the ink colored border when it was wet. Some prints are darker and some are really light and hard to see, which is what I was going for.
I quilted around the foot prints and did a simple meader stitch down the rest of the border working around the foot prints. My painting and drawing skills are much more advanced than my sewing/quilting skills that's for sure.
I still need to re-touch some areas but as you can see from the pic below at least one border has been sewn on. I'm in the home stretch of getting this quilt done!
I also keep going back to the footprint theme. I thought before I would have footprints that would fade away as the animal progressed showing that the animal is disappearing. Then I thought I would simply put the footprints of the animals on the back of the quilt. At least they would be somewhere, right?
After sleeping on the problem, I thought I should figure out something else for the borders. And I don't why I hadn't thought of this before but it would've saved me a great deal of worrying. Footprints. I can put the fading footprints around the border.
So I decided to paint more fabric and quilt the footprints on the border and paint them black, gray and light gray and see how that works out. And I think my border will be 6" wide instead of 10". That should give me enough room for footprints and keeps the attention on the animals and it sends the message that these animals are endangered. So win, win all around! I'm really pleased with this idea and my excitement is back!
I've cut my fabric and I've decided to go with "ground" colors. Mostly, browns, greens, yellows and once they dry, I need to work on the footprints.
I've been thinking about the footprints or animal tracks. I'd like to show them fading or disappearing. So how do I do that? How to get the best results without ruining the fabric I painted? I think that's the most challenging part of making something that's not a pattern out of a book. You have to visualize the end result of if you do something one way vs. another and that's not easy. For example, I could draw the animal tracks on my painted fabric, quilt them and then add black ink to the print to make it stand out or I could draw, ink then quilt it. Which would give me better results? Would the ink bleed too much into the surrounding color? Would it look bad - black bleeding into green or yellow? Could I control the bleeding? Experience tells me - not really. I could use a less liquid like product like Inktense pencils. They go one like a color pencil but you lightly get it wet to make it more inky but you have more control. But the color isn't as intense as inks and probably wouldn't cover another color well and just look muddy. So how else to get the tracks on the fabric? I could dye more fabric black, gray, light gray and cut out the prints, fuse them down then quilt them. That would eliminate bleeding and I would have control. This is a lot more work but probably the best.
So I tried it. I had my Cameo cut out a wolf (or dog) paw prints just to see how it would look. I dyed some fabric, cut it and laid the paw prints out on my borders and I hated it. It just looked like gray blobs that didn't really work against the colors I had. I could dye more fabric in brownish colors and that may have worked better but I wanted to make some progress so I went back to the idea of drawing them on myself.
This time I used the oil paint sticks. I roughly sketched out the paw print with my frixon pen and then used a stiff bristled stencil bush and worked the color into the outline I drew. I used wolf, cat, rhino, bear and giraffe prints. After the ink set overnight, I tossed them into the dryer for 30 minutes on high heat. That took off the frixon pen markings and my paw prints look more like they are a part of the border. Like an animal just walked across the ink colored border when it was wet. Some prints are darker and some are really light and hard to see, which is what I was going for.
I quilted around the foot prints and did a simple meader stitch down the rest of the border working around the foot prints. My painting and drawing skills are much more advanced than my sewing/quilting skills that's for sure.
I still need to re-touch some areas but as you can see from the pic below at least one border has been sewn on. I'm in the home stretch of getting this quilt done!
Girl, you mess with my brain. Of late, I have struggled to sew a simple stitch, and you create these wonderful quilts. And come up with innovative ideas that I wouldn't even know how to think up. I am impressed again. You should have had a sewing machine twenty hears ago. Think what you would have accomplished by now. Impressive Lisa, dear, quite impressive.
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