Newest Face Quilt

I've been working on this little quilt off and on for a week or two. I finished it this morning. The face and the flower are my designs; the cat is a Darcy Ashton pattern from her book Claire's Cats Volume II. I wish the cat showed up better from the background. As always, if you click on the picture, you can see it bigger.

Second Finished Face Quilt

This quilt is only 6 X 6, while my last one was 12 X 12. Making the face that much smaller made it much harder, in my opinion. So I don't think I'll be making any more faces this small. But I think she turned out ok. The flowers are silk flowers stitched in the centers, and the edges are satin stitched. I'm having a lot of fun learning to paint faces! It's amazing how different each one is. The 12 X 12 quilt in the last post was made for a swap, and this one is a small gift to the swap hostess. Hope she likes it!

Finished!

She's finished. She is for a swap hosted by Lenna Andrews of Creative Swaps. I added eyelashes, darkened the outer edges of her irises, and fixed the mouth to make it more even on both sides. I finished the edges a little differently on this - I couched a piece of yarn to the top edge, and then I painted the side edge. I also rounded the corners a bit to make the couching easier. I'm already working on my next one - I can see that this may become addictive!

Faces on Fabric

We got our lesson for painting our face today, and I worked on mine right away. The white highlights you see in the photo are not as bright in the quilt as they are in the photo. I'm really happy with how this turned out. I HIGHLY recommend this class by Terri Stegmiller if you have any interest in learning to paint faces on fabric - Terri is an excellent teacher. We still have one more lesson on finishing techniques, but I've made enough quilts that I may go ahead and finish mine this week.

Face Quilt

Progress on my face quilt - I'm actually caught up now. At least until the next lesson comes out on Monday. That will be painting the face. You can't tell in the photo, but the petals are loose - only stitched down in the centers. I also just realized that the flowers are HUGE in relation to the size of her face!

The white line around the edges is the approximate trimming line - I like to make things a bit bigger and trim them down to size, but I also like to see what the actual size will be. This one will be 12 X 12, because that's the size required in the swap that this is for. I'm going to hate to send this away, but the quilts that have been received by the swap hostess to date are all wonderful, so I'm sure I'll get something even better in return!

Faces on Fabric

I worked on the Faces on Fabric class today that I'm taking from Terri Stegmiller. I've got my face fused to the background:



We're going to be adding stitching in the next lesson and painting in the lesson after that.

I'm going to be adding flowers on the right side of the quilt.



I fused two fabrics wrong sides together and cut out some petal shapes. I hooped a water soluble sticky stabilizer and attached the petals (if you didn't have a sticky, you could use a spray adhesive, but the sticky makes it easier). Then I free motion stitched around the edges of the petals and in the centers. That's as far as I've gotten, but the next step is to remove the stabilizer. Then I will put a vase with stems to the right of the face (I haven't chosen my vase fabric yet, nor have I named my girl). The petals will be attached to the tops of the stems in the centers only so that the flowers will be 3D. I will also probably put some beads or crystals or french knots or something in the centers of the flowers.

Ultimately, this quilt will be sent to Lenna Andrews for her Fabric Techniques 12X12 swap. This is the first time I've participated in one of Lenna's swaps, but they look really good. The deadline isn't until April 22, and she's already received 3 quilts. I would be happy to have any of the 3 she's received so far. We have a couple of trips planned in the next few weeks, so I'll be working on this quilt every chance I have in order to have it finished in plenty of time to get it mailed by the deadline.

And speaking of trips, we're leaving in the morning to visit our son and daughter-in-law in Minneapolis. It's a lot colder there than it is here in Oklahoma! I just hope we don't hit any bad weather on the road. I was making them a quilt, and I finally finished it over the weekend. I'll try to take a picture of it with them and post it from there. I had hoped to finish it much earlier, but I was having trouble with my sewing machine. I solved that problem last week by trading my machine in for a new one. The problem was in the electronics of the machine, and the repairman was just going to have to start replacing circuit boards one at a time until the problem was fixed. As he was telling me this, all I could think of was a car we had several years ago that had an intermittent problem that we were never able to fix. After spending much money trying to get it fixed, we were told the next item to replace was the computer. That's when we decided to trade cars. I didn't want to start down that path again (you know - been there, done that).

Two More Faces

This is the face I drew yesterday:



And this is the face I drew today:



I think this last one may be my new favorite.

Faces

I didn't have a chance to post yesterday, but I did draw a face - it's my favorite one yet.



And here is the one I did today. I'm still struggling a bit with the mouths. Yesterday's is a bit better to me. But this is really good practice - and I'm proud that I've drawn at least one face every day. It's been really fun to see what the other students are doing too.



Terri created a Flickr group for us to post our progress, so if you're interested, you can see more faces here. There aren't a lot of faces there yet, but I'm sure we'll all be adding to the group over the next few weeks.

2 More Faces

Since I signed up for the Faces on Fabric class, I've decided to draw at least one face every day, at least until the next lesson comes out next Monday. So far, I've drawn more than one face each day; here are the two I drew today. Since they will be turned into fabric, that's why the hair on the second one looks the way it does - each section will be a separate piece of fabric. I'm thinking about taking my watercolor pencils to these.

Faces

I drew 2 more faces today. Practice, practice, practice!

Faces on Fabric

OK, these aren't on fabric, but that's the name of the class I'm taking from Terri Stegmiller that started yesterday (I know, I'm addicted to online classes). We're starting out by sketching faces on paper - we'll work up to getting them onto fabric in the next few lessons. I've never really drawn faces before, so I don't think these are too bad. I know I need LOTS of practice, but hey - these are my first 3 faces!! They look weird because I drew them with a 3H pencil (very light line) in my Moleskine sketchbook, which has cream colored pages, meaning there wasn't enough contrast to see them very well in the scan. I desaturated them in Photoshop so that you could see them at all.