Dilys The Quilt: BLOG 242

BLOG 242 Sunday April 5^th

Happy Easter! Another holiday weekend is upon us and, luckily, some lovely weather has arrived with it too. This leaves me with a bit if a quandary … garden or craft room? … craft room or garden? The craft room wins hands down because of course I have an exhibition looming and unfinished items that need finishing. And, to use my favourite expression, I felt another quilt coming on …!!! This time I decided to work on a turtle. These were often seen during our time when we worked on remote islands in the South Pacific 40 odd years ago. We even brought back a turtle shell as a souvenir and it hangs on our bathroom door as a constant reminder of those wonderful days. I must add here that the local people used to habitually catch turtles for food and the shells were often sold to the expatriates. This artefact proved invaluable when drawing the Master pattern.

Turtle shell

I sketched some shapes initially referring to Google images for inspiration.

Sketches

Then I drafted one of them to size as the Master pattern. This time I chose to include regular wavy bricks for the wall.

Master pattern

I chose 2 fabrics that I thought might work together.

Chosen fabrics

I made a template for the wall which made it easier to prepare the fusible shapes for the bricks.

Template for bricks

I was able to bash on with the bricks and soon they were all completed and pinned onto a working copy of the pattern. Then I started to make progress on the shell of the turtle and I realised straight away that I didn’t like the fabric that I had chosen.

Wall

Back to the stash for another root about and, as luck would have it, I found an ideal fabric; one that looked like it was fragmented already, like a mosaic.

Ideal fabric

I used larger pieces for the shell and continued to fragment it wherever else I used it. I felt as though I was making good progress.

Progress

More progress

Whilst I was working on this, I had my granddaughter here for a sleep-over and she has been dying to get into my craft room for ages. From the windows she could see colours, and fabrics and threads and a multitude of things to fiddle with! After much pleading I took her in there and set her off on a project using my leftover ready-fused bits of fabric. I put a small piece of batting onto a sponge block, gave her some pins and told her to cover the batting, making sure that the fusible layer went against the batting. When she ran out of pins, I ironed the fabric pieces to stick them to the batting and to release the pins again. This is what she did in half hour. I am so proud of her and thrilled that she is interested in being creative.

Ella’s art

Back to the turtle and you will notice a great difference between what I had on my design wall one day and what I changed it to the next day. Going back to my original concept for these hangings, in my mind’s eye I envisaged the animal/creature coming out of the wall subtly and I certainly hadn’t achieved that with this hanging. I liked the shell and fragmented flippers, but little else. The face and neck were too light and the bricks were a contrast rather than a gentle transition.

Revised version

Here you can see how differently the hanging looks now before fusing and I like it much better. One more thing to be done before it goes onto batting for quilting, those two irritating and almost white shapes just above the turtles head! They look like 2 sticky-up ears!! You probably wouldn’t have noticed them but once you have seen them, they leap out every time you look at the quilt!