Terry Aske Art Quilt Studio

Merry Christmas to all!  I hope everyone is snug and safe, and having a wonderful day.  Here’s a collage of Christmas quilted creations I’ve made over the years.

There’s a new portrait quilt taking shape on my design wall.  As usual, I ‘posterized’ the original photo to get the value differences.  (Here’s a tutorial about the process I use.)

I wanted 5 values of skin-tone fabric for this portrait.  I have some great pinky-beige fabric in several values, but was missing a good medium value fabric (the one I used on the forehead and right side of the face).  I tea-dyed some fabric that was the right value, but just a little too pink – it gave it the perfect skin color.  The original fabric is in the middle.  I’m using the fabric dyed with English Breakfast tea.  (Here’s more information about how I tea-dye fabrics.)

This is what my design wall looks like right now.  I have several versions of the photo as reference – the original, a ‘posterized’ version, a ‘boosted’ version (to bring out the colors of the eyes), and a black & white ‘posterized’ version on which I drew the lines to separate the values.   At the bottom is the full-size pattern (14 x 11 inches).  Most of the fabric pieces aren’t fused yet, so the lines between the fabrics are shadows that will disappear when they are ironed and fused.   I’m going to experiment with some different fabrics for the shadowed area around the eye, before proceeding to the mouth and the hair.

I belong to a group of textile and fiber artists – TAFA.   One of our members has put together a blog post featuring Christmas decor items made by TAFA members.  That’s my Modern Christmas Trees table runner at the bottom of the mosaic.

I’m linking up with the Needle & Thread Network for WiP Wednesday.  (I missed the deadline this week to link up with the other two blogs.)  Click on the buttons below to see all the creative people participating and check out the projects they’re working on.

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This quilt came together so quickly – and I love it!  As I said last week, this idea has been in my head since I first saw the IKEA fabric.  On the test piece I made last week, I wasn’t entirely happy with my skinny inserts, because I was envisioning a much more precise graphic look.  (I’ll use that technique for a more wonky, improve circle quilt.)  I recalled that I had some fusible 1/4″ bias tape left from this quilt – that was the look I wanted and it looked so good with the black and white fabrics.

My initial concept was big circles of the IKEA fabric with lots of other text fabrics – mostly black and white and gray with a few accents of bright colors.  As you can see, that idea morphed into IKEA text fabric with bright colors and black and white lines.  I’ll save the multiple text idea for the future.

I drew a 6 x 6 inch layout, then multiplied all the measurements by 6, so the quilt would be 36 x 36 inches.  I taped two lengths of freezer paper together to get a 36 x 36 inch square.  I drew my circles on the dull side of the paper using this technique.  I found it impossible to stick the pin in my cutting mat, so I moved the cutting mat to the bedroom carpet, put the freezer paper on the mat, and pushed the pin into the carpet.  My only challenge was that I hadn’t marked the center of each circle on my small drawing, so I had to experiment to find where to put the pin for each circle.

I sewed it together using the same technique I used for my Boston with Love flags.  It went together really quickly.

I’m linking up with these blogs for WiP Wednesday.  Click on the buttons below to see all the creative people participating and check out the projects they’re working on.