My Train Jumped the Track

I was making good progress on my two large leaf quilts when I got BADLY distracted.  The culprit was the book  Serendipity, by Susan Carlson.  In it she explains her fabric collage techniques.  In many ways they’re the same as my own, but with a much higher level of tiny details.  It was all SO intriguing and I just had to give it a try.  “BAM!  SCREECH!” The sounds of my leaf train derailing.

I pretty much never switch gears once I start on a quilt, but this time I did so quite gleefully.  I searched my photos for inspiration and decided to work with a photo of three tomatoes.  I tweaked the composition and will probably do some more down the road.

Susan typically constructs her design elements as stand-alone units.  This enables her to move them around later and to easily audition background options when the time comes.  So, I followed suit and drew a  20″ tomato.

I drew the design onto muslin with a Frixion (heat-way) pen.  The mini iron was my “eraser.”

The idea is to fill the shape with the proper VALUE, leaving the detail areas as cutouts.

This was my first draft as I was nearing completion of the red fabrics.  The space was covered, but it was lacking some finesse.

I switched the light spot from yellow to pink.  But, it still looked pretty chunky.

Next, I started fiddling with the details.  Susan explained the basics in her book, about how to soften any hard edges.  From studying her blog and website, I could also see that she often cut little motifs from her fabrics and used them to merge the colors and patterns better.  Like this.

Instead of abruptly cutting off a motif, soften the edge by continuing it onto the next fabric.

Well, that sort of thing is totally addicting!  AND it adds a lot of interest to the piece, as well as softening hard edges.

Here it is after a ton of fiddling (with the leaves still showing as cutouts.)  Much better, right?

I’m really having a lot of fun working this way.  Perhaps it will become too persnickety for me in the future.  We’ll see.

On to those twisty little leaves.

Ellen Lindner
P.S.  I’ve made several other quilts featuring produce.  Like  Mangolicious.
P.P.S.  Did you know you can susbscribe to my blog?  When doing so, you’ll get every post in  your email inbox.  Just click the Subscribe button, top right.