Sew2Speak

This is what I was doing this Sunday, when I wasn’t bullying Sqeze into taking the photos for my last post. It is for the final activity in Module 1 of my C&G course. I was to do a piece of free appliqué based on a portion of or the whole painting of the pumpkin. Well I decided to base mine on just a part of the painting:

This section still contains all the colours from the painting, but I liked the proportion of the different colours one to another in it. Seeing it without the white background also affects how you perceive it. It became obvious that it didn’t need a pale background.

Here is the finished appliqué. The strips are just fixed with Bondaweb at the moment.

The finished size at the moment is 45 x 33 cm. The strips are about 1cm wide, some a little narrower and some almost twice as wide. The background fabric is a piece from one of my dyeing classes at QU. It’s amazing how at some point in time you find a use for all the fabric you dye, even the pieces which were a “failure” at the time (not that I considered this piece a failure). The strips are all commercial prints and batiks. They almost all came from my box of scraps. It was pleasing to be able to use them too. A reward for becoming a hoarder!

I decided to keep the 2 areas of colour separated because the inside and the outside of the pumpkin are such different colour schemes. The shape is roughly the shape of the pumpkin too. I didn’t set out to make an abstract pumpkin but looking at the painting the ideas just came. Then I pulled out my box of scraps and started choosing the fabrics. It just went on from there. I chose to cut strips because the skin of the pumpkin is striped green and pale yellow. I also remembered seeing a matchstick quilt by Melody Johnson at the Quilt Expo in Lyon in 2006. Not that my strips are matchstick sized, but I think it influenced me to leave the gaps between the strips, which had the advantage that you can still see the background fabric which I like and didn’t want to cover up completely.

In the next module we will be continuing to work on it. So I am curious to see what we do next. It was an interesting series of exercises to see how you can go from a pumpkin to a painting to a colour scheme and end up with an appliqué design. I’ve read about the idea in some of my books on quilt design but hadn’t put it into practise myself. So again I’ve learnt that you have to actually do things and not just read about them to get the maximum benefit.