TIF January 2008 - Part II

Thank you to everyone who left comments on the 'Take in Forward January 2008-Part I' post I wrote two weeks ago. I really appreciate and enjoy reading your thoughts. There's alot happening among the challenge participants including a good bit of action on the TIF flickr pool as well as links to participating bloggers in the comments here. It's a real pleasure to browse around and see what other people have come up with working from the same starting point. Although, I've probably bitten off a bit more than I can chew in one month, I'm pleased with the way my piece is developing. I'm already getting antsy to do the quilting, a sure sign that I am feeling a strong connection to the work that is unfolding. Below are photos with a brief description of what I've done so far.

Pieced together three windows to place in the background of the quilt. I wanted decreasing sizes of windows to give a senseof depth to the wide open space in the center of the piece but somehow I didn't manage this. So I'll work with these. Next time I would use patterns for this to get staggered sizes.

These are two of the windows set into the background fabric. They are fused from underneath with wonder-under. This is the first time I have used this product and I like the result.

I traced silhouettes of flying birds onto freezer paper and ironed these onto the fabric. I mixed up some acrylic paint in a pale turquoise colour which I thought would give the feeling of light reflecting off white birds high in the sky.

After looking at this for awhile I decided that these birds by themselves were too light so I threw a second darker group of birds into the mix.

Here is the same piece of freezer paper, re-ironed onto the fabric and painted with a darker grey paint.

This is the quilt top so far. I have been thinking of calling it: 'There is something of 'God' in the Ninth of Beethoven: Homage to Etty Hillesum', or maybe just 'Homage to Etty Hillesum'.

Work in progress, detail

Next steps:

1) Create a sense of dense brush in the lower part of the fabric using both layered acrylic silhouettes of dead wood and underbrush, and by quilting large thorny vines into the forefront of the piece.

2) Batt, back and baste.

3) Quilt first around the windows and birds by hand, then add machine quilting to bring out the lines in the brush. Finally quilt two lines of barbed wire across the bottom half of the piece, always leaving the top half open. The last bit of quilting will probably be to free-motion machine stipple any remaining open spaces.

Related Post: TIF January 2008 - Part I