bluemeadowdesigns

Extra post
I knew it was bound to happen, and sure enough it did. I used the same quilt twice during our 100 Days of Quilts. But nothing gets past Karen! We might have to add 'fact checker' to her long resume of things that she does for us.

So I decided to add an extra quilt into the mix, and I am sure that NO ONE has seen this one. It's not a true quilt, but rather a very large wallhanging - 4' x 8' to be exact.

Last year our Church reach it's 70th anniversary, and we have also had a large addition built on - and so, someone on a committee thought that we should make a hanging to commemorate all of these milestones. Whenever the Church needs a banner, they ask my mother. And whenever my mother needs something designed, she volunteers me to do it.

I really stuggled with this project for most of last summer. I felt the pressure of designing something 'nice looking' but that would reflect our Church's past. So after much debate and annalysys, we decided to represent the buildings, and to use a timeline to show who worked in the Church, but what we really needed was to give recognition to the pastors who lead our Church, and lead us forward. And so I designed what I call 'the Mount Rushmore of Pastors'.

I wanted to show this hanging, to give you another idea of how to applique faces. Ususally you take lots of different fabrics to make the skin tone, and the eye color, and the lip color....but if it isn't done right, the person can end up looking like a clown. When I saw a black and white photo of the first pastor, I realized that this was the perfect way to depict all of them. By changing the faces to 'two-tone', they would look more uniform, and it would make the job a lot easier. Their faces are actually the background color, and we simply added the dark area of fabric, and a few embroidery lines, and suddenly there was a face. The hardest part with faces is trying to get the person's character to come through. Here you can spend hours tweeking lines, so that it looks like them. An old artists trick is to turn the photo, and your drawing upside down. When you do that, you stop looking at the 'person' and start seeing where your lines are wrong. So the next time you are asked to make a wallhanging of a person, keep it simple, and it will turn out better than if you riddle it with details.

See you tomorrow.
-myra