Our theme of "comfort" this time was intriguing, and the resulting quilts have been, so far, amazing! This design was my first idea, but before executing it I spent an entire day trying to capture the comfort of family. That quilt was a disaster, frankly! So then I returned to my first inspiration.
I sit in this yellow easy chair every day in the late afternoon when I am too tired to do anything else but sit and read. In the winter, a fire is in the fireplace and I have a mug of hot tea beside me, and a throw in case I get chilly. Books have afforded me a great deal of comfort and diversion and distraction, ever since the sad days of February, 2011.
To make the central image in the quilt, the yellow chair, I first took a photo of the chair, and then I posterized the image on Photoshop, a technique that makes the shadows and the outline of the chair stand out. I printed this image, traced it onto yellow batik fabric, and then added in the details of the chair and its shadows with a product called Pentel Fabric Fun, Pastel Dye sticks. Ironing the shadowing with a hot iron, protected by a sheet of paper, made this coloring permanent.
For the captions under each photo below I'll give some other construction details.
 |
| The little mini quilt is a print that most mimics a pieced quilt. I "quilted" it simply and tacked it onto the arm of the chair, as I wanted to achieve dimensionality. The chair is stuffed lightly--a technique called "trapunto". I cut a slash in the batting and inserted small pieces of fiber fill, and then I closed up the slash by hand. |
 |
| The stack of books was achieved by my photographing a little ceramic box that sits beside my reading chair. I printed the image onto fabric and then appliqued it to the quilt. |
 |
| I love all the blue and white Spode china that I have collected! I drink coffee every morning and tea most afternoons from one of my Spode mugs. I have a vast collection of blue and white fabrics; I chose one that most looked like one of my mugs. I scanned the fabric, then reduced the image on Photoshop, and then I printed the image onto white fabric, to make some new fabric. Then I cut the mug out from it and added the inside of the mug's lip and the handle from plain white fabric. |
 |
| This is the back of the quilt. I was sorely tempted to use this beautiful commercial print for my stack of books, but I was determined to do something from scratch. Another idea I had was to use my Aunt Martha's book SPUN BY AN ANGEL for the book beside my chair, but somehow this image didn't have the impact I wanted. |
 |
| If interested, you can read about this book and my aunt on Wikipedia, at this location: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Cheavens My father is the little boy in the book, set in Mexico, where the family lived before the Mexican Revolution; my Cheavens grandparents were missionaries to Mexico. |
 |
| This distorted image is an attempt to portray in 2-D the 3-D quality of this quilt, with the stuffed chair and the little quilt that is simply tacked onto the front. |
