My Latest Material Mavens Quilt--Comfort in a Yellow Chair

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.