Pets On Quilts 2017 - "Lori & Aliya" (entry 1)

Pets on Quilts is one of my all-time favorite quilt shows!  
I'm entering this quilt into the "Pet-themed Quilted Project" category

And it gives me the perfect opportunity to put together an overdue Finish Report for one of my absolute favorite quilts:

"Lori & Aliya"

This quilt, after washing and blocking, measures 55 x 55 inches.

It has all-cotton top fabrics, a Minky back, and Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 batting. Everything was prewashed, including the batting, to minimize shrinkage. I re-engineered the construction of Jenny Pedigo's "Metro Hoop" pattern to produce an unpieced ring center for the cameos.

I finished this quilt about 5 weeks ago. It has been a long labor of love for a super good friend from our Florida days. The top was made in 2014, and for various reasons on both ends, it got put on standby a few times. This year when it entered the priority queue, it took many weeks of intense free-motion work to get it all quilted up on my domestic Viking Sapphire. 

I'm in Colorado now, and Lori's in Kentucky. But while we were still in Florida, Lori and I enjoyed tea and dinner and a DVD together at my place every Thursday night after she got off work.

Lori commissioned this quilt to feature cameos of her super-duper awesome canine bestie, Aliya. I like the way this filter choice showcases the portraits: 

I worked hard to develop quilting templates from favorite photos that would reflect her pretty German Shepherd-ness and hopefully capture her personality while working effectively with the way quilting makes fabric puff and flatten. (That process was blogged here.)

 

Lots of detail work happened in those cameos! I can't tell you how many hours were spent tying and tucking tails! It took many sessions of watching movies, that I distinctly remember.

When I asked Lori what kind of quilting she wanted other than the cameos, she said she wanted traditional feathers, bones, and dog paws. My quilter brain was reeling - "Waaa!!  How on EARTH can you put all that together on a modern ring design and have a semblance of cohesiveness?"

But you know how your brain works away at things in the background, and then you wake up at 2:30 am with an "Aha!" moment? Yeah, that happened with this quilt, and when I pulled out my plexiglass oversheet to be able to doodle on top of the quilt, some play time with dry-erase markers teased out the design that would work.

I can quilt a lot prettier than I can draw! Go figure.

And the execution of the idea was a huge success. 

I love so much how Minky backing showcases quilting work:

Wait, I said earlier that this was all free-motion work, but I did use my walking foot to stabilize the whole quilt with stitch-in-ditch and echo lines around the arcs before I started the real work.

I used Aurifil 50wt threads in matching colors everywhere, except the portraits got a subtly variegated King Tut 40wt to stand out, and the paws got a gray contrast Aurifil. (Note: cotton threads can be problematic with Minky backings, as it sometimes grasps the "fur" and pulls fibers through to the front a bit. This will show when the thread is a different color from the Minky. In future I'll stick with slicker fibers for this backing.)

Stitching the binding down on this quilt was a little interesting, as my stitching hand was in an immobilizer due to a bit of a boxer's break that I got when I did a knife hand power break incorrectly while practicing for a Taekwondo tournament.

Aliya loves cats, which is good, because my boy Navarre loved this quilt, and I didn't have to confine myself always to the only room that is cat free.

My kitty was very helpful during some of the prep stages, offering paw marking aid. . . 

(No, Navarre, we're using Aliya's paw!)

. . . and suggesting I include his adorable otter pose in the design. . .

. . . REALLY suggesting I use that pose. . . 

He's a constant photo bomber on indoor shots, my funny little friend (as you can see here with one of my Fiesta Mexico blocks).

Poor boy cries and cries at the screen door now that I have a longarm in its own room that's kept cat-free, but that's for another post of its own.  :D

"Lori & Aliya" was the last quilt to be finished on my domestic machine, which adds to its specialness for me. Thanks for letting me share it in a special venue.

The show link-up is active for a couple more days, so you have time to get a post together if you want to participate this year. 

Huge thanks to Snoodles at Lily Pad Quilting for coordinating this every year. I know it has to be an enormous amount of work.

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Linking Up:

Pets On Quilts 2017 at Lily Pad Quilting

TGIFF at A Quarter Inch from the Edge

TGIFF is Here Today, and It's All About the Dog :)

Hi! Welcome to this week's TGIFF link-up!

Have you finished something lately that you'd like to share? Link up at the bottom of this post, and be sure to visit some of the other links to find some great eye candy and help your fellow bloggers celebrate. :D

I'm really bummed that I couldn't get this quilt completely finished in time for this post, despite tons of overtime work on it, but I'm super thrilled that the cameo portraits are not only FINISHED!!!, but that the whole process worked! So here is "Lori & Aliya" with that part all done: 

It was a long, difficult process to achieve those portraits! 

Lori sent me about 11 photo files of Aliya that she totally loved. I lifted a couple others off her Facebook page. Played around with cropping/sizing and pasted images into a 9x9 grid until the two of us both liked the images chosen and the grid placement for them. 

Here are a couple of the cameos and the photos they came from:

I needed to create Golden Threads quilting patterns for those nine chosen photos, but I am not an artist! Any drawing task is excruciatingly slow and involves a large amount of erasing.

I made them by using this tutorial to edit digital photos at the free online app, PIXLR, so that they were as close to coloring book images as possible. 

Then I sized them up in a Word document, printed them out, and traced in the lines I thought I'd like with a fine-tip Sharpie. 

Finally, with the photo file open in front of me and a sheet of the Golden Threads taped over the marked-up print-out, I traced the lines I really wanted to quilt in. That part was done in pencil, because I had to erase so often, and it was tricky to capture a good likeness that conveys the gist of her markings, but also plays nice with stitchability and with the compression/loft effect of batting. This pattern-making stage took an entire week of several hours each day to get to where I was happy with all 9 in the set.

There were a remarkable number of free-standing details to quilt it, and on the full-body images in particular, I wasn't sure that the Golden Threads method was going to pan out well with the minky backing. Minky makes everything so much more springy to work on, and I worried that the paper would get prematurely torn and back-tracking or closely-spaced lines would just get all goopy and messy. But it worked just fine!

That one up there was one of the least-messiest, tails-wise. Cleanup of the quilting to this point took just over 10 hours. Details were too close to use backstitching, so everything is secured by tying before tucking. I used a lightly-variegated gray King Tut thread in 40 weight for those. The rest of the quilting is done in 50-weight Aurifil threads to match the fabric colors.

This is a special request commission quilt from a good friend. She wanted a quilt to feature quilting with bones, paws, traditional feathers, and quilt-outs of favorite photos of her beloved German Shepherd. That was quite the creative challenge! But you can see how beautifully it's working out on this shot of the minky back:

We went with a variation of the Metro Hoops pattern to have these feather-framed cameo areas (which will get cross-hatching filler around the figures). I chalked an inner border "bumper" line inside the rings to do the feathers freehand against the ring's inner edge.

. . .and I worked up motifs for the "between" spaces that get the bones in for her. These got marked with chalk, tracing a curvy-diamond and a bone stencil that I cut out of a file folder into the area after I'd chalked in a register crisscross. The plumes just got free-handed as I went along.

The portraits will get cross-hatching between them and the feather rim, and the ring arcs will get some curly-q's down their centers to further stabilize them. The outer border will have life-size quilt-outs of Aliya's paw prints superimposed on top of traditional feathers, as you can see in this shot of my acrylic overlay sheet (this is what I lay over a quilt top to play around with quilting ideas when I can't discover a scheme right off the bat).

I'm sure I'm not the only one who can quilt things a lot prettier than I can draw them. Does that happen for you, too?   

I'll cut a file-folder stencil for Aliya's paw and put those in with a blue water-erase pencil, along with a spine line for the feathering. I'm leaning toward all of that work being done in the red thread, but might possibly do the paws in the King Tut. I'll figure that out when the fillers are in and the paws are marked.

I apologize sincerely for not being able to finish this 100% for y'all. I'm still learning to correctly gauge how long certain jobs will take, and that cameo work totally blew my estimations away.

But now it's your turn to show us what you've finished! I love the variety that comes through every week and look forward to seeing your link:

An InLinkz Link-up

Wait Loss Wed.

Link-ups like Jennifer's Wait Loss Wednesday can help ease the ennui when projects are feeling stale, or getting into the next stage intimidates you for some reason. :)   Here's what's moving at my place right now:


Scott's DOD American Retirement quilt is washed and almost finished drying. I'll get a label on it Friday (want to make sure it's 100% completely dried before bunching it up to work on it), and then I hope we can get a good photo op together at the Air Force Academy this weekend. I got the binding finished over a week ago, so this last bit of work is delayed way long enough!

I have all 9 dog stencils now, so I'm trying to finalize my plans for the quilting so that I can do any marking up front before layering the quilt. Lori wants feathers and the dog's foot print and bones in it, so I'm trying to figure out a balance of doggy elements and "pretty" that works great with the quilt top  (metro rings on red background) and the cameos. I have some good ideas, so this may be accomplished tomorrow.

And my breather project, when Lori's quilt overwhelms me with its mental intensity, is this old froggy UFO, "You Must Be Croaking." In March of 2013, I pulled this out of my deep storage and did the prewashing and made the basic blocks. I wish I knew when I'd originally bought the kit, because I'm sure it was at least 2 years old at that point. 

The past couple of weeks I've been working on the face applique work and got the big feature frog cut out. I traded out a couple of the border fabrics for others from my stash, and this should make flimsy status by next week, I would guess. It's not my priority project, so it moves slower than it might. That will bring the frogs up to the benchmark for their slot on my 17 for 2017 list of UFO work.

Don't they look so cute from the back?  hehe

~*~*~
Linking up at 
Jennifer's Wed Wait Loss WIPs

It worked! (Photo to Quilting Template)

Today I am whooping it up about something that is only a tiny step forward in my next priority finish, but took me many hours over several days to accomplish.

This is the first final-form quilting template (on golden threads paper) of a set of 9 cameos for a personalized commission quilt featuring Lori's beloved German Shepard, Aliya.

I am not an artist! Any drawing task is excruciatingly slow and involves a large amount of eraser. I should invest in a company. . .  ;D  (I'm also thinking the Black Pearl that Barbara shared about might be better for this waxy paper than the white pencil erasers I have.)

I made these by using this tutorial to edit digital photos at the free online app, PIXLR, so that they were as close to coloring book images as possible. Sized them up, printed them out, and traced in the lines I thought I'd like with a fine-tip Sharpie. Then I keep the photo file open in front of me and tape a sheet of the Golden Threads on top so I can trace the lines I really want. Pencil is an absolute must, because I have to erase lots and LOTS. It's tricky to capture a good likeness and the gist of her markings in a way that plays nice with stitchability and with the compression/loft effect of batting. 

So I'm super happy that this finished template succeeded and really whooping it up that the customer's reaction upon seeing it was, "OMG I'm so excited!"  :D

~*~*~
Linking up at 
Jennifer's Wed Wait Loss WIPs
Sarah's Whoop Whoop Fridays

Flimsy Alert! ~ "Lori & Aliya"

This is my first commission quilt - I'm not at a point in time yet where I'm ready to take those on in any regularity, but when a friend that good asks, you see if you can do it.  :) 

A fantastic friend from our Florida days wants a red and white quilt with gray minkee backing that features quilting of cameos of her super-cool German shepherd, Aliya. So we used Pinterest to find a design she liked, and we settled on the "Metro Hoops" pattern, with a uniform red background instead of the two-tone.

I ended up constructing this top differently from the pattern, because I wanted the cameo fields to be seam-free, and the diamond pops of the black print to be one piece instead of four corners sewn together. I also wanted a larger size than the 3x3 grid would yield.

It wasn't terribly hard to figure out how to work it - that Quick Curve Ruler is awesome! I just made curve bars to insert with squares of background and accent. The worst part was getting my history-writing saturated brain to work the math reliably to upsize the rings.

I have to say, if you are happy with the modern wedding ring shape and want/need to piece a top in much greater speed than the tradition wedding ring pieces let you do, this ruler is a FANTASTIC way to go. 

 

The fabrics were fun to work with since they have a modern pop to them, despite the atypical red background. Technology is awesome, since camera photos make it easy to share findings with a distant commissionee to see what they do and don't like!

I actually finished the top in something like early August, when I had zero time for non-academic writing. Now I'm finally getting to its report. Lori asked if we can wait a few months before doing the quilting so she can save up for the custom job, which fits perfectly with my quilting time/priorities at the moment. Sometime in January I'll start on that part. I'll put different cameos of Aliya inside the nine rings, developed from photographs that Lori's been taking. I'm not certain yet what I'll put in the spaces between the rings, but her paw prints will be worked into the quilting of the outer edge areas. I extended the background beyond the rings (another departure from the Metro Hoops pattern) to give space for that and to make a little more snuggling room under the nine rings.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 

Linking up at:

Can I get a Whoop! Whoop!

 

Link-a-Finish Friday

 

TGIFF is at Quilt Matters this week
 (main site here)
 

Fabric Tuesday