Per ardua ad astra

 

Thank you everyone for your patience. I have finished at last - though the photos are indoor/nighttime and don't show the colours well. 

My son asked me a while ago if I could make a picture for my grandson's room, which would also be a memory of my father, who sadly died last November. I thought the collage theme would be a good opportunity to do that so I started by drawing the main elements onto a piece of linen stabilised with freezer paper and fusing on the hexagons for the sky and  scallop strips for the sea. I then attached the piece to wadding by machine stitching wavy lines (sky) and hand stitching (sea). I then fused on the gold frame and quilted with straight lines.

After that, I fused on the various elements apart from the metal cogs, which I glued on at the very end. The sausage dog is lighter than the photo and is velvet with leather ears and nose and I was very surprised and impressed that the velvet didn't fray. The plane was printed onto fabric.

Unfortunately it looked very drab and I struggled to decide how to brighten up the picture until I realised I could liven it up by getting more colour into the frame.  That allowed me to put the words into the main picture where I thought there was too much empty space.

I've never been a fan of fusing in quilts before but, apart from the trials of actually finding time to do this, I really enjoyed the collage techniques and I was very pleased with effect. In particular, I could never have got the dog's tail or the shine on the balloon so precise with turned applique and the fabric spots would have taken forever. I feel I've been missing a trick all these years! When I get a chance, I will take a better photo and give more detail of the story behind this quilt over on Rainbow Hare.

I enjoyed seeing everyone's collage quilts and I'm really looking forward to seeing the circles and squares in November. I will be sure to start very early this quarter :)