Engagement Quilt

I love making digital collages and doodles for textiles pieces.

The collage opposite shows a collection of my own photos mixed together to make an image.

In the paper template further down this page you'll see that I added some extra elements but this photo collage was a good place to start.

As I've mentioned above, I used the pieces for the Foundling project as mini challenges for me to develop my textiles skills.

I'd never produced a piece with a man in it before, this seemed like the perfect opportunity. My fiancé is obviously someone whose face I know very well and should be able to replicate successfully in line and textiles.

Another challenge I was going to face with this piece is that I wanted to include our pets into the quilt.
We're very much animal lovers and I wanted to incorporate some of our favourite pets. I hadn't produced many animal pieces before this one - there was one with lots of tiny frogs all over it and a couple of fish pieces. Furry animals were going to be a difficult challenge!

I thought my pet rats would look great along the top and sides of the piece, acting as a frame for the central image - I like the borders that some quilts have around the edges so this was my rodent-based answer to those borders!

Once I was reasonably happy with the way the composition looked I sketched out a to-scale template on thin layout paper (see image below).

You can see I've added a bit more space around all the elements of the piece so that it looked a lot more balanced.

Another challenge with this piece was that a few of my pets were black and I'm not overly fond of working with black. It just doesn't work that well when you're using cream organza over the top of everything.

You can see, from the photo below, that I haven't added any particular textiles for the animals or the faces but I have left whiter places in the middle of the textiles pieces.

Fabric was layered up on top of wadding and then covered with organza.

Once all the background textiles were stitched down I started adding fabric on top for the faces.

The yarn and fabric for the hair were layered on top of the sewn-down background.

I added another layer of organza on top of this and sewed it down. Once that layer was sewn down properly I added fluffy yarn to the top.

I also started adding fabrics for the animals.

The faces were built up with appliqué and machine embroidery.
I wasn't really happy with my face on this piece. I think it's made a lot more awkward because I've chosen a photo where I'm looking down at the camera whilst everything and everybody else on the quilt is photographed from the side.

The main thing I did was embroider into the face with some blue thread - the same thread that I used for the flowers so that my face looked like it belonged to the piece.

My main worry for this piece was that in the digital collage you can see there is a lot of shadow on my face because I'm looking down at the camera. I didn't know how to add shadow into my face without it looking weird. I decided I wasn't going to add as much shading as the photo had and that by adding a little blue I can get some sort of shadow and also make my face tie in better to the background which, as you can see, is mostly blue.

I also decided to add some more strands of hair with the feathery yarn to make my face smaller; this helped it look a little less odd. I added the nostrils in with brown although I think I will work into these, either by going over them with cream thread or by sewing organza pieces over the top of them, so that there isn't such a large contrast.

I was so pleased with the way my fiancé's face looked, the first time that I sewed it, that it didn't need much more work. The eyebrows, eyelashes and stubble were all hand sewn. I added some see-through metallic fabric over some of the stubble to give it added texture and to break all the uniform sewing up a little more.

I didn't add a lot of blue to his face but you can see that the outline of his profile was already sewn down in blue. Originally I was going to work the blue into the face and hide it but I think at this point I will leave it as it is so that it works better with the work I've done on my face.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

You can see I used black fabric for his hair under the cream organza - this was why I wasn't so worried about doing the same for the rabbits when I decided I had to fix them. Yes it does make the blacks look greyer but I think you can get away with it when the rest of the colours in the piece are also subdued.

I added the blue flowers to the top of his hair because when I hung this piece on the wall and stood back to look at it I realised that my head was a lot higher on the fabric than my fiancé's head. If you look at the digital collage above he's a lot higher up the page than I am. The blue flowers helped to get our heads more level with each other. This is something to be really careful of when you start a textiles piece. I tend to jump straight in, make loads of mistakes and have to think about how I can fix them later. If you spend more time planning your work out carefully you can avoid a lot of the silly mistakes I make!

The animals were all made in pretty much the same way - by applying fabric to the top of the background textiles piece and working into them.

Opposite you can see how I originally started the rabbits - by applying a real mish-mash of fabric!

I have a lot of trouble using black fabrics in my textiles pieces, as I've already mentioned. It's possible that you can get black organza to make a black fabric look rich - I didn't want to do that on this piece because it would be awkward to use black organza just over the rabbits when the rest of the piece was covered with cream organza and I didn't want the rabbits to stand out too much from the background.

I started to add nets and fabrics (including black fake fur) onto the rabbits. The rabbit looks fairly "bitty" here and I think, to some degree, confusing with all the business going on in the background. I made the mistake of melting the background at this point, thinking that it would bring the colours out in the textiles and add texture. Unfortunately it meant that all of the background fabrics were fighting for attention with the fabrics I layered on top of the people and animals. You live and learn!

When I started work on the rabbits I thought that by layering the fabrics on top I could still retain the rich black colour and make the piece feel fluffy to the touch. I had a couple of problems with this. First the more fabrics you add to a piece, obviously, the thicker it's going to get and the more difficult to sew through. I went though a lot of needles before I gave in! Secondly I just thought that it was looking ugly. I could have worked into it but I didn't have the patience for that (or the needles).

My next move was to cut animal-shaped holes in the textiles and replace the rabbits with black fabric that I could then work into with layering yarn and organza to make them look fluffy.

You can see where I've started to work into the rabbit shape with some black organza.

I embroidered on top of the organza roughly to get some degree of fur-like texture to the piece. I also satin stitched in the lines where the paws, legs and head were. I chose to use a thick satin stitch line again to give some balance to the rabbits so that the eye isn't just drawn to the thick child-like black outline. Using the dark organza on top of these stitched lines helps to work them into the piece better so that they're part of the whole rather than lines separating sections of textiles.

I ran out of black organza and, as is often typical, I couldn't find any more. I bought some brown organza instead. I think the brown works quite well within the whole piece - the black I'm using is making the rabbits stand out far too much from the other elements of the piece. The black thread on top of the brown gives just enough black in the image, especially as the rabbits in real life do have a little brown in their fur anyway.

Even with all the darker organza worked on top of the rabbits I still wasn't happy with some of the dark black lines around the outside of the rabbits. I was starting to wish I'd used a cream thread around the outside which I then could have hand stitched a few black lines over. This is a lesson learnt for next time. I decided I would get out my mattress needle and hand-sew oatmeal-coloured yarn over some of the lines. I really like this effect as it gives some definition to the fur and adds a few highlights in the darker patches such as the area above the rabbit's paws. As you can see in some areas around the outside the stitching looks too much like ordered stripes. I decided to break these stripes up a bit with some cream organza sewn on top.

The other animals were made in a similar way - you can find out much more about this piece in the Foundling e-book. Check out the bottom of this page for info on where to get hold of this e-book.

These were the thoughts I had after making this piece:

"If I was to make this piece again I think I would definitely layer up black fabrics for the rabbits under the top layer of organza. I think I caused myself a lot of problems and aggravation with layering fabrics on top of the already very thick background. I do still like making texture on top of the piece with fluffy pieces of yarn and organza but I either need to not use so much or to make my background piece thinner.

I'm not sure about the animals, I feel like something is missing with them. I really love how the rats have turned out but the others at the bottom of the piece I'm unsure about. I wonder if I should have made them a lot simpler with fewer lines and textures.

I can see that the rats still need so much more definition around them. Maybe it would have been a good idea to sew dark chunky stitches around them to bring them out from the background.

I think I would have liked to make more of the plants in the background. If this piece had been thinner I would have embroidered a few more plants and blades of grass.

I think that the animals and people should have been closer to each other like they were in the digital collage on page then I wouldn't have felt the need to try and put more flowers etc into the background. I think that I jump in too quickly, wanting to get a piece finished before I even start to think about it properly.

This piece may have been easier to produce in sections which then would have been patched together. The art quilt was just too big to work on with my domestic sewing machine. At 52" x 38" I think I must have been crazy to have been tugging this piece through the sewing machine, especially considering its thickness. Each animal and person could have been on a separate square which then would have been patched back together. I then could have maybe used different colours in the backgrounds etc which would have given the piece more interest - or it may have looked like an insane hodgepodge of a piece!

I think I still need to work on producing a likeness of someone in textiles. I may practice by sewing family portraits. This is a positive step to take because sewing a person, where I have to take a lot of notice of the details, will train my brain to take notice of other subjects and how I use line to portray them.

Looking back at the digital collage on page I think I would have liked to have made the top of the quilt look more like the sky - as it is in the photos. It may have been a nice idea to add some sort of landscape in the background, like the textiles piece on page .

It's not all bad! I'm really pleased with the way my fiancé turned out in this piece. It amazes me that a few stitched lines and scraps of fabric can look like a person."

The first thing I tackled, when working back into this quilt, was to darken the background around the rats at the top of the piece.

The rats were fading into the background because they were so pale and there wasn't enough of a contrast.

I used strips of dark blue organza - hoping that the darkness wouldn't be too heavy due to the diaphanous nature of organza.

I didn't actually refer to the notes I'd written above about the unfinished piece but you can see from my thoughts that I knew the rats needed some work: "I can see that the rats still need so much more definition around them. Maybe it would have been a good idea to sew dark chunky stitches around them to bring them out from the background."

Below you can see that I've also worked some dark blue ribbon into the background behind my partner and me.

I thought I'd have so much work to do on the animals but all the rabbits needed was a some diamond eyes!

I cut some sparkly jewels from an old t-shirt and sewed them into place on the animals' heads.

I'm so pleased with the rabbits - check out the image below.

I did a bit more work on the guinea pig - I used part of an old glove to give the animal's fur a richer colour and feel.

The baby bunnies also had a little bit of work done with making their ears darker.

To finish the textiles piece off I added a few pale green applique flowers for a bit of interest.

I also gave the piece a bit of a dark blue border so that the dark blue around the rats and our heads didn't look too different to the bottom half of the textiles piece.

I'm going to back this piece onto a canvas at some point in the future so that it can be easily hung up on the wall.