In January of this year, I announced that I was going to make an art quilt using my niece, Candace, as my model.
I made a posterized and enlarged version of one my favorite photos of a good memory with her.
After that, I did nothing until April, when I made a tracing.
Something about the tracing stopped me cold. Procrastination really set in.
Sunday, I gave myself a ‘talking to’, and decided to get with it. While I was tracing my tracing onto Lite Steam A Seam 2 (in reverse so that the resulting pattern pieces would be the right way when I cut them out of fabric), I realized why my tracing bothered me.
It was the way that I traced Candace’s mouth. The mouth looked like it belonged to a marionette. At least to me it did.
So I’ve redrawn the mouth on my fusible…not worried about the tracing. Nobody but me is ever going to use the tracing.
The lesson here is that, it is my quilt. I can change it anywhere in the building process that I want to.
You can do the same with your quilts. I give you permission.
I have a muslin foundation on the design board. It is overlaid with my tracing of the enlarged and posterized photograph. I also have the photograph pinned on the board (obviously, not the enlarged one).
The tracing is valuable to help me position the batik pieces (the fabric doesn’t have to be batik, but I really like them).
The fabric is not fused down!
That is the wonderful thing about Lite Steam A Seam 2! It is tacky enough to stay put, but yet, be repositionable!
Throughout this entire design process, I won’t actually fuse anything until I am positive that the pieces are just where I want them!
Hopefully, I will make more progress in a reasonable amount of time, but I make no promises!
LC's Cottage 