Newest Large Art Quilt: Welcome to the Neighborhood

Well, I’ve been busy, busy, busy finishing SOME of the pieces I wanted to hang in my featured artist  corner. I thought I’d give you a peek at how I constructed it:

After marking out the size with pins in the corners (I had some stretcher bars to make a piece 30″ x 40″ on hand, so that’s the size I decided on) I sketched out a couple of funky trees. My 1st try (not shown) had curvy branches, but I wanted more angular branches to go along with the angular shapes of my houses, so this is what I ended up with:

I originally was going to use a navy blue from my Jewel Tones palette, but I didn’t have a big enough piece. Plan B: some pretty multi color hand dyed fabric with lots of the same Jewel Tones in it (bonus: already fused!) I slapped those paper patterns down and traced around them with  my rotary cutter:

Although I really liked the look of the white paper trees, I was too scared to go with no color for a big piece like this when I was committed to getting it hung like the next day…so I say okay to the crazy tree’s and move on!

Next, add houses! I love my mod house ornaments, so I pretty much cut out one of each of those:

Then, it was time to add the birds and quilt the details! Here it is hung on the wall in my family room for a 3 minute photo shoot:

and then it was down to the gallery to hang my show! Seriously, I was wrapping and stapling this quilt at noon, and in the gallery hanging it at 1. I got a few pix, I’m not too happy with them…but it’s all I had time for. Talk about last minute art!

I’ll have more details on the installed show tomorrow!