"Tough Old Bird" in the Houston Show

I'm thrilled to have my "Tough Old Bird" piece in the "World of Beauty" contest at the International Quilt Festival in Houston this year. The show runs from November 1 - 5, and is at the Houston Convention Center.

I'll be going to the show, so it will be a treat to have a quilt hanging while I am there!

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Tough Old Bird Final Details

Here are some last images for this piece before I move on to another project:


I used a blue horizontal and vertical strip to anchor the Tough Old Bird on the background.






I used bias tape and straight stitched it on.












































Face stitches:




shirt stitches:



hat stitches:






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More Quilting - The Stitched Bird!

I'm still showing the making of my "Tough Old Bird" piece. Today's post is about the quilted bird I put on this piece. You can see it in the upper left corner of this image:



Why a stitched bird? Well, something needed to be placed in the upper left corner to add some balance, in my opinion. I also wanted an actual bird of some kind on this somewhere.

What kind of bird? This Marine required a bird of prey, hence the hawk.

How did you do it? I drew an image of the hawk and then enlarged it to the size I wanted. The image was cut out and placed on the fabric.















I used a white pencil and traced around this.

















And then I stitched around and within the lines.

















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Background and Quilting of the Background - a lesson learned

   After all the parts that make up the "Tough Old Bird (TOB)" were painted, I assembled them on a piece of tan fabric. This fabric prevents the background colors from coming through the lighter fabrics. I trimmed the tan fabric up to the edge of the TOB, so none of it shows. It just adds a nice warm tone and prevents color bleed through. I do this with all of my portrait images.

I used a blue and brown background, as you can see in the image above. I pieced the background and sandwiched it. I decided to quilt the background before putting the TOB on it. I used a straight stitch for the quilting on most of the background.






After completing the straight stitching, I placed the TOB on the background. I fused it down and then machine quilted it. As I was looking at it during the quilting stage, I realized I could see the straight stitches on the background fabric through the TOB. Pre-stitching the background turned out to be a mistake. I had straight horizontal shadow lines all over this old dude, and that was not what I wanted. I didn't like the way that looked at all, so used a stitch picker and removed all of the straight stitches that were under TOB. It was extra work but worth it.

So what went wrong? The horizontal lines may not have shown through if I didn't use fusible behind TOB, but I like fusible and I'm going to use it, I got the idea to stitch the entire background first from another art quilter. She says she does it and it makes squaring up the quilt at the end easier. She does not use fusible, so that may be why it works for her. Since I use fusible, I won't pre-stitch the background again.

It was a lesson learned, but all is well in the end. In my upcoming posts I'll show more of the quilting and finishing of this piece.

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"Tough Old Bird"

"Tough Old Bird", Eileen Wintemute

This is my piece entitled "Tough Old Bird".  It was just shown at the 2017 Road to California Quilters Showcase, and it will be shown at other venues this next year. It is based on a photograph of Roy, a friend of mine.













This is the picture of Roy I based it on:



I took this photo at a July 4th gathering at a friends house, and I always thought it was interesting to look at. There is something about capturing people in normal conversation that looks so natural to me. Roy has a lot of things going on that give it character, like the hat, the beard and the cigar.

I am proud to be a member of Beyond the Edge Fiber Artists, and we decided to create an exhibit entitled "Put A Bird On It!".  We were encouraged to take a liberal view of this title, so I decided to create a piece based on my photo of Roy. After all, "tough old bird" is a form of a bird, is it not?

I am very happy with the way it turned out. It is going to be Roy's once it is done being shown by me. In my next few posts I'll show the steps used to create it.

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