Quilts from Canaan

Problems

It started with the satin stitch. I tried to treat the applique edges with a narrow satin stitch. My sewing machine had other ideas. The satin stitch came out so bad that I decided to take it out, which was a total nightmare. The only way I found to do it was using an xacto knife from the back and slicing through the stitching. On the other hand, my sewing machine does a beautiful blanket stitch. So, blanket stitch it is:

The next problem I encountered is with the fusible. While sewing the edges I discover more and more of the leaves are separating from the background fabric. I am constantly ironing to keep the fused pieces down. It seems almost useless. Maybe I should work one leaf at a time - fusing then sewing.

 

Starting Work on Umayyad Palace Mosaic

I wasn't in a very creative mood for some time, and it obviously extended to my quilting and blog. But I am back quilting and writing.

I decided to share here the process of working on one of my new mosaic quilts.

I have started working on the Umayyad palace mosaic. It is a daunting project and I procrastinated for a couple of months before gathering the courage to begin.

I decided to reconstruct the pattern relatively faithfully, so the first step was drafting the pattern directly from a picture of the mosaic.

 Copying this image is quite time consuming, but it allowed me to really "soak" the design in, learning the way the leaves overlap.

I then had to enlarge the pattern. One of the techniques I use for this, is projecting the image on the wall, enlarging it as required and copying the projection on freezer paper. But this time I decided to be lazy and took it to be enlarged in a copy shop.

I chose to work on the foliage separately, so I copied the foliage area to a separate piece of paper, decided on three values in the leaf colors - dark, medium and light, and marked the leaves with value and number, so that they could be identified.

The next step was to copy the single leaf patterns to freezer paper.

 

I then copied the foliage outline to the dark green fabric, ironed the freezer paper leaf templates to the leaf fabric with fusible, and started cutting out the pieces. This was much more of a struggle than I  anticipated - the freezer paper kept coming off.

Then the fun part began - fitting all the leaves together, like a puzzle.

 

This step was much shorter than I expected and three hours later my foliage is fused. Now I noticed that there is a problem area, which is true to the source but doesn't look good in the composition. I will have to replace some of the leaves here to improve the value balance in this area.