Bossy - aka Abilene

 

This is my version of Laura Heine's Abilene.  I call her Bossy.

Bossy was a real challenge for me.  I've not done a collage quilt before.  Luckily, I was able to take a class with Terry Rowland, and she had lots of great tips and suggestions, such as how to make the eyes more realistic.  

I am not, by nature, an artist.  I cannot pick up a couple of coloured pencils and create amazingly shaded drawings, as so many can.  So, this was a challenge.  I was creating the shading with fabric.  And it's amazing how these loud, bright, many coloured little bits of fabric blend from a distance.   It's like a Van Gogh painting.

 I thought "this won't take long"  but this partial head is as far as I got in the day long class, in February 2018.  And then it was put away until summer and I pulled it out again. 

I just had to keep telling myself to 'trust the process', almost as a little mantra as I laid down the pieces. 

 Turning the photos to black and white helped with shading--for example, in the photo above the belly blends into the rear leg, and I wanted the left side to read a little darker.

 Better

 Same photo, in colour and in B&W.  The process worked!!  Despite my misgivings.

So this is how far I got in July 2018, and then she sat again until January 2019 when I got her onto a shaded background.  I had originally bought a kit from My Sewing Room for this project (not having the right variety in my stash), and then added several of my own fabrics in as well.  The background provided in the kit was, for me, too busy to show the quilting well, so I found an shaded ombre instead, and used the kit background as backing.  Quilting and faced binding completed in February 2019.   I had fun with the quilting, building on some Christina Cameli Wild Quilting and Karlee Porter Graffiti Quilting

 and some stencils from Jodi Robinson

I also added my father in laws former brand, of which we have a wood burning, which I traced

and now Bossy hangs behind my Innova Longarm, where we get to watch each other as I quilt.