Fabric Self Portrait

 

Last spring, my quilting bee gathered on Zoom for a sewing day. The challenge was to create self portraits in fabric. The inspiration for this gathering is the work of Freddy Moran.

This pushed me outside of my comfort zone. The idea was to go abstract and find items representative of yourself. I found a happy medium by including Corgi hair - I could have gone with all corgis for hair.

Then came the fun part, raiding my fabric shelves and finding meaningful images to include - heritage, hobbies, friendships. And of course auditioning where they might fall.

Due to kitchen renovations, losing a Corgi to kidney disease, and then adding a Corgi and a Cattle Dog, all quilting was set aside for several months. Earlier this month, I decided it was time to finish and selected a fun backing.

During the course of the quilting, I managed to quilt the backing into the quilt - again... twice... so time was spent with snips and tweezers to work the fabric out without having to remove the quilting.

I used a variety of motifs throughout. Red thread in woodgrain to add texture and color to my hair, which is currently more red than blonde. A few colors to accent eyes and cheeks. I used invisible thread to outline the fused pieces and for the background texture which is largely McTavished with a few hidden Mickeys thrown in. I've worked with invisible thread in the past, and prefer the YLI nylon.

I decided on the red/garnet binding and spent an evening or two hand stitching that along with tacking on a hanging sleeve. This will eventually hang in my office.