She Flies With Her Own Wings

"She Flies With Her Own Wings" is the challenge theme for our Fyber Cafe textile arts group. It is the Oregon State Motto. My cousin's granddaughter loves her pet chickens, and I thought she would want to fly with them if she could. So I asked her mother to take a few photos of her with her hands out to the side, sitting on the lawn. I'm going to put feathers in her hands and chickens in the background.

I enlarged the photo and traced it onto clear plastic to make a pattern. In Photoshop I printed it in poster mode to get a 2 x 2 sheet for a pattern. With cropping, it comes out to 18" x 24" when I add extra width for the feathers. I worked on the flesh tones first, I have an assortment of 8 x 10 fabric gradations, in pink to beige to tan brown hand dyes. I picked them up at a quilt show just to do faces with. I've added a few pieces of Kona cotton and others to give me a wider range. Next I want to try dyeing my own fabrics for this purpose, I love to do portraits. I used a clear plastic outline of the face to get the positioning just right. With this type of pattern I use the fusible instead of raw edge applique, because I need exact shapes. Wonder Under fusible interfacing gives me sharp outlines with little raveling.

Working on the blouse and skirt next, I followed the colors in the photo. The left side shadow will be changed, that fabric has too much contrast. Making the skirt I used some vintage fabric hexagons, so I folded the one edge and overlapped it with the first piece of fabric, to look like folds in the skirt. Instead of looking like my fabric pieces were too small.

I hope the black lace gives the folded skirt more dimension too. I had enough to put along the bottom edge also. A 1/8" pink satin ribbon will be embroidered at the gather point of the blouse and tiny buttons added. The grass is beginning to come together. I have collected landscape prints for quiet some time, so I had a variety of grasses in several sizes to give depth to the picture. I still need to find some cute chicken pictures to make a pattern from, to put in the background.

I had two fabrics, a gray and black colorway of feathers, I cut them out and made them shorter and narrower, and I also want to get some real feathers to embellish with. Thread painting will help the fabric ones look more real. So I am making progress, the deadline was November, but it really just needs to be ready for the Guild quilt show in April. Hopefully I'll have more to show you next Friday.

I am linking this to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" to click on the badge in the right hand column and see what other wonderful textile artists are doing this week.