Welcome
Welcome to Lilies and Dolls! This is the place where I share a little bit of my favorite things.. one being cloth art dolls. I love comments so please feel free to leave one or more!
Please do not copy any of the images on this site. Thank you.
Here is a little peek at what I have been trying out for my Self Portrait Quilt. So far I'm liking it but knowing me I could change the whole thing or start over on a whim.....Which I'd better not do because I think Deanna is way ahead of me! She's agreed to postpone the deadline to Dec 31st. So it has to be done by then. No excuses!
By the way, I found a small peice of that blue fabric I was looking for! When I finally finish this thing don't be suprised that I've taken artistic license with my image. Looking at it I'm wondering if I'm going over board with the colors. You can only see a small amount here. My problem is that I overwhelm myself thinking about ideas and details. I need to just do it and it will come together much easier.
Remember the trouble I had with the flower stamp that was too large for my block? Well, that little setback took me on a new adventure. Some of which was totally unexpected! First my ink was either too light or too dark, then some of my images were too close together. I decided to blend the ink so I grabbed my spray bottle of water and soaked it with water which caused the color to bleed all over the place and I'm thinking "what have I done now?". But once the piece dried I added some accent paint and outlined a few areas and I think it is finally starting to get the dimension to it that I was looking for. Of course, I didn't try this on a sample piece first, oh no, I jumped right in and put it right on the panel where there was no turning back.
As my frustrated friend just found her groove and asked for more time to finish our SPQ Challenge, it looks like our new date of completion is December 31, 2009. That being determined I'm going to change my updates to bi-weekly posts, that will also give me more time to be creative and see how else I can make that last panel just a little bit better.
Well, I have to say that today is the first day that I have been truly excited about doing this quilt. So far I have been frustrated and have been stalling quite a bit. But today I had a break through! I'm so psyched! I did a face (mine) that I really like. And the whole thing is starting to talk to me. I'm hearing freedom and inner beauty and spirituality. Now the only problem is time. I just don't have the time I would like to spend working on it. MAYBE MY CHALLENGED FRIEND WOULD AGREE TO POSTPOSE THE DEADLINE? Sorry I can't post a pic but that would give it away!
On the home front, we had a Happy Halloween last night and here are a couple of pic to prove it. Darren and I just hung around the house. We had a few drinks, dinner and listed to several CD's. Delight was one of them. I don't know if anybody remembers her, she overdosed right after she made her most famous album. The technobeat is way cool. We also listed to Natalie Merchant who I love. We got in some dancing and some singing and had a very fun night. By the way, that's not Darren's real hair....LOL.
Can you believe it - only 22 days left before the unveiling of the SPQ Challenge Quilt! I still have such a long ways to go to finish especially since there is a lot of hand embellishing to get done. Most of my quilt (again, I say that loosely) requires fusing a lot of pieces and that is something I am still learning as I go along. Big pieces are a lot easier to fuse but these teeny tiny detail pieces of fabric are a lot harder to work with I am finding out.
October is my favorite month and here is why....no oaks or maples in these pics just crepe myrtles and a dogwood at the end. We do have maples but they are still small and a couple have already lost their leaves. I love the crepe myrtles! Some are bright red and others are a golden color. So beautiful!
I'm having a really hard time deciding what and how to add my image to my SPQ. My printer wants to run out of ink and I can't decide on the size or anything. This is a few of the images I've been looking at. None of them make me happy. When I think about what to do I have great ideas and fun with it but when I try to apply those ideas I'm super frustrated! If anybody has anything funny or inspiring to say I'd appreciate hearing it.
This past weekend I was experimenting on a small scrap of fabric using the rubberstamps and inks I had chosen as part of my embellishments for the SPQ, checking to see what would and wouldn’t work. Well, what wouldn’t work is the large flower. It looks okay by itself but it is way too large a scale for the rest of the quilt, although I like the faded image of it I see in the background.
Quilt in my case is a very loose translation because I chose not to create a traditional quilt but rather a quilt-like project for my self-portrait that seemed to capture my personality more than a traditional quilt could. So it is back to my drawer of rubberstamps to find a rubberstamp that will be the accent to the block in the right scale.
