Off the Wall Friday 6-21-13 - Dog Head Study

Oh, my!  I am on Day 7 of my 365: Creativity Journal.  I am in love with how I feel.  Exhilarated is a good word.  I can't wait to see what the next day brings in terms of working in the journal.

I made the decision to create a separate blog to chronicle my year long journey through the book.  If you want to head over there to see what is going on there is a link on the top right of thi blog or you can go to

http://fabric365.blogspot.com/

I will start doing all the 365 posts over there in a few days.  Right now I am splitting my time and cross posting until people get used to it.

One day this week the challenge was to walk for 5 minutes, stop, and make some art.  Then leave it for someone else to find.  I was very glad to see that, I had read an  article several years ago about this group who make small pieces of quilted art and then went all over New York City and left them for people

to find.  Doing that has always been a dream of mine.

So I tweaked the instructions, you can do that you know, and made a thread painted piece from some muslin and leftover batting. My friend down the block has two well trained labs, quite a contrast to my totally untrained bassets.......  So I snuck down the block and attempted to tie the piece in the tree in front of her house.

Her dogs raised holy hell.  I hoped she was not home.  About 5:30 I get a text message asking if it was me who left that dog in her tree!  It worked!

She was so excited.  She does not quilt, but she works with me on the CAAWS board and I know she loved the thread painting.  It is so uplifting to give a piece to someone who has no idea how to do this quilting thing.  They think you are the Goddess of Quilting!

To do it, I found a picture on the internet that had a simple picture of a retriever looking slightly to the side.  I cropped it to just be the head.  Then I printed the picture on regular paper.

I used my finger to trace the lines I thought I would sew over.  After several times I was ready to use a marker to draw what would be my quilting line.

I freemotion quilted over the marked line, then tore away the paper.  What remained was a beautiful head study of a lab that looked just like one of hers!

Earlier in the week I made one of Chloe using the same technique.  Now I want to do the bassets

and the Swissys and make a nice quilt of all my dog heads.  I will probably do a quilt as you go technique since when I do the thread painting I am working on batting and a back piece.

I will have to think on that a bit......