Lioness

I just finished a small mixed-media art quilt that I am pretty happy with.

I started by drawing a picture of a woman who looks a little lion-like, printed it onto Lutradur that was treated with Golden Digital Grounds, and then I fused it onto a piece of fabric. The background fabric is sepia-toned sheet music all overlapped. You can see that behind the face a little and that is just what I wanted.

I added a couple of borders and then went to work!

Using yellow-gold, green, and yellow-green, I painted some hair- with acrylic paint mixed with glazing liquid so it was transparent.

Then I laid strands of this gold-toned fuzzy yarn I had and I loved the look! I attached it temporarily by dabbing points here and there with gold paint.

I fused some snippets of the gold border fabric under her chin, and I like it, though now I can see that they probably stand out a little too much and I will need to decide how to tone them down, make them recede some.

Then I stamped some words throughout her "mane".

I made it into a quilt sandwich and did a large meandering stitch to tack down the yarn. I did do a tiny bit in between the larger areas too, but not much.

I stitched around the fabric snippets and then kind of filled in the rest of the bottom area with a mirroring-type of quilting stitch. I did all of this with a metallic thread and even though I went as slowly as I could (and still keep my stitches fairly even), the paint made it tough overall, and I broke FOUR machine needles on this small project!

I trimmed the quilt and simply used a machine blanket stitch to finish the edges. I didn't want a raw edge, but neither did I want the feel of a tailored edge; I thought it would seem too finished for the composition.

So with all I have done to this poor fabric, it is not laying completely flat so it is currently blocked and stretched a tiny bit- I want to hang this in the house here and need it to lay flat...

Here it is- please feel free to make suggestions, especially about how to make the fabric snippets become more of the background because I have not yet figured out what best to do. I thought it best to look and think on it for a while rather than rushing in and ruining what I like...

Now to finish my latest Suzi Blu class project- I will be posting a photo of that too as soon as it is dry!