Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Back to the Hands

And back to more decision making - I've returned to the second bubble prayers quilt. Because the hand fabric is relatively thin allowing too much shadowing through, I decided to fuse the hands onto white fabric. That also facilitates the stitching I want to do while the hands are off the quilt. As always, it's a question of what color thread to use.


I've also gone back through my sheers and am auditioning some here for the second set of hands. They will be partially behind the other hands, more of a shadow than anything. The blue silk chiffon is looking good for this.


I've had so much trouble visualizing how the fabrics will read that I cut hands out of two steps from this gradation. I'm pretty sure the darker of the two is too dark so it became my practice piece for trying out threads and lines. I tried stitching around the outside of the hand and then stitching in the lines across where fingers bend and along the palm but it looked really bad. Thread painting wasn't my intention, but thread painting is what I ended up doing, in this case with the light teal Oliver Twist hand-dyed thread, and am surprised at how much I like it. Since this is done with the feed dogs up and fusible to help stabilize it, there was little distortion.


So on to the lighter set of hands and none of my threads were quite what I wanted. This King Tut was the best but I wish it didn't variegate so dark. I went ahead anyway since the other threads I tried were worse, convincing myself I could find a way to modify the thread color after the fact. But, I don't know, I maybe like this after all. Click on any picture for a larger view. 

3 comments:

Sherrie Spangler said...

I really like the shape of these hands.

The Idaho Beauty said...

I've really grown quite fond of them myself. Funny thing is, I've never cared much for hands on quilts, not even ones on folk quilts. Never thought I'd put a hand on any quilt of mine. Now I find I am surrounded by hands: paper hands, photocopied hands, fabric hands. I had to go buy some plastic portfolio style folders to corral them in it was getting so bad, so I guess there will be more hands on quilts in my future. Maybe I should blame you, cause I've also got that hand on that quiltlet you made me for Rochester. Yeah, that's it - Sherrie the bad influence! ;-)

bj parady said...

I like the dark parts of the stitching on the light hands--it adds dimension. Nice.