Lines should be straight

This is a post that I wrote before we left for our China trip, but I didn’t want to interrupt the travel journal to post it……so here goes……

In June our quilt guild presented their “Zoo Challenges”, so, I can now show you what I made before I left.

The Challenge was in two parts…..first was to focus on the word “Zoo”.   Secondly, we were to incorporate something that our last show judge said about one of your quilts. 

Now, this judge had one BIG bugaboo that went something like this….”long lines should be straight and corners square”.   I REALLY got tired of hearing her say this during our judging days.

So here is my interpretation of the challenge….entitled “Lines should be Straight”….

As with many of my quilts, it started with a web search for photos of a zebra.  When I found this one, I knew that it would fit my plans perfectly….

I printed it out on paper, and then traced it onto an overhead transparency.  In all honesty, since the photo was so simple, I probably could have just enlarged the photo and cut out this step…..

I used by photocopier to enlarge the drawing to the size that I wanted. 

Now it was time to pick the fabrics….black and white, right!!!   Not so easy!!!  As I was tracing the outline, I began to realize that there were several different shades of black, grey and white in the piece.

I had found a “shade analyzer” on this great blog and used it to determine how many different shades of black and grey I would need.  (In the final analysis, I cut out a couple of these shades)

Here is the photo with the shading strip at the bottom…..

Here are my selected fabrics, with the shade guide on top.

The zebra face was worked on white fabric, with the black pieces being drawn onto Steam-A-Seam, fused to the black fabric and and then cut out and fused to the white.   Much of this part was fused in one large piece.

For the body, I chose to use another black fabric as the base and to fuse the lighter grey shapes on top.

I decided to carefully topstitch the shapes in place using a matching thread.

Final step was to pick a border.  While staring a the boxes and boxes of fabrics, this one caught my attention…..

  ….and of course it is PERFECT for the theme of the piece.  

I love my Zebra and my husband has already claimed it for his office so that makes it just perfect!!!!