Portrait Challenge

Back in July, we were presented with a challenge in our guild…..make a portrait of yourself with the overall dimensions to be 80 inches.  Oh, and it had to have a discernable patch of red in it.

Once again I started out with tons of ideas…..

  –  since this would be after our Himalaya trek, I envisioned using a picture of the mountains with a silhouette of myself in backpack and hiking gear.   Unfortunately I never got a good picture of myself to use so I started thinking again.

  –  I was pretty sure that I wanted to do something about travel, probably using this photo of Michael and myself, taken in Gaeta, Italy……

……so my next thought was to pick out favorite travel photos and do a banner that was 10 inches wide and 30 inches long.   But, when I started looking for photos, I couldn’t find any that I felt would make a good composition.

Back to thinking…..   For some reason the “Trip Around the World” block caught in my mind so I started playing with how I could turn it into a quilt.

Then came the idea of turning the above photo into a black and white photo, but leave my red shirt and use that for the color basis of the quilt.

I started off by making a strip set of the fabrics that I wanted to use…..

I then cut each set down into 2-1/2 inch strips…..

…..and sewed the sets together to form rings of fabric…..

I then un-picked one of the seams in each set so that it would fit in with the pattern…..

As I laid the quilt out, I spent a great deal of time re-pressing the strips so that the seam allowances would nest properly. 

I had left room in my design for a decent sized border and thought about adding a saying of some sort to finish out the idea.    I spent a long time looking online for quotes about travel and found some wonderful ones but my favorite was by Charles Schultz….”In life, it’s not where you go, it’s who you travel with”.

So, with that in mind, I played with my computer fonts until I found one that would be easy to applique and would fit in the design.

I kept the quilting simple with just straight lines and then did a double quilt around each of the letters.

I was VERY happy with the result…….

Of course, mine was just one of the amazing quilts that were shown that night.   Here are the others…..

The best part of the challenge was listening to the reasons that we made our quilts.   One woman made hers to remember her time serving in Viet Nam while another showed her tennis shoes to commemorate a new active lifestyle.  And, of course, several noted our mutual love of fabric and sewing!!

As usual, the challenge was a great jumping off point for making a fun and thoughtful quilt!!!