Nepal Monument…..a continuing saga

If the last post seemed to cut off at a weird point it is because I accidentally published the draft before I got it finished!!   Obviously I am not quite competent with using the Blogger online editor yet!!

I had two more areas of details that needed to be added to the quilt before I could start the quilting process.

The first was to add some “donations” to the monument.   As we walked in the mountains, many of the trekkers would pick up a rock or a flower and put it into the opening of the monuments.  Some of them had wooden rods that people would tie bits of thread or fabric onto.  This is what I want to represent.  After playing around with ways to make small, three-dimensional flowers, this is what I came up with….

I am going to do all of the quilting and then add this after the fact.

The final area that needed some work were the mountains.  Although I like how they look, I felt that they needed some extra details in the large solid areas.    I started out adding small white strips of “snow”…..

…and then moved onto adding some darker crevices to the large snow areas.  After a few minutes of cutting out tiny slivers of increasingly grey fabrics I had the idea to just ink them on myself…..

By the way, the white strip under the spire is marking the area that I don’t want to quilt so that I can attach the flags.

I got everything basted in place and have started the quilting.   I am quite happy with the texture that is showing up in this process…..

I have also been re-thinking the prayer flags.  My original thought was to leave them flapping in the breeze but I am concerned what will happen to those fabrics once the quilt is stored.  I can imagine that they will get very wrinkled and flatten out.   SO, I am now wondering whether I can applique them down and still have them look “flappy”.    Every step of this quilt has been a challenge of some sort so I guess that I will just add this to the list.

……nearing the end now……..