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……..