The Colin Quilt

The solid green was used to piece into the rest of the quilt top, so that was solid fabric, pressed, and set aside.

The needlepainting was done strictly on 2 layers of water soluble stabilizer which was hooped initially. Then I laid that onto the finished top and used a marker to delineate the shape of the eyes. Putting just the hooped stabilizer into the sewing machine (one eye at a time and feed dogs down), I used about 5 different thread colors to shape, file, and add shading, with a teal colored bobbin thread. I did a teal random base of thread, then sky blue on the outside edge, dark green on the inside edge, yellow blending between the two, and some teal metallic on top. This was then washed to remove much of the stabilizer, which left me with patches of thick thread. Once dry, I appliqued them over the green material, using another deep green thread.

The other interesting oddment is that this originally is not a picture of Colin. My sweetie had wiped out most of the stored pictures of Colin off his hard drive. So I went cruising for pictures of cats that looked like him, and I found this photo:

wrote the photographer for permission and shared with her pictures of Colin that I did have, and we agreed they could have been twins- except Colin has that endearing half moustache and her Kelvin does not. She also loved how the quilt came out. That was part of why the quilt came out so well- it's easy when an artist is taking the initial picture. Anyone who wishes to try the same- I recommend taking so many pictures of your QIs that they become inured to it. Thank you everyone for the compliments!!

-georg