Sara's Spring Quilt

I really enjoyed thinking about the word Spring - I thought of springs going "boing" in all directions, clock springs and a battle of tug of war between winter and summer. Another group I am in had a challenge word of "tradition" and I started thinking of my family Spring traditions and the thoughts really rolled in. I settled on my husband's passion for Peeps - only the ones shaped like chicks. That gives us the pre and post Easter tradition of hunting for and buying the hugest collection of Peeps we can assemble. This year we had a fabulous multi-colored collection which included the watermelon Peeps that are green on the outside and pink in the middle. My sweetheart's favorites are the yellow ones - he claims they taste better. I won't eat Peeps so I take his word for it. (By May he says he is permanently done with Peeps but he seems to forget that by the next year).

The two of us had fun with this. I've challenged myself to try to techniques with each challenge in addition to meeting the challenge criteria. I thought I would try thread embellishing a manipulated photo. Husband and I unwrapped many boxes of Peeps and arranged them in colorful combinations while I took pictures.Playing with your "food" can be fun.  My color printer did not want to cooperate and I did not want to wait or to send the image for printing so I tried a different approach. I took the image that was enlarged and printed on 11 by 17 paper up to my studio. The color balance on my print out was terrible so I ignored the colors and used a technique I learned from Esterita Austin for monoprinting with Mistifuse. I layerd a piece of parchment over my image and painted the image onto the parchment with Golden Acrylic paint. After it dried I created a "sandwich" of plain parchment (for table protection), painted parchment, dried paint side up, Mistifuse, really cheap synthetic organza (mine was a polyester, Esterita said she uses nylon bridal wrap but the poly I found was cheaper than the nylon I found) and then another layer of protective parchment paper. I then used an iron to transfer the paint to the organza via the layer of fusible (I believe it was on a synthetic setting). It is really cool to pull the paper off and see the paint transferred to the fabric - seems magical.

I then trimmed the organza some and fused it to a piece of cotton sateen damask, a sample given to me by a friend who owns a fine linen shop. I added free motion black outline stitching to enhance the design and also some stitching for the little peep eyes. I then trimmed away all the organza outside of my stitching. I layered the top with batting and backing and quilted the little guys rather heavily and finished off the quilt using a facing. I may go in and add more stitching to the background now.