Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Carolyn: As Time Goes By

When the theme, time, was announced, I knew immediately that I would celebrate our marriage of 56 years with our song, As Time Goes By.  I decided to create a quilt based on our wedding photo and incorporate a history of our years together.  After searching through many photos, I chose 5 that signify the best of our time together: photos of our two girls at 6 months, us with our 3 grandchildren, our entire family, and one of us as we look today.

I wanted the quilt to appear aged, like some old photo you might find in a trunk.  Most of the photos were in color, so I antiqued them by using sepia and oval distortions in my Apple photo editing file.  It was difficult to get black and white photos and color photos to be approximately the same sepia tone, so this became a long process.

The next step was to decide on the background fabric.  After being introduced to fabric painting by Jane at our Nantucket retreat, I chose to try my hand at painting.  I chose Lumiere water based paints, using red for passion, gold for the golden years and blue for tranquillity.  I began by brushing and blending the paints, moving from the center outward.  I wanted to suggest movement from our marriage photo going out to not only the next generation, but future generations.  For this technique, I used 561 gold metallic paint. When I was satisfied, I lay the fabric aside to dry and began painting gold metallic around each photo. When dried, I fused them to the background with Mysti Fuse.  I completed the quilt by quilting around each photo with gold metallic thread in a tiny zig-zag pattern, ending with simple gold metallic machine quilting from the quilt's center outward.  The words to the song are printed on the back of the quilt.

12 comments:

  1. I love the pictorial history of your family and life together. How appropriate "your song" was for this!! The painted background is wonderful!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, Carolyn! This is lovely. What a lot of hard work went into the nostalgic and lovely quilt! Since I've known you so long--since our late 20s!!!--it was nostalgic for me, as well. And hurrah for painting the background so expertly! Too, all that work that went into getting your photos the sepia tone you were after.....Good job, all around!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Carolyn this is truly fabulous! Love your narrative and as always so well done!
    One of my favorites!!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. What a very lovely quilt! I love memory quilts and have struggled with putting photos on fabric. Yours are very well done. Plus, I am so glad you have used paint on the background in such a pretty way. As I look forward to our 50th anniversary this year, perhaps I should consider making a quilt...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Fantastic!!! Love that song and love your quilt! I can't believe all the techniques you wove into this little quilt. The sepia tones were well done as was the background. You all look like kids in your wedding photo! Next time you can teach us about manipulating photos for quilts. I can't wait.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The painting is a perfect background. I too enjoy making memory quilts. Your pictures show much happieness!

    ReplyDelete
  7. The painting is a perfect background. I too enjoy making memory quilts. Your pictures show much happieness!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Carolyn... What a perfect interpretation of our theme ! I loved all the techniques you used and how you described them for us. And the song.... oh that perfect, perfect song .... Sigh !

    ReplyDelete
  9. This is heart warming, Carolyn. What a perfect quilt for the Time challenge. I love it!

    ReplyDelete
  10. What a sweet quilt! Thank you for explaining why you chose the colors you painted the background with. They are perfect and I enjoy how they make the photo's glow. I never would have thought of doing a sepia tone on the photographs, but it makes them cohesive. Great job!

    ReplyDelete
  11. This quilt is a wonderful treasure Carolyn. Love the symbolism you put into the color selection and the wonderful selection of photos.

    ReplyDelete
  12. What a wonderful way to interpret the theme, so well done from the painted background to the sepia color photos to the gold metallic paint. What a special memory quilt.

    ReplyDelete