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.