Listening to a Little "Background Music" While I Work...

"Teresa's in, Teresa's out," this poor little blog is starving for attention!  

There has been sewing happening, often late into the wee hours after a full day of responsibilities.  There has been a growing list of unfinished projects, gifts due, babies born, graduations celebrated, actual early efforts toward Christmas gifts, and dreaming/plotting my next idea (which is a weird whopper tangled in another world). 

But enough yapping.  I went out on a style limb with this music-themed wall hanging for my daughter.  I've never designed such a large scale focus motif on so small a background!

I call it "Background Music" mostly because I made it for Riley to hang above her bed.  Sometimes, I think of walls above beds as the backgrounds of bedrooms.  Especially when an apartment has very little wall space.

The paragraph above sounds like I am dissing the space when it could go either way:

• nice way to anchor/balance the space
• focal point to establish a theme (pieced or appliqued) or establish/enhance a color scheme (not necessarily making something that just matches the room...)
• never done it, but I'd like to design something where the wall hanging, WH, is either the precursor or continuation of a theme to the bed quilt, BQ, or throw pillows (for example, depict a hot air balloon show theme where the WH contains an array of balloons, weather, birds, etc. and the BQ reveals what is going on at ground level, like people, trees, quilt display, balloons being blown up and such)
• a WH over a vintage or family BQ could just coordinate in a low key way, perhaps in a similar color scheme and a few of the same block components from the other quilt sprinkled in for continuity and a nod to the modern
• now that I've spelled it out, the creative juices are flowing.  Another type of project to put on the "to do?" list...
• just feature a favorite quilt whether it matches or not, LOL

Riley's an actress in Atlanta (double major in Theater and English), so of course there are Broadway show posters, programs, and an interesting array of theater ephemera on the available wall space.  It wasn't quite a shoe-horning ordeal of hanging it, but the surrounding wall items have yet to be rehung.

It seems like my daughter has always left the wall space over her bed blank, maybe secretly hoping mom would make something interesting to fill it...something that warms up the room and makes an apartment feel homey.  Hand-quilting with a surprisingly modern-looking Baptist fan motif bridges past and present for me.

I've always been fascinated with music modern art, especially the idea of instruments appearing to be explode out of a small celestial black hole in the middle of the canvas.

My "Baltimore Rhapsody" quilt is the complete opposite of this project.  With sixteen traditional 15-inch blocks of exactingly detailed representations of the instruments played in a symphony orchestra done in the Baltimore Album Quilt style, that quilt is completely over the top.

I wanted to include some instruments that she plays in the design.  She actually does have a blue ukelele!

After working with teeny-tiny applique pieces, typically individual flower petals and bird feathers, the instrument pieces were gigantic to work with!

It felt backwards to draw LESS detail on LARGER instrument pieces.

It was hard to draw instruments like a caveman!  No small details...I just made general instrument shapes, making up tubing and keys.

I drew crude instruments on vellum pieces (basically "onion skin" paper).  For the pattern background, I taped paper together to make a big rectangle on which to work.  I measured my big patchworked paper background to find the approximate center, where I penciled an "x."  

My pencil mark was the origin of my "big bang theory" of instruments appearing at high speed from the black hole!

The big rectangle was too big for my large light pad, so I had to float the paper over my light pad with the middle area and the "x" hovering over the center of the pad.

I did my usual technique of applique prep and and hand-stitching...just on a big scale.

The pattern weights are holding pieces together until the glue-baste dries.  It just takes more of them!

I hand-appliqued small chunks of the instrument motif together, which I joined with ther others into the whole motif.

Since I would be hand-appliqueing with a whole bunch of background fabric scrunched up in my hands, I only wanted to have to applique around the perimeter.

I really wanted a very simple border, so I used scraps randomly sewn on cash register tape and a simple continuation of the background fabric for outer border and binding.

I am obsessed with keeping and using every little scrap!  Fun for me!

(Still has her old college quilt on the bed...7 years old and washed 100 times I'm sure.  I need to put a new binding on...it's actually a little thread-bare.  The binding wore out before the hand-quilting!  Let's here it for us hand-quilting dinosaurs, whoop whoop!)

I promise to show you my vellum-background pattern designing technique.  You will see that you too can design your own applique.  My method feels like cheating, until I see the results!  Then I don't care...

Teresa - - - - - - - -