Saturday, January 9, 2010

Truck Quilt From a Photograph

Last summer, my friend Lindsay and I took a trip to the East Rosebud.  Somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, we came across an old homesteaders cabin surrounded by some guard cows. (They were really eyeing us ready to defend the cabin if necessary!)  Near the cabin was this old truck. 



This thing was sitting on it's rims, bullet holes all over it, and every piece of glass had long since been shot out.  Perhaps that was the reason for the guard cows......  It looked like it had been painted at least 4 different times as the many layers of paint and rust were showing through.  Lindsay took some awesome photos that day and I decided that it might be kind of fun to turn one of them in to a quilt.


I took one of the photos and printed out an 8.5 X 11 print of it on my home printer.  I then took a sheet of transparency film and placed it on top of the photo and traced the shapes onto it with a fine tip black marker.  This sheet was taken to Kinkos and they printed out a copy that was 3 feet wide.  This became my pattern.  I went a bought a bunch of Steam a Seam 2 and started adding fabrics. 


It'll be fun to see this one come together.  I've always wanted to do a quilt based on a photo but really didn't have the courage to jump in and do it.  This is a different technical skill than I've ever used previously and I'm nervous about not chosing the correct fabric textures and values to get the effect I want.  I don't want this quilt to look flat.  I want to be able to stand in front of this quilt and say "Wow.  That's is SO cool!"  So I see this quilt as a chance to push myself artistically and technically.  At the same time, I'm trying to be realistic.  This is my first one in this style so I know that I'll make a lot of mistakes and learn a LOT on the way. 

So as this progresses I'll keep you up to date.

Let's go quilt!


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