WHERE DID THE TIME GO?

WHERE DID THE TIME GO? is the name of my quilt selected for A Matter of Time exhibition. I had been thinking about what time meant for me and one of the repeating thoughts was a series of photos of my children growing up. I took the same photo every year and have them framed together and see it everyday. 

I wasn't too good at the growth chart thing and they have been painted over but a couple of marks remain by the kitchen door.

As you can see they are right at the top as my son is now over 6 foot.

 My children are grown up and married now and would kill me if I had used their names in this work so I used fictitious names.

 But I did like the thought of creating a growth chart and used growth charts of boys and girls to get approximate measurements.

Here is the section of the door I used and I played about in Photoshop to get an idea of shapes, lines and shadows

 First I thought I would piece the narrow sections and so dyed a collection of fabrics

 But it didn't really work and so I just pieced a white and mustard fabric together and painted the rest of the the background with DUAL fabric paints. I used Blockposters to enlarge my altered image to full size and drew in the lines of the shadows. I practised for a while as my painting skills are not brilliant.

Once the basic shapes were done I used Fabric pens to write in the names and measurements for my pretend children.

I traced a silhouette shape of a child onto the quilt top and then stitched a piece of hand dyed silk organza around the shape and then cut it away.

Then I quilted the whole quilt but the names were not clear so I needed to quilt over them too.
I am very happy with the completed quilt as I don't usually do things to a theme but this time I think it worked.