Cynthia's Creating Ark: Cynthia's Garden - Art with Fabric Blog Hop.

This was an exciting project to be invited to do. Select a famous work of art and interpreted in fabric. I had big ideas, maybe a little too big. Vincent Van Gogh's Irises painting was my choice in the end as I love Irises.

Taking on this challenge really push me out of my comfort zone, way outside my square so to speak. I am not a painter or drawer so doing an art quilt is something I only try once before using a pattern. Now trying to use a famous painting for my inspiration and starting from scratch was somewhat daunting. Plus throw in the fact I am using applique techniques to create it, left me on a few occasions thinking what the hell am I do.

Cynthia's Garden

Here is how my piece went together. A lot of hours of cutting and stitching. The background was first and I started with the quilt sandwich with my background fabrics on top. Next was all the leaves on top of the background. Followed by a long day of stitching all of this in place.

Then came the flowers. It was interesting trying to cut the right sort of shapes. Admittedly there was a lot of scrappy waste at the start but once I got going things moved along..

Lastly I trimmed and backed my work with a fresh piece of fabric to hide the mess of threads and I added some extra quilting to join the layers together.
I will never be a world class artist but I am happy with it. It was worth it in the end.
Here are the links to the other participates in this blog hop. I hope you will visit them and enjoy their creations too.

, May 9th, 2016