Cara Mia

Cara Mia is a self portrait measuring 16 1/4" X 23 1/2." It is machine appliqued and quilted. The background consists of silk dupioni and cotton. The hair is made from commercial cottons and hand dyed corduroy. This piece is inspired from a 3 day workshop I took with Pamela Allen. I really enjoyed playing with fabric to achieve different tonal values of the skin. I used Derwent Inktense pencils to further blend the colors in the face. I feel as though this has really opened up so many ideas in my mind. I really enjoyed doing this exercise and look forward to doing more larger scale pieces. I really felt that her face needed softening so I added a vine for interest. The trailing vine to the left is made from machine wrapped cording. There are two different kind of leaves on the vine. One set of leaves is thread painted on organza, a technique I learned from Maree Caplin while the other set of leaves are made from textiva film. Having been inspired by Frances Holliday Alford's article in Quilting Arts magazine, I layered one color of textiva film running vertically on a piece of timtex and then layered a second color of textiva film perpendicular to the first. I pinned the layers together and began stitching leaf shapes with veins. I then cut the leaf shapes out and heat distressed them with a hot air gun. The veins on the front of the leaves were painted with Tsukineko inks as well as the back (timtex side) to add more dimension. Leaves were heat set before attaching them to the vine. Edges of the quilt are satin stitched.