I’ve been trying to publish this description of how I made Yum!, but it’s fighting me all the way. I may have to break it up into even more pieces, but this is the continuation of the previous post. The photos seem to want to go with the wrong paragraphs, so you’ll have to figure out where they SHOULD be.
I photographed several baskets I had in the house, one of which I made, and started playing in Photoshop. I was working in CS4, which I hadn’t used much. Oh, look how easy it is to change the color, and to posterize the image! I got a little carried away, I’m afraid. There wasn’t enough of the challenge fabric to do a practice piece, and the baskets printed darker than I wanted them to. (Since I wanted to use the Cotton Lawn for raw-edge applique of the veggies, I ironed a stabilizer to the back of the baskets so the fabric wouldn’t ravel. It helped a little.)
Photo of one basket
After playing in Photoshop
Then, on my regular visits to the nearby Wheat Ridge farmer’s market, I photographed lots of lovely vegetables to fill the baskets with. Again, I had too much fun playing in Photoshop, posterizing the colors and adding edges. One challenge was sizing the veggies so they looked like the right scale.
Original photo of beets
I had taken several photographs of wheat fields in Wisconsin this summer, thinking to use one as a background for this piece. I used a neat program called Image Tricks to modify the photo for the background, and printed it on four 13×19 EQ regular fabric sheets, then pieced it together.
Original wheat field photo
After playing in Image Tricks
The next step was to play with the arrangement of baskets and vegetables on the background. I soon realized that I needed to have shadows cast by the baskets to add a little “realism” to the images. I tacked the baskets and veggies in place with droplets of Elmer’s Glue, then used Derwent pencils to add the shadows. The next step was to quilt, I used mostly King Tut variegated thread, and outlined the colors on the veggies. I did a sort of “scribble quilting” on the background.
About this time, daughter Shannon Osorio in Ohio sent some photos of the harvest from her garden. They were wonderful, and I decided to include them as mirrored images for the borders. As I was coming near the end, I took a workshop from Susan Cleveland on her marvelous piping technique, adding piping to both edges of the border was the final touch the piece needed. I am really pleased with the result, here is a detail. (Check out the previous post for a photo of the whole quilt.)
Detail of Yum! A Farmer's Market Fantasy