Staycation: Day 3

Today I was so excited by my landscape quilt that it was the only project I worked on all day.  However, I accomplished a ton! The top (it's only wallhanging sized) is completely assembled and ready for machine embroidery.

Below the snow-covered mountains that I worked on yesterday are brown mountains.  I had two batiks that were along the purple-brown lines that I wanted, but were too close in color to each other.

So this morning I tried painting the lighter one a little bit, to no avail.  Then I realized that bleaching it might be just the trick.  I poured a random amount of bleach with some water into the sink, cut out a little 3x3 square, tossed it in for about 2:30, decided that was just slightly too pale, and popped the entire piece in for about 1:30.

Bleaching is definitely intimidating, instead of making the colors lighter it might jsut wash them out or do something funky.  But this time it worked great!  Check out the two fabrics after I bleached the lighter one.

I'm really glad I took the plunge and tried it.  These mountains came out great, even better than the snowy ones in my opinion.

 Above, they are assembled.  Below, the tulle overlay has been added to add depth and make them look more distant.

Next, there's an alluvial plain with a lot of interlocking/braiding rivers and sand bars.  I originally had the same blue from the snowy mountains for the river, but today, digging through my stash, found a lovely teal that really stands out.

Above is the design wall for the sandbars and river.  I think the teal goes great with the pale tan/beige colors.

Then, in the foreground are some cliffs with Dall Sheep.  Here they are!  You can also see the assembled river and sandbars.

Now there are two things I might potentially change before I move onto the next stage.  You can very faintly see the other fabrics under the big Dall Sheep, so I might stick a second piece of fabric under him, or some stabilizer/interfacing.  Also, my boyfriend thinks the darker fabric I used for the cliffs doesn't fit.  He had a problem with the pattern, but I think the value might be too strong.  What do you think?

Tomorrow (or maybe tonight!) I will start on the machine embroidery.  I'm not quite sure what to embroider, aside from faces onto the sheep.  I'm still a little vague about what goes into the machine embroidery step and what goes into the quilting step, because they both seem pretty similar to me.