Frustration on the Landscape Quilt

Hi to anyone who comes from WIP Wednesday.

Here's the background about what I'm working on this week: I am making my first-ever art quilt/landscape quilt, whatever you prefer to call it.  I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm trying to enjoy the ride.  The quilt is of a scene of Denali National Park.  I'm currently at the machine embroidery stage, and have committed to doing a little bit every day to make sure this thing progresses at a good clip.  I've been working my way from the bottom of the piece (sheep!) to the top.

Since I've never done machine embroidery, there's been a bit of ripping out going on:

Sheep #1's nose looked like a dog nose:

...so I ripped it out and made it look more sheepy, although it's a little low in his face now.

Big sheep had a weird eye that just didn't work

 This eye makes a lot more sense!

He also had a bit of a frown going on, as you might have noticed. So I made him look more cheery.

Now I drew on these guys with pink chalk pencil, and it hasn't really come out.  Any tips?



But today I am stuck with a big dilemma about my piece:

Yesterday I finished the foothills on my Denali quilt, and I don't really like how they came out.  :(  I am currently debating whether to rip it all out, or just soldier on.  Normally I would be okay with taking forever waffling over this, but I need to get this wallhanging done by August 15 if I want to submit it for my guild's quilt show, so I need to make a decision about what to do relatively soon.

What should I do? What would you do?

Below are two shots of the mountains, one taking outside and one taken inside.  You can click to see a larger version. Somehow the parallel lines just aren't doing it for me.  I can't specifically describe what I don't like about them, and maybe I'm over-reacting or being a worry wort.  Honestly, do you like them?  The mountains are covered in a layer of tulle under the embroidery, dunno if that matters or not.

Any thoughts or opinions are appreciated...I'm hooking up with WIP Wednesday for the first time to solicit even more opinions.

In terms of WIPs on my plate:

This week I've finished nothing lol, no surprise there.

Still on the to-do list:

• This wallhanging!
• The charity wholecloth I'm supposed to be quilting before my guild meeting in August
• July FMQ (I need to get on that!)
• Quilted Jacket for my mom (on the back burner a bit)

Denali Quilt Inspirations

Today I did a lot of fun machine embroidery on my landscape quilt to start to flesh out its features.  Since this is my first landscape quilt, it's hard for me to feel really confident in knowing how to stitch certain areas.  For inspiration and ideas, I've been referring to two different quilts I saw on my visit to Denali.

The first was created by Linda Beach in 2005 as part of Denali's artist in residence program.  Through this program different artists stay in the park for a few weeks and create a piece of artwork inspired by their stay.  It was pretty cool to see one of these be a quilt, and a gorgeous one at that!

I would love to have the piecing skill to make something like this.  The photo doesn't do justice to how striking the blues of the streams were.  You can learn more about it here.

The second quilt, even more impressive, is the centerpiece of the Eielson Visitors Center in the middle of the park.

The full piece

Check out the quilting!

More awesome quilting

A display board showing the different techniques used to make this

This was made especially for the new visitor's center by Ree Nacarrow, who has a great webpage giving the story behind it.  The most amazing fact?  Every piece of fabric in that quilt began as plain white cotton, and she hand painted, dyed, and stamped ALL of it! WOW!

Anyways, I've been staring at these a lot to figure out how I'm supposed to quilt things like streams and mountains.  Now time to stop procrastinating and get back to stitching!

Back to Work on the Landscape Quilt

Well I got all set to write this post and then remembered that I'm not supposed to post pictures of this quilt.  :(  It makes it hard because I wanted to ask for advice on lots of topics!!

Today I finally had time to drive to quilt shop to buy border fabrics for my Denali landscape quilt.   Picking fabric for the border was incredibly difficult because I couldn't decide what color I wanted to highlight.  I am not used to quilts like this one where there is no defined color scheme.  I tried out a dark purple, dark teal, tan, reds, and every color in between.  After getting advice and suggestions from two different people in the shop, I ended up with two colors that I am pretty happy with: a lovely pale teal and a burnt red.

Border fabrics

The teal is for a thin inner border, and the red for the main outer border.

Inner border attached!

Now I scratched my head for a while trying to figure out how the heck to attach the border pieces due to the uneven mountain portion at the top of the wallhanging.  Finally I decided that it would just be easiest to sew the whole thing down to one giant piece of red fabric.

This is definitely not the world's greatest sewing technique, but it did the job.  I basically created a giant reverse applique of the wallhanging onto the border, because after I sewed it down I cut out the back so that all the lovely red border fabric wouldn't go to waste.

Backside of the wallhanging, reverse appliqued onto the border fabric

Next step was to put that arch along the top.  I printed out a big arch from my computer that was sized to the dimensions of the quilt.

Printed arch-very high tech :)

At this point the top is ready for sandwiching.  I am debating how thick I want the border to be.  Right now it is pretty big and gives the image a sort of distant feeling, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

border all cut out with the arch in place!

I am planning on getting this done in time to enter in my local guild's quilt show in September.  But, I do need advice if anyone has it: how do I hang a quilt with a curved top? To enter it in the show it has to have a hanging sleeve.  As of right now if I just hold it by the two upper corner the top flops over.  If it's stiffer once quilted, I might be able to get away with a normal horizontal hanging sleeve and the top bit can hold itself up.  But I'm not quite sure...

Tomorrow I will start quilting this thing! I am very excited about entering this next stage :)