Face Off, the design process....

I thought I'd show you some of the design process on this small quilt. I was inspired by the lovely face plates on some of the old Singer sewing machines. Those lovely glossy black machines were decorated with gold scroll work and metal covers that had quite beautiful stamped design work. I have three vintage machines with different face plates, the metals used on the earlier machines had a more golden or brassy content than the 'newer' chrome enhanced models.

I photographed the face plates and then enlarged the photos in photoshop and printed them out to find a suitable size. That suitable size was actually chosen to match the fabrics I had available in my stash, I had plenty of the black fabric but only smaller pieces of the silver and gold fabrics but all worked out well....

I traced off the designs using a pencil and lightbox/large piece of tempered glass, once I was happy that my designs would all look more or less the same size, I blackened the trace lines with a permanent marker.

I had the designs on paper, it was time to transfer the designs onto fabric with a blue washout marking pencil, yes it's a slow process, but once the design is on the fabric, it's best to get onto the quilting quickly in case the blue marker fades.

I chose silk dupion fabric in colours to mimic the metals and also to give a metal like shimmer

Then I added a beaded piping using black silk to frame and then a self coloured binding which would add an additional frame when the three panels were placed onto the black quilted backdrop.

The three panels are permanently stitched into the backdrop at the top but are left floating on the sides and bottom of each panel. The finished size is 31wx23h (80wx57hcms)