More Peacocks!

It has been a while since my last blog but I have been busy with checking through the first draft of my book which is now complete and has been returned to the publisher and the piece I have been working on has taken a long time too so I didn't really have anything to blog about - textilewise that is. That piece is now compete at least enough to blog about so here goes.

Last year I bought a book from Dover books. It was a book of all of Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations which were on a CD too. He was an illustrator of the 1890's. He was a controversial character and his works vary from the strange and somewhat grotesque to stylised and decorative. I like a lot of his work and ignore the not so nice illustrations.

I quite liked the two illustrations of peacocks and they followed on from my first peacock based piece. They are very stylised and I have interpreted them with art quilting. This is the second quilt.

I began with the black and white illustration from the CD.

I put this into Photoshop and applied the filter 'Find Edges' which gave me a pattern. I resized this and printed it out for a pattern to trace. It was to be about 65cm high.

I had to make a few edits and fill in the white square at the top. Once that was done I prepared the base fabric. I used a fine white lawn and colour washed it. Then I trraced the design onto the fabric with a soft pencil. This was placed over 2oz wadding and a backing fabric of white polyester cotton.

The design was then developed using a mixture of paint, over painting, sheers, free machine quilting and some final hand stitching. I edged the piece with a rich dark blue satin. I added a few tiny petrol coloured sequins on the peacock combs.

I have made a support rod, painted it metallic blue and dyed some threads to make a hanger and tassels to hang down the sides of the piece.

I had planned to make sheer feathers and layer them over each other to create the tail but having made one I decided against it and painted the tail instead which has worked quite well.

I am still deciding whether or not to add decoratrive quilting to the cloak of the girl.

Close up detail of the tail

Now I am off to finish the hanging and tassels and to plan the next piece so ...

Cheers everyone until the next blog.