FFFC Progress

I don't feel too bad about how I'm progressing with the first challenge, despite the fact that others have already started posting finished pieces.  Sheesh!    Mine  looks like 6-8 pieces of fabric stuck together, but Hey! A lot of thought that went into those 6 or 8 pieces.

Friday I thought all day about doing a figure study, but fell back on architecture by the end of the day.



Saturday I picked up some extra fabrics at the Guild show, including some great squares of over-dyed wool that turned out to be a prominent part of the piece.  $7.00 for two seven-inch squares seemed a bit high priced.  Good thing they were useful.

 Saturday afternoon/evening I enlarged the photo, adjusted it for the 12" block, which meant making up an extra 3" on the left, and added some additional windows that I thought it needed.  Artist's licence, okay?  Then I traced the whole thing onto tracing paper to try to figure out which colors went where, or where the color changed.  I thought I had that all down.



Sunday I had about 1.5 hrs. in the morning, and two in the evening.  It did not take long to narrow down the fabrics I thought would work, but figuring out how to actually assemble the thing was another story. I decided I needed some sort of base to assemble onto, since there wasn't any "background" to it.  Not to worry.  A nice piece of an old sheet was perfect.  The plan was to build up the pieces from right to left...

I sewed one piece on backward, took it off and resewed it properly.  Tried to sew the curved piece on next.  It became clear that wasn't going to work, and I put the sewing machine away and got out the iron.  Fusing, it is!  I knew I'd be fusing on some of the small parts, but I had hoped to peice the major pieces.  Oh well.  That took care of most of the time I had this morning.

Back in the evening for better progress.  All the basic pieces are fused down.  Now I have to add a lot of small parts over the next couple days then quilt and bind, voila.   I'm looking forward to the quilting.  I'm hoping the quilting lines will define the bricks and stones, and give the whole thing some finesse.

My technical skills clearly need a lot more practice.  They are not going to keep up with my wild ideas.

Just for the record:  chiaroscuro is a painterly shading technique used specifically to give 2-D objects a sense of volume: that is, to make them look like three-dimensional solids. Whereas tenebrism is a dark-light compositional technique by which some areas of the painting are kept dark (that is, totally black), allowing one or two areas to be strongly illuminated by comparison.