Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Getting Perspective

Remember how today was the first day of Roger going back to school for the new semester? So I was looking forward to my first day home alone in a month?

Yep, you guessed it. Caroline was sick today and stayed home from school. So much for that peace and quiet thing.

Although I think she will be well enough to get back to school tomorrow, Roger came home early to retreat to bed with the same bug...so chances are he'll be home tomorrow too.

It's a good thing I love these people.

Anyway. I did manage to get some time to try to fix that wonky house on the Snowy Night thing. I discovered that I'm not very good at figuring out perspective on even simple building shapes.



Good thing I bought all those erasers the other day!

After various attempts (this is only one of many that ended up in the waste basket) I retreated to the basic 2-point perspective set up to get it right.



That helped, and eventually I got to here, which I'm contented with:




So here's how it looks in the setting, with everything machine appliqued in place:



By the way, several of you asked how I did the trees. I actually found a photograph with tree shapes I liked, then blew it up a bit and traced it to get to a line drawing I liked. Then I enlarged that even further to the size I wanted, then traced the shape onto WonderUnder. I fused that onto the black fabric, then cut the tree shapes out with the paper still on. I used an exacto knife for all the tiny inner holes. And so the tree shapes are just fused on and will eventually be stitched down. Everything else I used a folded edge and blind-hem stitched down to get the smooth finished look I wanted.

The assignment, you might remember, was to create a house in its setting. I wanted this to be less about the house shape and more about the feel of warmth and feeling of "home"... which is why I kept making the building smaller and the field of snow bigger.

This isn't final cropping and I've yet to figure out how I'll quilt it, but I'm looking forward to that and am pleased with this so far.

Not bad, considering I had a snuffly kid lurking around all day!

6 comments :

  1. Anonymous10:57 PM

    YES! This really works! the size of the cottage and the warmth coming from within are JUST RIGHT ont hat big field of snow, and those lovely trees - WOOOOHOOOOO!

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  2. It's looking wonderful, Diane!

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  3. I just love it. It's so fun to imagine what might be going on in that cabin. Can't wait to see how you'll quilt it.

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  4. I love this, the light from the little house glows,

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  5. I agree with everyone. the lights really do put out a glow. love your trees too.

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  6. p.s.
    thanks for sharing your process.

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