The Singer Continues - Off the Wall Friday

Little by little, I've managed to work through this project.   You know how some pieces come easy and some come hard?  Well, yeah, I've been dealing with the latter with this one.

Problem 1.  Coming up with a decent idea.  Since I have been whining about that for the last two weeks we do NOT have to rehash that here.  But, to my credit, I didn't call uncle, and I did manage to come up with a good one!

Problem 2. Getting a decent pattern.  Normally, when I work from a photo, I like to make a trace of the most important lines, adjust the lines to my liking, and use an overhead projector to blow it up to a master pattern.  This having to be a perfect 10" I couldn't do that.  Not to mention, my photo inspiration did not lend itself to an easy trace.  So what I ended up doing, was using the online site, PicMonkey's Effect, Edge Sketch and it came up with something a lot easier to trace.  Then my husband used his pattern software to get it to the right size for me (he was sweet and didn't mention that this was the second time he had done this for me for the same project!)

Problem 3:  Working out the values.  Now you'd think that after 25 years of quilting, I could easily get the values right in a piece the first time, right?  Well, heck No!!  I ended up doing at least three different versions of the the machine before I was happy with it.

Just one of the versions that obviously wasn't working

Problem 4: This is what I call "The Break-up".  You know how when you love a picture and you think  - WOW!  I can make that in fabric and it will look AMAZING!  -- buttttt - then you start doing your rendering and it doesn't look anything like the photo and you think you  suck and you just want to toss it?  No???? Then you're lucky because it happens to me all the time!  I've learned that  somewhere along this creative journey, you need to just kiss that original picture in your head good-bye , make a clean break and go with where your new vision is actually taking you.  Because let's be honest, if we wanted our pieces to all turn out like real life photos - we would all become photographers and this blog would be about something totally different.  So I had to give myself permission to break up with the master pattern and work out the finishing touches on my own.

This is the last photo of it and I'll have it done tomorrow.  I'm happy  with where its going though and I'm glad I didn't give up on it!

So What Have You Been Up to Creatively?