Several years ago at the NQA show my friend made me buy an applique kit of a Pomeranian. She did this over my protests that I never use kits and I never applique. She was able to manipulate me in this manner because I was in a wheelchair and she refused to push me any further until I bought that kit. I’m sure that’s a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act but she didn’t care.
I then promptly lost the kit. It ended up being found a few years later in a bookcase in the computer room. I still didn’t make the quilt. I had a good excuse. I declared it to be the Snowball Memorial Quilt and it would be just wrong to make it while she was alive. That worked great for procrastination until the dog decided to get very old and die which led certain pesky people to wonder aloud, “Wouldn’t it be nice if she had a memorial quilt?”
Since I was now officially excuse-less, I had to start. Meet the Snowball Memorial Quilt – Part 1.
It is just all fused down right now. The picture on the kit showed an orange dog with lots of contrast. Snowball wasn’t very contrasty. So I picked a bunch of cream and white fabrics that seemed very different when put side by side. I picked a few to be “light”, a few “medium”, and a few “dark”. Then I labeled the pieces based on the values in the orange picture. I just randomly fused a light piece to one of the light fabrics etc. I figured if I thought about it too much I’d get paralyzed by too much thinking. They don’t look as contrasting in the dog as they do as whole pieces of fabric which I think is good since it is a better representation of her. I used the wrong sides of fabrics too to tone down the contrast since I didn’t want her to end up looking like a pinto.
