Protea Quilt

You may be excused if you don't think this looks much like a protea. Alas, I cannot even guarantee that it will look like a protea when it is finished, though that is the intention.

I've read the blog of Emily Parson for quite a while and gazed admiringly at her Nature quilts. Just SO beautiful! And I've wanted to do that sort of thing with our own South African flora. I finally worked out a way to get from a photo to a quilt (I suppose I could have tried asking her!) and 3 days ago, I actually began.
I began by 'posterising' my photo in MS Photo Editor. I then printed it out in both black and white and in colour in A4 size.

The following step had put me off doing it for so long, because I thought there *must* be an easier way (with all the computer power we have these days!) But in the end, I couldn't figure out what that easier way was and just settled for doing it the hard way. I placed a clear overhead projector slide over it and began to trace the main outlines of each colour (easier to see distinctions when you posterise). I'm still convinced there must be an easier way!
Next I had to get this slide blown up to poster (full) size. I luckily obtained the services of a kind computer scientist to do this and also print it out for me, onto 25 separate A4 pages, which I then sticky-taped together.
{can't put photo of full-size version in here as it is currently taped to the back of my backing, and likely to remain there for quite a while. You'll have to imagine the slide blown up much larger}

I then realised that I should have asked for TWO copies of the printout, as I'd need one to put behind the backing fabric, for the placement of all the pieces and one to cut up for each individual pattern piece. Argh. But there was nothing for it, but to tape another 25 pieces of paper together and trace another copy onto that.

I then taped the original copy to the back of a piece of lightweight, see-through cotton. Hooray. The other copy was to be cut up into pattern pieces. I decided (very wisely, in retrospect!) not to sit and cut apart all the pieces, as it would have been a total nightmare of a jigsaw puzzle!

Then I looked at the photo again and wondered how I was going to separate all the colours from each other. Surely there must be an easier way, than the hard, manual way! I still haven't found it, so I settled for the hard way. After staring at the picture for some time, I worked out that there were 7 different reds and 7 different greens, plus white. I gave each grade of colour a code and a name and then with my master list of made-up colours, I sat and worked out what colour each individual piece had to be. (See why I spent so much time trying to work out an easier way?)

I'm now at the point where I know where each colour has to go. And I've begun to fuse the individual pieces onto the background. I will probably satin stitch around the edges as I'm not that confident the fusing will hold without unravelling. *Hopefully* I will have, at the end a "painterly" picture of a protea. At the moment it just looks like a very large, crazy, paint-by-numbers!

But now.... I don't *have* all the colours in the specific shades I want! And I have absolutely NO idea how to dye to 'spec' to get a particular shade (and I do want hand-dyed, for the mottled effect) Nor do I have enough fuse to complete it all, a non-trivial issue, since I can only get the fuse in the next town, 1.5 hours drive from here.

Double argh. It is only the very intense desire to see this through and have an end result which looks even vaguely like Emily's flowers (translated into a South African context) that keeps me going. But it may end up looking like a mass of random splotches of colour. That's the downside of working 'blind', with a technique I've made up (when the wheel has probably already been invented!)

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My first sewn garment was hilarious. I've long since tossed it in the bin, to save myself much embarrassment. At the time I thought cutting out the pieces according to the grain of the fabric was silly, since I could fit all the pattern pieces on a MUCH smaller piece of fabric, if I ignored that part. I sewed the entire thing, then held it up, put it on.... and realised why the grain was actually quite relevant.

My first knitted garment was equally hilarious. I thought it was silly to first knit a 'tension square' since I wanted to get straight to it. I knitted the entire thing, over many, many hours, then sewed it all together and then tried it on. Or rather, tried to try it on, except it wouldn't go on.... Because. It. Was. Way. Too. Small. I undid it all, rather than be confronted with lasting testimony to my own idiocy.

My ability to work hard was exceeded only by my stupidity. Okay, I've got a bit wiser since then, but this current project has me wondering if it will look even remotely like a real flower. I might do ALL this work and in the end it might just look awful. Perhaps I should make my intention a bit more obscure, so that if it flops horribly, I can claim I was trying to 'abstract' the general impression of a protea... to illustrate the 'essence' of protea-ness, the 'ethereal spirit' of the hardy protea as it survives under harsh conditions...

Yeah right.