Ashmead's Kernal

For my last quilt in the 2015 series I have continued to design and develop in Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 (which happily continues to work well under Windows 10). I was able to pick and photograph apples from the tree in my garden for this piece so it really does feel like it is completely my own home grown piece of work.

As the challenge for this piece is 'Reflection' I decided to play with the Reflection Effects in the software. There are so many variables to try that in the end I just rolled the dice until I came up with several pictures that I liked. Then I just chose my two favourites and added a Distortion Ripple Effect to the lower one. Examples below...

Reflection pattern

Reflection pattern with ripple

Reflection kaleidoscope

Reflection kaleidoscope with ripple

Once I had settled on the final two background pictures I superimposed my apples over them and I printed them out on TAP and ironed this onto white cotton. It is difficult to make the joins disappear and I used watercolour pencils to try and hide any small gaps. 

I applied Golden Soft Gel Medium with a small paintbrush and let it dry and then ironed on gold and silver foil. 

Finally I dusted lightly with some pearly and bronzey markal sticks.

The piece was then ironed onto felt with mistyfuse and quilted with YLI machine quilting cotton in Dusk.

It might interest you to know that I am not very good at visualising which is why I find PaintShop Pro so useful in the design process. Unless I have done something before I cannot imagine what it is going to look like so I do a lot of  'what if', trial and error and test pieces along the way to finalising my piece.

Pineapple Emerging

 I decided to continue with my method of designing in PaintShop Pro with the aim of producing something very bright and rather abstract. I eventually settled on a very simplified design of a pineapple set against a background of kiwi fruit cross sections. I love fresh pineapple, but am allergic to it and get a more extreme reaction to it every time I eat it.

I started with a simple drawing of a pineapple which I scanned in and then I found a good picture of kiwi fruit. I manipulated the kiwi fruit picture and then changed the colour of the pineapple and the leaves to differentiate it from the background. 

 I used TAP for the lettering on my last quilt, but I have never used it for a whole quilt and I have never had to match and join sections of a picture onto fabric. It’s quite difficult and I did mess it up a bit. I have since worked out how to crop accurate section for printing and to join them together with masking tape before ironing it all on to the fabric in one big go.

My intention was to do some dense quilting over the background in a light colour to knock it back and make the pineapple pop out, but this did not work as effectively as I had hoped. To rectify this I had to reinforce the stitched black outline of the pineapple with a black pen and then go over the background with a pearl-white Markal stick. If I'd had time to practice I would have faded out the background before printing it.

Reverse view