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.
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