My grandson,Trey, always loved to have his picture taken. I loved to catch his expressions as he posed with no help from me. When we walked outside, I'd take my camera while he explored and he'd say take my picture Nana. This quilt was inspired by an un-staged angelic pose that Trey suggested, by getting behind the railroad tie wall with his Snoopy and saying, "Nana, take my picture." I couldn't resist trying to interpret it with fabric. The title indicates he isn't ALWAYS the angel he seems here. Some of his less "angel-like" images are on the right corner and on the back.

I don't know where to start on the journaling of this quilt. There were so many decisions to make on this quilt. And like Sydney's baby quilt, I didn't want to mess it up. The first step was to put the photo in Photoshop and change the levels so that it shows the different values. Once I figured out which level would look the best in fabric, I printed that.

Then I enlarged it, put it on a light box, and traced the pattern that I wanted on tracing paper. The pattern was then traced from the tracing paper to freezer paper. I cut out the freezer paper piece that I needed and ironed it onto the fabric. You leave the freezer paper on the fabric once cut out, so that you can place the next piece exactly where it goes. This can be seen in the photos above.

The shirt was black in the photo, but Trey liked the color red, so I made it red. I had fun choosing reds of the same hue, and trying to make it look like folds and depth to it. Choosing the fabric for the face was a very DIFFICULT task, and took considerable time, looking for the right fabrics. I wanted it to look realistic. TIP: Leni Wiener's book indicates that you have to have enough of a difference in the values to make it look real and not flat. She states that it might look like too much contrast up close while you're making it, but you need to step back away from it about 10 feet and look at it. I tried several fabrics that were too close in value and didn't look "real" until I finally went darker.

Then I tried to decide what fabric to use for the background. Since red and green are complementary colors, the green makes it pop. The blue sky made it look pale.

And then that's when it got really hard. I really wanted to get the other images of him when he was playful and being silly, to show the other side of him that I love. I tried opaque pictures and pictures printed on organza. I tried them in all different kinds of positions. I even laid out fabric to the right and placed them on the side.. I could not find something I liked.

I talked to the other girls and someone mentioned putting them on the back. Since, I had originally planned to put a group of them in the upper right hand corner, I had a lot of empty space there. So, I added the dogwoods there, because he used to like the ones in our yard. Then I moved the leaves to the left side to balance it. I finally ended up putting one picture of him printed on organza in the right lower corner to get across the ?? marks in the title, and put the rest on the back.

Tip - Quilting a person seems difficult to not make it look flat. I recalled advice from Hollis Chatelaine in a workshop once about quilting. Imagine an ant is crawling over, for example in this case the arm, where would he travel? Straight across or more rounded? That’s not how she put it, but maybe you get the gist of it. I kept that in mind as I drew lines on the tracing paper, hoping to make the arm look “rounded”.

I showed Trey the quilt I was going to make of him, and he said he wanted to make a quilt. A couple of weeks later, we were in a quilt store and he reminded me. So, he picked out a red fat quarter, and I got red thread for him. I had no idea what he intended, but he seemed to know. So, when we got home, he took one of the 8 1/2 X 11 print outs, had me thread his needle, and he proceeded to sew the paper print on to the center of his fat quarter. I just loved watching him, and chuckled as I did. He did finish it (way before I finished mine).

It is a quilt too small to enter into most shows. But I did enter it into the shows that would accept that size. It was juried into each show it was entered into:

Shows

"Nana's Little Angel ?? ", juried into Quilt Expo, Madison WI, Sept. 6-8, 2016

"Nana's Little Angel ?? ", juried into AQS, Syracuse New York, July 29-August 1, 2015

"Nana's Little Angel ??", juried into Denver National Quilt Festival X, Denver CO, April, 2015

Awards

"Nana's Little Angel ?? " won Viewers' Choice for wall quilts in the BTQG guild guilt show in Columbia MO, Oct. 2014