I wrote a post about stitching some caricatures back at the beginning of June. The sketches are all done by my friend Nanci Williams. We are still working out the details but the plans so far for these are to have an exhibition of work by different artists using Nanci’s sketches as inspirations and to make a book of all of the people. We are thinking of calling it “Whitefish Fashion Plates”. The two previous stitched people who I did were the same size as Nanci’s sketch. This time, I decided I wanted to enlarge them considerably. I chose a sketch that had four women pictured who were all dressed very much alike.
I copied the original sketch and then enlarged each person on my copy machine by 200%. I then taped them all back together again. I gave them names as well!
I then hunted down fabric that would work for them. All of them were wearing pastel shirts, all had grey hair and wore a visor and carried similar handbags. I had a hard time finding pastel fabrics in my stash as I don’t seem to have a lot of these colors in solids. The skin tone fabric I had was dyed with tea.
Once I found all the fabric, I had to iron all the pieces so they would be flat and ready to put fusible web on to the back of the fabric.
I started with Becky Sue, the one on the right hand side of the sketch. When I traced the different body parts, I had to remember that the paper on the fusible web is on the back side so I had to turn the sketch over and trace from behind. That way when I fused the pattern on to the back of the fabric and cut it out, the figure would be facing the proper direction.
I then ironed all my fusible web with the patterns on to the back of the fabric I had chosen.
I cut them all out and here is Becky Sue ready to be fused down to the background. I haven’t chosen a background fabric yet. I only have one piece of fabric that is the correct size and it seems a bit too “tie-dyed” for a background. I have been just using fairly plain green backgrounds. All of the details will be added with stitching once all of the figures have been fused to the background.
All of the ladies shirts were plain except for Becky Sue. Her shirt is supposed to be striped. I didn’t have any striped fabric so I decided I would add stripes with a permanent marker. I made a sample piece to see which color stripes I like. Which color stripes do you prefer?
These mosaic people are by my friend Deb Stika. This isn’t a very good photo but these are approximately 2 1/2 to 3 feet tall and all done in mosaics. The resemblance to Nanci’s sketches are amazing. These will be included in the future show and book too. I will keep you posted on my progress on the four ladies.