Under Water
17.5" x 16.5", March 2023
Cotton fabrics, origami paper, craft paper. Fusible web appliqué. Hand-embroidered with 3-strand cotton floss. Machine-quilted, finished with facings.
Technical challenges:  No advance plan at all for this one. Collected materials, looked at them for awhile, and started experimenting. The base is a curved-piece quilt top. I had thought sewing these long curved sections together might be a problem, but cutting them out was even harder. Did the appliqué before the embroidery but it might have worked just as well the other way around, and been easier on the thin sections and corners of the paper. Tried several embroidery stitches I've never used before so a few areas had to be extracted and re-done.
Take-aways:  Remember to leave margins for borders/facings. Too much appliqué and embroidery is now trapped in the edge seams, which made the final assembly stages more difficult.