Gracie's Portrait

On Wednesday, I spent all day working on Gracie's portrait. It's one of the more fiddly things I've ever done, including the McKenna Ryan patterns I've attempted. Remind me not to write any patterns for this any time soon.

So here's the image I was working from:

The eyes are the easiest part for me.

Next I tackled the nose.

And then the ears and the top of the head. I was able to fuse those parts together.

From there, I was a little worn out on it, and so I took a break. I'd spent hours getting that far...at least half of the time was spent searching for my scissors, my tweezers, the piece I'd just cut out five seconds ago...you know what I'm talking about.

When I came back to it, I was able to work it through to some semblance of completion.

So there's a little too much black on the left side of the face, and I think I need to add one more black piece above the right eye for the eyebrow. Then, it will be improved with some top-stitching. As I'm looking at this, I can see a little hole where the turquoise background is showing through. Do you see it? I can fix that with thread too. In fact, thread just might be my saving grace for this piece.

It still needs fuzz in the ears, whiskers, eyebrows, and some lines for the mouth and nose. For a first try, I'm pretty happy with it.

The hardest part was choosing the colors. Her fur is often a mix of white, gray, and black hairs to give her a gray tone, and so it was hard to choose fabrics that represented the colors realistically.

Today is going to be a day of driving all over the place. I need to pick up my quilt from the Northwest Quilting Expo, and then drop off my quilts for the guild quilt show this weekend. Also, I'm getting my monthly pedicure, which will be a welcome interlude to a busy day, and I'll pick up some groceries. Obviously, no sewing today.