Today is The Endeavourers first challenge reveal day of 2023 and our theme this quarter is: ‘Portrait (of self/family member/pet/famous person) or a reproduction of a famous painting.’

I was really not looking forward to it as my portraiture skills are around about zero and my sewing mojo was altogether elsewhere. But, coming back to my blog after a time away, I found a host of new icon options to click on so I had to do a little trial and error investigation. To my surprise, I discovered I could alter a photo with coloured shadows and highlights and that put in mind of the Marilyn Diptych by Andy Warhol and suchlike.

Pop art is a way of liking things.

~ Andy Warhol

Just for fun, I cropped a randomly chosen photo of Poppy and just shadowed and highlighted away…

After that, I put together a more monochrome gallery because I thought I would call the piece The Poppy Diptych and I printed both onto fabric before realising that she gets called ‘Pop’ all the time and ‘Pop Art’ would also work as a name and an adjective. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to come up with a name for a quilt before so, in the end, I decided to keep both!

Just in case anyone wants to know, for the coloured pictures, I did as follows…

And for the black and white ones, I used filters and adjustments in iphoto to try to get variation.

After a grim few months, it was amazing to have something fall together so easily and unexpectedly and I also think it better captures the spirit of Poppy than the realistic image in a heavy frame that I was envisioning.

To make the quilt I printed screenshots of the images above onto Simplicity Cotton Canvas Photo Printable Fabric and you can compare the photos below with those images. I have used the poplin version of this Photo fabric in the past and I would say the poplin gives much better crisper images but this was very soft and would be easier to hand stitch so might be better for an embroidery project.

The other thing I would say about the canvas version is that it frayed a lot. I should have printed my images a bit smaller to leave a good border (the pieces are a bit shorter than A4) but because my bottom photos were too close to the fraying edge, I sewed them to the background quilt and then sewed a border of cotton tape to minimally overlap the bottom.

Finally, I fused some gold fabric around each piece to try to give the impression of two pieces ‘that together create a singular art piece these can be attached together or presented adjoining each other (Diptych – Wikipedia).

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I hope you will visit The Endeavourers blog to see what other members have made in response to this challenge. The reveal quilts are always wonderful and I can’t wait to see them : )

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

(If you subscribe to my blog by email, firstly, thank you :) Secondly, I really recommend you view the web version because otherwise you end up with a random scramble of photos and I don’t know how to stop that happening).