Colors and Piecing

I had trouble deciding which color palette to use with Olive.  I had several shades and I kept looking at the opposite ends of the spectrum.  When I finally looked in the middle, and went from there, it finally hit me which shades to use for Olive.  Olive spent a lot of time hanging on my design wall this week with me just staring and thinking.

It was easy to find the larger shapes in Olive and trace them.  I pieced Olive together differently than I did for Lucy. For Lucy I traced all the shapes onto the fusible web and then I ironed them onto the material. For Olive, I traced a shape and then I ironed it onto the material.  I went shape by shape because even though I had the material lined up from the lightest to the darkest, and had numbered the shapes on the pattern.  I just had a difficult time imagining the shades on Olive.  Doing it shape by shape took a long time, because I would stop quite often and pin it on my design wall and just stare.

First,  I did her body because it was the easiest to pick out the shapes and shades.

Next, I did her head, but something was missing.  Her head looked flat.  Thinking of my painting lessons from Karen Winslow in July,  I realized the top of Olive's head needed to be darker to give the appearance of dept.

Olive's owner likes pink.  I thought about making the border pink, but it just didn't work for me.  So back on the design wall went Olive and I left her alone for several days to think about it.  Next week, I hope to complete Olive.

Here is  pretty view from our visit to Vermont this summer.

Can you believe that rainbow?  The brillance of it?  Also, look at the formation of a second rainbow to the right of the main one.  If you look closely above the roof, you can even see the beginning of the rainbow, something I have never seen before.  It was truely "candy" for the eye.