Crime of Passion

I did not have an easy time with this challenge topic! And I have to confess that as I puzzled over what I would do, I was somewhat affected by the musings on this blog. I rejected passion flower and passion fruit as likely to duplicate someone else's effort -- and anyway, they just didn't thrill me. I rejected all sorts of ideas, until at some point the phrase "crime of passion" occurred to me. And maybe it's the lawyer in me (not that I'm into crimes, let alone crimes of passion!), and maybe it's that I adore mystery novels, but that's the one I knew I wanted to try to illustrate.

Ultimately, I decided to give this a double meaning. As those of you who read my blog or know me in "real life" know, I'm passionate about reading. I can talk books and browse bookstores and read for ages and ages and ages. Because of that, it seemed especially appropriate to make my piece a book cover of a mystery thriller about a crime of passion!

I could picture it in my mind, but oh, getting it translated into fabric! (Isn't that always the way?) I snapped photos of paperback books until I found a position and composition I liked. But then, how to create the cover? I tried various methods -- hand drawing letters and a bloody illustration .... the effort was fun but the result was just not what I wanted. Finally, I realized that I could set it up with Photoshop, and that's the method I followed.

As a side benefit in all of this, I have now learned how to create a curved-line path and place type on it in Photoshop! I wanted the book cover's text to curve to show a bent paperback cover. I tell you, just the type part took a full day. (And only at the end did it occur to me that I should have called my brother, a graphic designer and Photoshop expert, to just do it for me... duh.) Ah well, I was satisfied with the result. The bloody knife is adapted from a photo of a halloween decoration!!

Once I had my cover, I fused it down and then machine quilted it. You probably can't see it too well in this photo, but on the black background I tried to machine quilt fingerprint-like shapes. You know, crime evidence! You can click on both photos to see a larger, detailed view.

Here's a detail shot:



All in all, I was happy with the result and I feel like this really does illustrate one of my passions!