Labikeet

I did not have an easy time getting started with these colors.  While I work with bright colors often and have a lot of them in my stash, this assortment of colors had me stuck.  I had lots of ideas and looked at a lot of lorikeet pictures, I just couldn't land on anything that struck me. Funny how naming a color palette by the "thing" with those colors parks my mind on that thing!

But at some point, while looking at the wonderful markings on lorikeets (I sure do love Google Images), I thought "I wonder what other animals would look like if they had these colors."  That sparked my imagination, and it was an easy decision to turn our Lab/Weimaraner Gemma mix into a "Labikeet."

I took Gemma's picture (I was waving a treat just out of the frame, hence the intent gaze).  I recently got Susan Carlson's "Serendipity Quilts," which details her loose "free cutting" version of fabric collage images, and inspired by that I set out to superimpose those lorikeet colors onto Gemma.

This was trickier than I thought it would be -- especially getting the eyes to look halfway decent -- but I had a lot of fun doing it.  Carlson's process involves gluing (not fusing) bits of fabric down, and then trapping then all under tulle.  I guess I'm not as liberal with the glue as this process requires, because I struggled with pieces moving around a bit under the tulle as I started to quilt.  But I'm very happy with the result.  Check over on my blog for more details about the process and in -progress  photos.

Gemma was dozing at my feet during most of the construction process ... not terribly excited about being immortalized in fabric as a Labikeet, perhaps, or maybe just exhausted by the burden of being my model!