I thought I’d try to make a small quilt with sort of a ‘watercolor’ feel.  I started with these photos of coneflowers from my back yard.

After a lot of playing in Photoshop, I reduced the photos to this black and white ‘sketch’ — if I could only draw, this would have been done a lot faster.

I printed this on some cotton fabric and backed it with some stabilizer and then I experimented with different thread options for the leaves.

Even with stabilizer, and using a hoop while thread painting, the fabric was bunching up a bit.  Also, the white fabric showing through the thread wasn’t giving me the look I was after, so back to Photoshop.  I painted the sketch with multiple transparent layers to get a watercolor look.

Here’s the result after printing on fabric.

Before starting with the thread, I backed this with an ultra-firm stabilizer (peltex #72) and a backing layer of fabric.  I started the thread painting on the stems, and kept it fairly light, but when I got to the leaves, the thread started building up pretty heavily.

At this point I knew the ‘watercolor’ idea was long gone, but I was liking the heavy thread work, and at least a tiny bit of the fabric color was showing through.

Here’s the finished quilt, Coneflowers.  It’s 17 inches wide by 25 inches long.

And here’s a detail view.

I really like how it turned out, though it’s nothing like I intended.  I think I might go back to the black and white sketch and try another version, but with much less thread work.

In honor of National Poetry Month, I wrote this haiku after working for hours on this thread painting:

Coloring with thread
Quilting or Embroidery?
Love all the texture.