Fenced In

This month's theme for my local challenge group was "Fences," and I just finished my challenge piece. (With hours to spare -- everyone is coming over tomorrow for our first challenge get-together!)

I'd wanted to play with picket fences, and as I've been wanting to explore using a digital photo as the basis for a piece, I decided to use this opportunity. I started with this photograph:



Ultimately, the piece I arrived at above was created using software called Kaleidoscope Kreator. Boy, did I have fun playing with that! You can download a trial version of the software, which will let you do everything but you see your kaleidoscope result with a watermark of the company logo. But you can play with the various kaleidoscope shapes and see how they transform your favorite photos.

I ended up using two different kaleidoscope creations, actually -- the center pentagon surrounded by pickets, then another "frame" of the foliage. It was also fun experimenting with putting different frames around different centers. Amazing possibilities!

Then I printed it out and quilted it. The final piece is 9x12 inches. The top and bottom borders are a deep green, btw, even tho they look black here.

Along the way, I tried various photo effects to see where those led me for quilt possibilities. I discovered that some images that look great on screen (or even paper) just don't work on fabric. This is something I did with photoshop, and while it looked cool on screen, it looked horrid and dead on fabric.



Ah well. This was a fun learning experience, which is the point of these challenges!

And guess what I'm doing tonight? I'm having dinner with our very own Brenda Smith and her husband David, here all the way from Australia! I talked to her last night to make arrangements, thinking how lovely and familiar she sounded, even though I've never met her. I'm delighted to get to meet her in person!