Maria in the book is a young girl so I wanted to do some hair that was carefree. According to the book, she has short red hair. I found one of the faces in Melissa's book that had the sort of hair I wanted so I followed that idea by using one fabric as the base of the hair and another fabric cut up to represent strands of hair.
First I did some auditioning of background fabric and hair fabric.
Then I trimmed around her neck, face and hair line.
I thought the striped orange fabric was what I wanted, but first I cut rectangles to audition in case I didn't care for it. I also auditioned a couple of sky fabrics and a couple of shirt fabrics. I was looking for a combination that went well together. In the end I decided to go with the orange stripe hair, turquoise sky and yellow frog shirt. I liked the colors together and the frog fabric just felt perfect for a nature loving girl. I didn't have enough of that particular turquoise, so I went shopping to get a large piece of something similar to use for the background.
Once I cut a shape for the background hair I used the ombre orange fabric in photo #2 to cut the strands. That was a good choice because there were several values of russet orange to choose from and I could easily add highlights to her hair.
I spent a fair bit of time refining her hair, cutting the strands just so and figuring out how to place them. When I was satisfied I used my large square ruler to carry the whole thing to the ironing board to fuse it.
I didn't get photos of this, but at some point i decided her neck was too wide, so I trimmed the sides and added the brown lines again.
With the whole hair and face fused I could work on the rest of her body. I made tracing paper templates for the bird and her arms and shirt.
I made the bird and fused it together, then the shirt. I think I did cut that from the pattern.
I purposely put her arms behind her back so I didn't have to worry about her hands. and once the shirt and arms were ready I fused it all to the turquoise background.
My next task is to create the flowers and maybe some butterflies or dragonflies and then I can quilt it! It's been on the design wall for a while now, but I plan to work on this in July because it's due in mid-August. I am also contemplating adding a little marten face to hide in the flowers. Updates will certainly be on Instagram in the meantime, but I'll do at least one more blog post about this quilt eventually.
That's all for Maria, but I have one more fabric face to show you next time. Stay tuned!
