The Hysterical Chicken Quilt - in progress

                                                                                                                      

Auditioning background fabrics and placement.
(we really did not like this background)

We drew the chicken on muslin and painted it with acrylics

.

( We love the bird!)

Our old sketches that never found their way to paint and canvas have started showing up as appliques in quilting projects. 

Since most of these sketches involve some kind of twisted humor, they make for curious designs... 

Chicken Soup features one of our favorite sketches - the hysterical chicken.

Quick Applique Method -

1. Find a little sketch that has a good feel - small sketches work fine. Ink over the sketch lines so they show up clearly because you'll need to blow up the sketch on a copy machine.
2. Enlarge the sketch and tape the pieces of paper together to create a big pattern. 
3. Place a lightweight fabric over enlarged pattern and trace in pencil the sketch. Once you've traced your sketch on lightweight fabric - add an additional second or third layer of fabric to the back of applique to softly stabilize the image. 
4. Free-motion sew a single stitch line on top of all pencil lines. 
5. For our chicken applique, we used basic acrylic craft paints to add color to the applique...we kept the paint layer thinner. 
6. If the paint gets too thick the applique gets too stiff and cardboard-like in texture.
7. We spray-dyed the background beige fabric blue after we finished the applique painting. You can dissolve a little bit of acrylic paint in water and put in a travel size spray bottle... that works great.  It only takes a little bit of spray color to add a lot of pizazz to neutral-colored fabric.
8. We cut out the applique leaving a 1/2" blue border all around
9. Next, we played on trace paper with developing a crazy background to go with our hysterical bird.

As we plan through this design we're 'trying on' a radial design to see how it looks. 

Adding blooms and bugs to what looks like exploding lines creates so much comic energy with the
flapping wings, flinging flowers, and flying bugs.
This is a great contrast!

 Juxtaposed a prim/proper English flower arrangement with pleasant bees on a lovely day with a hysterical chicken
#HandmadeHappiness - one quilt at a time!