New Quilt: Bentley the Rainbow Dog!

Some of you may remember me mentioning that I took a collage art quilt class with Susan Carlson earlier this year.  I used her approach to make the quilt of Missy for Mike, but I haven't had a chance to share the quilt I actually started in the class until now.  I finally finished it, so many months later and figured that should be motivation to write about it!

I started with this picture of my precious Bentley, I love the tongue- it's really a great snapshot of him!  

You may know that Susan Carlson's quilts feature very bright saturated colors, lots of print and "busy" fabrics, and often non-realistic color schemes.  The bright, saturated, non-realistic colors definitely appeals to my design aesthetic, but I struggled think what colors I should do for him- blue and yellow?  Green and orange?  In the end I couldn't decide and no one should be surprised to know I picked "rainbow".  Basically his brown parts are bright rainbow and his white parts are light rainbow.   Her method starts with an outline drawing on muslin and then you start collaging in with small pieces of fabric.  The goal is to take advantage of your prints to give shading and shape whenever possible.  Here are a few shots of him in progress.

I got him all finished during the class and took him home in this condition.  Unfortunately, he stayed like that from march until I was home at my mom's over labor day when I finally had time to start thinking about the background.

I considered setting him in a field of green grass like the original picture but I worried that he'd blend in too much and that he'd look like he was floating.  Mom and I tossed quite a few ideas around, and one of her suggestions was a tiled floor background.  I could angle it so it would read as floor and if it was mostly grey and white, he wouldn't blend in too much.  I made a quick mockup in photoshop, and decided it would work.

I thought about piecing the background, but I wanted to maintain the rough-edged organic collage feeling throughout the whole piece, so after tracing the lines of the tile onto the background fabric, I just started collaging the background on.

I found these two slightly greyed out turquoise fabrics at my mom's quilt shop, and thought they'd work for the border.   I'll share the finished quilt on Friday, so check back then!