Art Quilt Collage with Beagle and Lab!

I love dogs! I was delighted to donate some 6x6 small art quilt collages to the Craft Napa fundraiser. I posted them on Facebook and a high school classmate really loved this one.

Since it wasn't available to purchase, she commissioned me to make one like it -- but 12x12" and with her two dogs. How fun is that?

She wanted this same color palette and composition, but in order to make it interesting at the larger size, I'd definitely need to add more fabrics and stitch motifs.

So, I began by pulling these possible fabrics.

Fun, right? I knew I wanted some handwriting surface design (which was also in the original small piece), so I created that piece at the top. Just light blue fabric with the blue Sharpie Stained fabric marker. You can see I was also thinking about how I might use a selvage edge.

It took me a long time to figure out the right fabric and shapes for the dogs. I ended up painting fabric specifically to look like a beagle and a gray lab. Here they are!

Even though I pulled all those fabrics, I settled on these for the final fabric layer.

I was leaving lots of space for stitching by machine and by hand, but adding those fussy cut flowers also filled in the space nicely and framed the dogs.

And here's the finished piece.

I fussy cut and spliced the selvage of Leslie Tucker Jenison's fabric to include the word "love." 

And you can see the embroidered purple sprouts and the more-subtle free motion quilted sprouts. 

Orange Y stitches as in the original.

The dogs got just a bit of contour stitching. You can also see the wavy, hilly, gentle lines stitched in the teal background. (I stitched them and then fused the dogs on top.) 

So, there you have it. Dogs! I am so happy to say my friend was thrilled with the result.

Also... here's my dog, Lincoln. He's smiling!