Giant revisited

Continuing the 'field' theme. In a post last year I wrote about working with this piece of a few years ago, based on sketches of Devon fields( red soil and the glow of a cereal field against a stormy sky) , to add a Henry Moore figure inspired by the poem 'Giant' by Katrina Payne
" ...... stride like a Giant....solid like a Henry Moore Madonna as I stride over trees, field, hills....."

To test out the idea ( and for June's CQ Journal Quilt) I printed out the sketch on the computer, and stitched it in a similar way to the larger piece ( from the back with silk buttonhole thread in the bobbin)
For the back, I'd used the same sketch when I went on a silk painting course a few years ago using steam fixed dyes. I'd started stitching it by hand with buttonhole thread but abandoned it long ago so used the whole thing, synthetic batting and all! ( bit of a mistake as the machine quilting puckered and wrinkled more than I'm used to with cotton wadding) The back has turned out quite interesting as there's a mismatch of stitching and painting.
I printed out a photo of the Henry Moore bronze 'Large standing figure:knife edge' on silk organza and applied it to the quilted sketch (only stitching enough to anchor it to retain the volume and floating quality)
I then painted over the background with acrylics with mixed results - in some areas its a bit heavy handed but I like the grasses in the foreground
This has given me the basis to go ahead (or should that be plough ahead-groan) with altering the orginal field piece- the foreground was what particularly bothered me and overpainting will resolve this, I'll just have to be careful not to overdo it elsewhere. I'll have to print out the figure on more than one sheet of organza and join it (probably try to do that along one sculpture edges and make a feature of it.) But I like a challenge!

Had a stimulating time at the QGBI Region 1 'Quilting in Action' day yesterday. People seemed very interested in my work and the methods I'd developed and when I was discussing these afterwards in the 'Demonstration' session, I learnt a lot too from other quilters about their what they'd tried. Jenny Hollingdale and Grit Traum ran a 'quilt forum' offering critique and advice to several brave souls who shared quilts and projects they were having problems with. This was so valuable - not having ever done any textile courses like C&G I've missed out on this and had to develop my own critical faculties, it was thought provoking to see their approach.

Ian treated me to a fishy meal out yesterday evening at 'Oporto'. As we're not followers of football ( Ian famously asked why Brazil weren't playing in Euro 2004) we'd neglected to realise that the opening match of Euro 2008 was Portugal v. Turkey and the restaurant was packed! Despite not having booked, they found us a table and we had a very enjoyable evening people watching. We couldn't quite see the tv screen but could follow the action from the cheers and groans( Portugal won 2-0) Very entertaining , like eating out in a foreign country.