What's for Dinner?

As the co-curator of the special exhibit "What's for Dinner?" for the International Quilt Festival in Houston, I have the supreme honor to have a piece in it as well. I find that I can really make matters worse for myself by over thinking what I am going to create. So, this year, I decided to keep it simple and go for a little play on words.  My idea is make a large Thai Chicken out of silk tie fabric.  I happen to have a couple of boxes of silk tie fabric, which would be excellent to use for this project. .

I laid out my fabric selection, right side face down on a Holy Cow Goddess Sheet made by Mistyfuse, and then carefully rolled out a piece of Mistyfuse over the top (wrong side).  I then laid a Fat Goddess Sheet over the top and fused it into place with a hot dry iron on the cotton setting.

This is a scrubbie.  I use it to get all of the residual Mistyfuse off the Goddess Sheet, so I don't accidentally iron it to something else.

I took the entire piece, as a whole, since they were bound with Mistyfuse in between the squares - to the cutting mat.  I cut them apart using my comfort 60mm Rotary Cutter from Havel's. It's one of my favorite tools.

You can see how the squares ended up, at a different angle, just for fun!  I auditioned many fabrics, before deciding on this beautiful red silk for the background

Here is the finished piece. 25x15.  It is simple.  A giant Thai chicken with a big googily eyeball. I thought that was a nice touch!  You can click on the photo to see it larger.  I free motion machine quilted in long hand the ingredients for Thai Chicken.  I didn't do any marking on the fabric.  I just went for it. Sort of as a challenge for myself.

Detail

This was such an excellent project for my new BERNINA 750 QE to see what it could do.  It was smooth as silk, writing out the words on silk.

I did break a needle when I started sewing on the wing of the chicken.  I figured I was going through 2 layers of wool blended felt, and about 2-3 layers of fabric.  One of the coolest features on this machine, at least for me, who sews with thickness, you can go in and program the presser foot to be higher, to allow for extra space between your project and the foot.  Once I changed that allowance, it sewed beautifully, as I added the feathers all of the way across the bird, and to its tail feathers.