I Saw ‘em, I Loved ‘em, I Made ‘em…Sort Of

I went out to eat this past weekend to a Mexican restaurant, Chuy’s, and they had the most wonderfully colorful, kitschy décor.  There were palm trees, a sawed off Cadillac rear end that served as a chip and salsa bar, a blue million (or so it seemed!) hub caps hanging from the ceiling in one section, and even a crying Elvis painting on black velvet!  Even with all that going on, the thing that caught my attention was a school  of colorfully painted wooden fish suspended overhead that meandered in graceful curves around one section of the restaurant.  Here’s a picture.

Of course my creativity was sparked.  I thought about making a bunch of individual fish in my dimensional style and having them layered…and that idea is still a possibility, but I jumped right in Saturday morning and came up with these “fast art” fish.

It took about three hours to lay out the background water and fish.  It's a decent size, 18" x 45".  The whole thing was covered in a fine, blue netting, pinned extensively, then stitched (at a later session).  When it comes to quilting and this type of work, I don’t believe in pinning, I believe in OVER pinning.  It would be such a shame, not to mention frustrating, to go to the effort of laying out so many small pieces only to have them shift in the sewing process.

A piece of interfacing behind the whole thing served as stabilizer, and I went to town sewing around all the pieces, which took about four hours.

I still plan to embellish with yarn to emphasize the water, then it’s on to quilting.  I’m still not particularly good at free motion, but I’m certainly getting practice.  Even the original stitching through the netting to secure the individual pieces is done free motion, so it can only be a matter of time before I get the hang of this!

I can hardly wait for the final embellishment.  Sequins would be a natural fit as scales…plus think of the beading possibilities!  Coming soon -- a picture of the completed project.