Miniature Mosiacs Session 4: Position the Fabric Tiles in Background

All right, so I finished my heart and I want to point out a few things. You can see that, earlier when I was talking I was working kind of small with the orange, and then this orange kind of got big, and I don't care, 'cause I know it doesn't matter. So I had started with my red-violets, I moved towards red and I ended with oranges more in the middle and my nice yellow line. I went ahead and extended that yellow line into the background here, and I had two little tails come off of it, and I really liked the way that looks. And I extended it off here too.

Then I decided I was gonna go ahead and put a frame around, or a border. And I did that in the violet. And then to test the waters, I put a blue-green and green going vertically here, and I'll put it horizontally here. And then over here, I started with blues horizontally, which I'll put vertically here. So right now I'm gonna finish up this frame.

Gonna turn this around. I've already got a lot of these violets cut, and I'm just gonna position them. If they hang off the edge, that's fine. I can trim them down later. It doesn't matter.

But I'm gonna go ahead and lay a bunch of these out. And I really like this dark violet corduroy, so I want to make sure I put it in there every once in a while. So this is really easy doing this border. All I have to worry about is getting them all about the same length and about the same distance apart. And I'm just gonna kind of match whatever angle I've got going there with that yellow.

And that's a little narrow piece. Gonna need to cut a few more pieces. Oh, here we go. Already cut magically. Now you can see that I put a square in each of these corners here, so I'm gonna go ahead and place a square in this corner, and that's gonna kind of give me something to work against.

So I'm gonna need a narrow piece there, or cut a piece down. So we'll cut that one a little narrower than it was, move things over. I can see that I don't have these quite deep enough, so I'll push them in a bit so that they have that depth of my square there. Okay. And now just this edge.

I think we're ready to tidy up and then do some ironing. So when I say tidy up, I just want to make sure that I like the line that's happening here on this side. That I like the way it looks. I'm noticing how much space is between each one so that we have about the same space, making sure that things are, you know, somewhat straight, not too crooked. I like the way it looks.

And once I like the way it looks, I'm gonna go ahead and iron it in place. Okay. And so you can see, I'm kind of keeping it off that far edge in case that edge is hanging over, I don't want to iron it to the ironing surface. Okay. So there's our frame.

I'm gonna go ahead and flip this over and just cut off my excess so I don't have to think about it later. Again, you can see that I'm not worrying about perfection. Okay. So now I'm ready to do my background. So remember I said I did this horizontally in blue here, so this is gonna be horizontal and blue there.

So I'm gonna pull over my blue fabrics, and I'm gonna be cutting just some long strips from the blue. And my strips are about, oh, a scant half inch wide. And no, I'm not grabbing my rotary cutter. I do not want these to be perfect, because if they were really straight, and everything else isn't really straight, then it's going to be more noticeable. I want everything to be not straight.

This is a really cool cotton velvet. It's gonna be fun to have in there. So I have a nice variety of mostly blue. You'll see a little bit of blue-green, little bits of blue-violet in here also, but it's mostly blue and different values of blue. I've got lights and darks.

All quite nice to play with a nice. So a nice bright blue. Okay. We'll start with this. And so these things I'm gonna be laying out, like I said earlier, horizontally this way.

So, I'm just gonna start by laying one in place, cutting it to length, taking the next color, laying it in place, cutting it to length. And then you can see here right away that I'm gonna have to cut off an angle. So cut that angle off. And I'm just playing with the lights and the darks, and the, this is not long enough yet, and the value, I mean the color scale, so some are tones and some are shades. This one was really rough, so I'm making it a little bit neater.

And just keep cutting that angle as it hits that heart. It's got a major curve in it there, and I don't want it to be that crooked, so I'm just gonna kind of cut that curve off. Cut this curve off. This is the cotton velvet, so it's kind of slinky. All right.

So these backgrounds go really quickly, because I'm using such big, long pieces. I could use little squares in here too. I just like the juxtaposition of the long linear aspect of the long pieces against the small squares. I believe that it helps to define that negative space better against the positive space of the motif or the design. And then I will snug these up and make sure that I've got a nice equidistance of black between everything and then iron it in place.

Okay. So, was hoping to use my tweezers, here they are. So this is when those tweezers come in handy when you're doing that kind of finishing placement. So what I'm concerned with here is that my space here is about the same, and my space here is about the same. If I have to make some adjustments along the way in my cuts, I will.

Good, and then down here, I think these two are a little long, so I'm gonna cut off this. Not a whole lot, just the tiniest little bit. Here we go. Make sure I've got nothing else on here that might stick when I iron this. And I'm gonna go ahead and put my Teflon pressing sheet on this because there's a lot of it, and it will help keep it in place while I'm ironing.

And then our last segment is gonna be back to green and filling in this funky little space there. Okay. Now earlier, I put this piece here so that it would line up with this piece down here, and would give me an edge to work off of with this blue. So that's why I'd already put that green in there. I'm gonna turn this around so that the green is right in front of me, push aside my blues here and grab my greens.

I'm not gonna need a whole lot here, so I'll try to get a good variety going, because I've got everything from blue-green to true green to yellow green that I want to include. Okay, so let's play with these and see if we have enough. So these are gonna be vertical now. And the first thing I'm gonna do is do the work to make things fit in here. And it's not gonna be nearly as tough as you think, because it's again, just cutting a few angles.

And I think I'm gonna do something that's not too blue, because this has already got some blue in it. And so the first thing I'm gonna do is cut this angle here. I'm gonna use that pencil, kind of get that angle. Put it in there, yep. And then clip.

Okay. Now this guy, the next piece that I put in there, I want it to be wide enough here so I don't have to put a second piece in there, so I'm gonna lay it down, put that angle in there first, and then go ahead and cut that angle. Let's see that fit in there. And then that's gonna tell me how narrow now, I can kind of feel that yellow through there. It's gonna start about right here.

So you can see that line, and it's gonna go down to about, I can feel it under there, about right there. And so we'll kind of cut that out and see what happens, see if it's the right width. And the right curve. So, I can see here that it's a little too wide there. I don't really like the angle here, it needs to be increased there.

So we'll fit that back again and see if we like that angle, which we do. This is a little too wide, so I'm gonna thin it out just a bit like so. Put it down and there we go. So that's how easy it was to deal with that very funky shape there. Use some pokey apparatus to put things in place.

And I'm gonna go ahead and iron this area so it doesn't move on me. And now we're gonna do this area. Now I'm gonna use just one thick piece that's gonna fill in here. I don't want to have to put two pieces in there. So I'm just gonna grab something that I think is going to be wide enough, and that is it.

It's definitely wide enough. Straighten out this edge, because I don't need that angle, and put it in place. Cut it to length. Okay. So my first piece here is gonna have quite the long angle on it.

So I'm gonna grab this guy here and I'm gonna lay it down and put it in place. And I'm going to basically draw the curve that's happening right here along right like so. Now I have a little kind of spare piece here on this edge I'm gonna get rid of, and then I'm gonna cut this angle, or this curve. See how that fits in there? Oh, very good.

But I've still got that little piece there. I don't want that on there. That fits very nicely. It could be cut a little bit more here. Not as deep of a curve as I had going.

There we go. Very good. And now I'll cut its length, and we'll just keep doing that, adding that curve in there as we go. So again, just setting that down there so you can easily see where that curve needs to be. Mark that curve, cut it.

Cut the length. I can see already I cut that length too long, so I'm gonna cut that down a bit. All right, so we're gonna need a little piece right there, but I want to kind of get these in position first so I know how big that needs to be. Because right now I think it needs to be a lot smaller than I think. Okay.

I'm not liking that I don't have any, there we go, we need to see some black there. And I think I need to do a couple of things. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lift this little corner up right here, 'cause you can see that it's a little wider here, right there than this is, and so it's crowding this piece. So I'm gonna lift that up and just kind of clip it off. There we go.

Much better. So now I've got that nice black on both sides of this green. And so these are being pushed over, so now they're all gonna be a little bit too long. So I'm gonna cut. Wow, that's just jagged as all get out.

There we go. Okay. So again, just making sure that I like the distance of the space in between, that we have the same amount or a similar amount of black showing. That I like the positioning of everything before I get to that one final piece, or if we even need a one final piece, or if we just need to make this piece a little bit bigger. So what I think I'm gonna do is I think I'm gonna narrow this piece down, put him back into place.

And I need to cut off this corner on this side right there. Put him back into place. Okay. So he's fitting well, so now we're just gonna need a little triangle sort of shape for this portion here. I think I'll use this nice green.

So I'm gonna cut a square or a rectangle and then kind of cut from corner to corner and see if that fits. It's too big, so we'll cut it down. And I believe that's going to fit right there in that corner. There we go. Okay.

Our final little peek at our spaces in between before we iron. I'm liking it. Make sure there's no extra bits on there. And I'm gonna press that, and then I'm gonna give the whole thing a final press. This time, I'm gonna make sure everything is pressed down and nothing's coming up, because now we're gonna be ready to start our quilting.

Once I've done this whole thing with the Teflon pressing sheet on and I can see that it's not sticking anywhere with a Teflon pressing sheet, which means that there's no adhesive that is on the top of anything, I'm gonna go ahead and use the steam and press it directly. Make sure nothing's on here. Okay. And really make sure everything is in place, because I don't want things lifting up on me during the quilting. All right.

Let's check it out. I'm a liking it very well. It's very cool. Nice. So now we're ready to quilt.