Hubby’s portrait Christmas gifts

I already told you that Sweet Hubby decided he needed to give my “Making Faces” technique a try. He wanted to make portraits for Christmas gifts to give to some friends who we’ve known for about twenty years. In his excitement, while we were in Colorado, he even bought his own fat quarters. Earlier this month he started on his first portrait. Now that the gifts have been given, I’m excited that I can finally show you his portraits. He did almost all of the cutting himself. I just did some fine-tuning and quilted them. He wasn’t ready to learn free motion quilting, too!

His first portrait features the same young lady who I used as a model for “Windblown.” It went pretty well for him. We did end up buying a pair of Gingher scissors with large handles to accomodate his larger hands, and they seemed to help a lot. (So glad my 50% off coupon for Joann’s came at just the right time!) He has a bit of trouble with very fine motor skills, so I helped with some of the really picky details (mostly on the next two). Thankfully, even though he is dyslexic, he didn’t have too much trouble with the process.

The biggest problem he had was that the paper pattern wouldn’t stay stuck. It kept separating from the Lite Steam-A-Seam 2 fusible webbing which, needless to say, is extremely frustrating and can cause problems. This was his first time using fusible webbing, and I told him to fuse it to the fabric for 10 seconds. The only thing I can figure is that in his attempt to be thorough, he may have fused it for much longer so it was no longer sticky. I think that’s something I’m going to have to explore a bit more.

When he first came up with the idea of making portraits of the entire family, I cautioned him that it might be rather ambitious. It’s not too difficult to do an 8-1/2″ by 11″ portrait of just one person, but it’s much harder to do a double portrait. It’s obviously double the work, and all of the pieces are much smaller. Plus, now he was going to have to deal with glasses and a beard!

Nevertheless, he was optimistic and enthusiastic and forged ahead. I’m glad he did. Didn’t he do a terrific job with our friends? As soon as he finished it, he moved on to his last portrait This time he had the challenge of three people, including another pair of glasses and a baby. I suggested we make this one a bit bigger so the pieces would at least be reasonable sizes, so we made this portrait 11″ by 11″.

As always, we marveled at how much the portraits look like our friends. We really enjoyed presenting his gifts to our friends and watching their faces as they opened the packages. That’s the best gift of all!