Can You Name This Tiger?

Can You Name This Tiger Quilt for Us?   

If you’re one of our wonderful newsletter subscribers (and if you’re not, you really should be, because that’s where the action is!) you know that we’ve been working on a big project for the last few months.  OK, almost nine months, on-and-off, but who’s counting?

Anyway, sometime in the last year, we acquired a printed digital photo panel, and we decided to do what we do – and remove it from its ugly black background, and give this handsome tiger a new and colorful quilted home.

Now – finally – we’re almost, almost, done.  There’s one last border to attach, one last sashing seam to sew, and this handsome tiger will live forever. 

Or at least until the fabric disintegrates.

But We Just Can’t Decide on a Name

Maybe we got too close as we built this beautiful quilt up from base strip sets and wove together a scene that we hope is beautiful and mesmerizing, that tells a story and sets free the imagination. 

Maybe we’ve just worked on it too long and we’re a little burnt out.

Or maybe we just came up with a whole lot of awesome names and we can’t decide on our favorite (which has happened to us before).

Whatever it is, we can’t quite decide on the proper name to sew onto a fabric tag with our shop name and date and attach permanently and until the end of eternity to our tiger quilt.

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So can you help us out, please? 

Take a look at our pictures, and we’re sharing the rough, raw, and real workshop photos of how this quilt is coming together.  And read the story below, as we describe the vision we had for this quilt and how it evolved.  And then think of a name that you think is just absolutely perfect.

We’ll share each answer in the Facebook post, including the names we’ve thought of, and then we’ll round up every answer we receive during the next two weeks, and share them in our next newsletter issue. 

Alright – Let’s Learn About the Tiger Quilt!

We wanted to get a fabric tiger, I can’t remember why now.  I think we were planning on making a fracture quilt or something.  But we found a printed tiger panel – just one – on Fabric.com, one of our favorite supply sites.

He was a very handsome tiger, on a black-and-white background.  I’m told this is a photography technique called “color-popping,” but in this case I just felt it didn’t do him justice.

Re-Doing the Background

So we ordered the tiger, and the first order of business was to take him off of his boring monochromatic background and begin puffing and popping him with batting, foam, and variegated thread highlights.

Once we’d done that, we pulled out all of the colors out of our stash that we thought worked to create a more natural background for the tiger – a kind of sun-washed jungle background.  After a few false starts we ended up with a chopped-square mosaic background that we quilted all over with jungle vines and leaves. 

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Changing the Plan

At that point the plan was to stop.  But – of course – the quilt had other ideas, and we had to listen to the muse.

So we started envisioning something new. 

We saw a tiger, king of his realm, in a ruined temple in one of the amazing wildlife preserves in India.  So we started adding in architectural pieces designed to evoke images of the awe-inspiring Taj Mahal, from sandrel-arches to mosaic diamond floor tiling. 

The Final Result (coming soon)

We’ve put all these pieces together, and we’re working on the final border, which will be another Princess YellowBelly original design that’ll finish it off with flair. 

Now the top and bottom of the quilt have a special border – a straight green strip with striped cream, brown, and gold diamonds in the same diamond trellis design.  And the little tigers that came with the big panel live there in stunning glory.

Finally there will be a border around the whole big, beautiful tiger quilt in a fabric we fondly refer to as “the tiger flame.”  That’ll be a specially shaped border…once we stop achieving the cow udder effect.

Can You Name this Tiger Quilt?

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