The Eyes Have It - Allison Haggarty

When the challenge was announced I immediately thought of something that I had recently done for an online photo group that I am part of.  The group is run by Ricky Tims  and started as a year long photo challenge/class - every Sunday he gave us a challenge and a lesson and by the following Sunday we were to post a photo according to the topic.  After the first year many of us wanted to continue as a group so now it's just a challenge format, no more lessons.   And now we are in our third year of doing a photo a week. Some weeks it's quite difficult to take an picture that satisfies me but the constant practice is good for my photo skills and it is always fun to look at the amazing work done by other participants.

Anyway, for the first challenge of this year we were asked to illustrate our "word of the year". A word to inspire our photography for 2017.

My word is LOOK.  Because by really looking at what's around us we can see photo opportunities everywhere.  And as an illustration I used an extreme closeup of one of our cats.  The cat with an intense gaze.  :)

For the quilt challenge I wanted to do something more than just print a photo onto fabric. So I did some manipulations with Photoshop to get a black and white posterized version of  the original picture.  A little colour was added back to the iris.  I tried to enhance this with metallic thread so that a viewer who looked closely would catch a gleam from the thread. Not sure how well this will appear in a closeup!

For the rest - I matched the background to the eye colour, fused on the lettering and quilted.  The black areas have a shimmery thread which worked very well for the first half of the quilting and then started breaking on a regular basis. Sheesh! But I was able to finish just in time to meet our deadline.