Red Rock Canyon

My son is a climber. This site is outside LasVegas and he played there last March. I OFFERED (what was I thinking) to make him a tapestry from his favourite photo....this one.
Christmas is coming and I've put it off long enough. We (the creative Mary and the practical Mary) finally began today. This is not going to be easy even for me. And it will not be a continuous effort.

I have two more pieces under deadline, both part of group efforts for our Guild's Quilt Show next May:  Tofino Woods and Newfoundland's Jelly Bean Houses.

So I'm going to bounce between them as the mood and my energy allows. (Going out to work may actually help keep me sane)

But first Red Rock Canyon. The colours. Not having been there and relying on photos is never accurate but these are my choices. In his words - Orange

 The original photo is deceiving. My son drew a sketch of himself on a printout and it was barely more than a millimetre. These rocks are big, though in the photo they look like a rubble pile. After photo shopping and cropping I settled on the upper two thirds of the photo.

Here it is, enlarged on my design wall ( roughly 24" sq.) and reduced to 8 layers. And here is my working reference sheet. There are three colours of lines to indicate order of assembly. Really.

How do you start this? With a lot of thought. I decide recently that instead of using fusible web and fussy cutting, I'm going to take a "crumb" approach and anchor materials first with glue and then netting. I want to keep the thickness to a minimum. After assembly it will require a lot of thread painting.

I'll keep you posted.
2:00pm This part, the EASY stuff took 2 hours.