Puzzle Challenges - What's for lunch?

Last year I took some online courses which I enjoyed.  This year I plan to take part in various challenges and will show my creations on my blog.

The first one I'm taking part in is the Quilt Challenge run by Three Creative Studios.  Every two months a theme is announced and everyone has two months to create a quilt based on that theme.  The first one is Puzzle and although it started on 1 January, I didn't find out about it until the beginning of February and decided to join in.  Quilting is not my main area of textiles but I have enjoyed creating my puzzle which I finished last night, three days before the deadline.

Here's a picutre of what I started with (all from my stash)

All this I planned to use to create a design in the manner of a sliding tile puzzle based on a photo I'd taken of my son's lunch three summers ago!  I just knew it had potential to be more than food for the stomach.

The background fabric was made by felting the merino fibres using my embellisher machine.  The ham is a blend of pink, blue and green merino and throwster's waste - not mould I hasten to add and I used the orange blend for the background.  Although there's only one cheese in the lunch I used several different packs of silk fibres so that each slice of cheese was slightly different.  Wensleydale curls have been transformed into ketchup!

Here's work in progress

After felting the fibres lightly I cut them up, rearranged them into the correct position, and embellished again using some fibres going across the joins underneath to hold the squares in place.  The silk paper was bonded onto the merino an then I attached the wensleydale curls with a herringbone stitch.

Next - the quilting.  I wanted to blend the squares together so I used the ketchup swirl from the original photo.  I planned to quilt with some french knots in silk thread but was worried the silk would wear thin to quickly so I embroidered them before adding the middle and bottom layers.  The running stitch and fly stitches go through all three layers providing the quilting aspect of the challenge.  More silk paper, this time in green/purple was added to the border and here is the finished piece.

I promise that if you cut my puzzle and slide the tiles like the child's toy you'd get back to a ham and cheese roll! 

I'm looking forward to the next theme which will be announced on 1 March and I promise I will blog as I go although only sneak peeks are allowed until the reveal week at the end of April.