A really dirty job

Below is an earlier photo of the unquilted but painted image... Now.. the center is pretty well done... and I am quilting DIRT..... this will take some time as this type of repeated quilting can freeze ones brain and then you begin to make crazy mistakes. So to keep the scale consistent, I try to break about every hour.

(C) copywrited image
There's a lot of dirt in the background of this piece (not all shown in above pic.) It will take a good while to complete. The area you see in this pic is about an hours effort (appx 22 square inches covered... appx 4.5 inch x 5 inch rectangular area) I quilt pretty slowly on purpose. The variegated thread going from black, to light brown, to greyish works pretty well and helps add a bit of interest to an area that otherwise with 1 solid thread, would seriously bore the viewer.

A viewer asked the origin of this piece so I'll try to be brief albeit it difficult on this subject. Last summer on a Mission trip to two orphanages in Ecuador, I and others went to an open market in the capital Quito. By North American standards, it was a sad place all on it's own. So many poor and lost children mostly unclean, dead and live animals for sale, fruits and vegetables some nicely presented, others thrown about... and as in any poor country thievery ever present. This child at least had parents. Her only toys were this empty box and a piece of paper. Children in Ecuador seems to be very afraid of foreigners. This young girl had just spotted a caucasian out of frame of my original photo, and was afraid for unknown reasons. I regularly wonder even today of this young girl and how life may be treating her now. Ecuadorean children are really quite beautiful physically ... smaller in stature, round faces, and very expressive, but usually sad eyes. The visited orphanages were in both Quito and Latacunga... established and managed by a beautiful American couple as residential homes with loving local Tias (aunties) .