Monthly Archives: April 2011

New Quilt — Coneflowers

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I thought I’d try to make a small quilt with sort of a ‘watercolor’ feel.  I started with these photos of coneflowers from my back yard.

After a lot of playing in Photoshop, I reduced the photos to this black and white ‘sketch’ — if I could only draw, this would have been done a lot faster.

I printed this on some cotton fabric and backed it with some stabilizer and then I experimented with different thread options for the leaves.

Even with stabilizer, and using a hoop while thread painting, the fabric was bunching up a bit.  Also, the white fabric showing through the thread wasn’t giving me the look I was after, so back to Photoshop.  I painted the sketch with multiple transparent layers to get a watercolor look.

Here’s the result after printing on fabric.

Before starting with the thread, I backed this with an ultra-firm stabilizer (peltex #72) and a backing layer of fabric.  I started the thread painting on the stems, and kept it fairly light, but when I got to the leaves, the thread started building up pretty heavily.

At this point I knew the ‘watercolor’ idea was long gone, but I was liking the heavy thread work, and at least a tiny bit of the fabric color was showing through.

Here’s the finished quilt, Coneflowers.  It’s 17 inches wide by 25 inches long.

And here’s a detail view.

I really like how it turned out, though it’s nothing like I intended.  I think I might go back to the black and white sketch and try another version, but with much less thread work.

In honor of National Poetry Month, I wrote this haiku after working for hours on this thread painting:

Coloring with thread
Quilting or Embroidery?
Love all the texture.

Creating Your Own Plaids in Photoshop Elements

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A plaid, or Tartan, pattern consists of criss-crossing bands of different color threads in the lengthwise (warp) and crosswise (weft) orientations.   The distinctive diagonal lines in  plaids are created by weaving in a twill pattern.  To create a plaid effect in Photoshop Elements we need to be able to mimic the twill weaving pattern.  Continue reading →

Black and White Fabric Designs

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Spoonflower has a fabric design contest coming soon with a theme of black and white — the designs can only use black and white, no shades of gray allowed.

I’ve been playing with some of my photos of coneflowers, and converting them to look like pencil drawings.

Here are a couple of draft designs, both representing a fat quarter of fabric–22 inches by 18 inches.  This was my first attempt, but I think it’s a bit too busy, and some of the areas are too dark.

Here’s another version, with some of the elements taken out, and some of the lines lightened up a bit.  I like this one better, but I’ll probably rearrange the flowers a bit more.

I’ve also been working on a larger drawing to use in a quilt.  Here’s what I have so far.  My plan is to print this on white fabric and then add thread painting to get sort of a watercolor effect.

If you want to look at some great botanical art, check out Science-art.com and search on any keyword, such as coneflower.

More AAQI Quilts

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I finished the last 3 of my recent batch of small quilts for the AAQI. These each started as photo that I took and then played with in Photoshop before printing on fabric.  I finished each of these using the stabilizer ‘frame’ that I described in this post.  There’s a size limit of 9 by 12 inches on the AAQI quilts, otherwise I’d have made the frames a bit wider for each of these quilts.

Pink Daisy was actually a plain white daisy in my back yard, but the magic of Photoshop let me change the color.  I had fun playing with different free-motion quilting patterns on each of the petals.

I took this photo of Delicate Arch at about 6 a.m. on a blazingly hot summer day at Arches National Park.  The sunrise was beautiful and it even made it worth getting up at 4:30 and hiking 1.5 miles uphill to reach this spot.

Purple Orchid is from a photo of an orchid that I bought at Home Depot for about $10 several years ago.  It bloomed spectacularly for quite a while, but it’s been dormant for a couple years now.  Guess it might be permanently dormant at this point.

The splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm.  If every flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness. 

Therese of Lisieux

There are several ways of looking at Delicate Arch. Depending on your preconceptions you may see the eroded remnant of a sandstone fin, a giant engagement ring cemented in rock, a bow-legged pair of petrified cowboy chaps, a triumphal arch for a procession of angels, an illogical geologic freak, a happening—a something that happened and will never happen quite that way again, a frame more significant than its picture, a simple monolith eaten away by weather and time and soon to disintegrate into a chaos of falling rock.

Edward Abbey