I began working on this small quilt a few years ago, and it took me well over a year to get it to the point it’s at now.
I started with a bunch of small pieces of leftover fabric–some were from other quilts but most were from experiments playing with dye stenciling, monoprinting and discharging. I cut the fabric into 4 inch squares and started arranging them on my design wall.
Here’s one arrangement of the squares.
I entered another of Spoonflower’s weekly fabric contests. This one called for a one-yard image that included four distinct coordinating fabric designs, including at least one stripe pattern and one dot pattern. I’m not sure why I enter these contests…but it’s fun working on the designs and I’m learning a lot about Photoshop and Illustrator and repeat pattern design in the process.
I thought I’d try to use the ten colors in the Pantone Spring 2012 fashion color trends as my palette, since it’s trendy and these are not colors I’d normally pick (especially Sweet Lilac). A floral theme seemed to fit well with the spring colors, so I started gathering some of my photos of daisy-like flowers. Continue reading
One of Spoonflower’s recent weekly fabric design contests was to design a fabric using a recipe as part of the design. I’m not much of a cook (my husband does most of the cooking, though I’ve mastered the NY Times No-Knead Bread), so I don’t have any go-to recipes.
As I thought about this contest, I remembered my grandmother’s hand-written cookbook from the 1930’s. Gockoo (as we called her) wrote her recipes in a journal and added ones she found in newspapers or magazines, or ones she got from friends. I found her recipe for apple crisp pudding and thought it would make a nice nostalgic print, especially since there were only a handful of ingredients in the recipe. Continue reading
The December challenge for the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge group was to experiment in contrast and color and use strong value contrast in a dramatic way. In art, chiaroscuro refers to the use of light and dark, usually to add depth and volume to a painting. Rembrandt often used the technique, such as in his Self Portrait as the Apostle St. Paul.
For my quilt I wanted to start with a photograph, and I found this one of a water lily that I took last summer at the Como Park Zoo & Conservatory in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Color On Cloth 