Watercolor Coneflowers is my quilt for the Fall 2012 Blogger’s Quilt Festival. It’s a small art quilt that I’ve been working on to donate to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative (which has already raised over $773,000 to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s and fund research). Both of my parents suffered from Alzheimer’s, and you can read more about why I support AAQI here. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: October 2012
Pointy Pink Plaid and Illustrator CS6’s New Pattern Function
I’ve been learning to use Adobe Illustrator to create repeating designs for fabric (here’s an example, and another one). There’s a new version of Illustrator (CS6) which has a new feature allowing you to easily create repeat patterns. I’ve been wanting to try it, and as luck would have it, Spoonflower.com announced a contest to create an Arrow-themed fabric design using the new version of Illustrator. Perfect excuse to try it out, and I learned some important things about how the pattern function works in Illustrator. (You can see my final design here and vote for your favorites in the contest here.) Continue reading
Creating the Fabric Designs for “Urban Sunset”
When I created this fabric design for a conte
st at Spoonflower, I knew I wanted to expand on the idea and design some fabric to make a quilt. In an earlier post, I talked about my initial efforts.
I created the designs in Photoshop, using a custom brush that I’d made from a photograph of bricks. 
I used a limited color palette, and used multiple layers in Photoshop to keep each of the colors in its own layer. I did this so I’d be able to rearrange the order of the layers to get different effects with the colors. I also used more than one layer for each of the colors, again to be able to control the depth of the colors. Continue reading
Two In-Progress Quilts
I have two quilts that I’ve been working on for a while. The tops for both are complete, and I’ve made good progress quilting one of them. There are a lot of similarities between these quilts–both use fabric that I designed digitally in Photoshop and Illustrator and that I had printed at Spoonflower.com; both combine those fabrics with my hand-dyed fabrics; and both use a circle motif.
Over the next posts, I’ll detail the process I went through in creating these quilts along with the techniques I used to put them together. Continue reading
