I finished quilting Prairie Night and Chiaroscuro Water Lily quite a while ago, but I didn’t get around to binding them or finishing the edges in some way. I wrote about Prairie Night here and about making Chiaroscuro Water Lily here. I’ve been working on some other small quilts for Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative, so I figured I’d better get these two finished so I can ship them all off. Continue reading
Author Archives: jean cheszek
Creating the Quilt Top for “Urban Sunset”
In this earlier post I talked about creating the fabric I used in my quilt Urban Sunset. My original plan was to use the fabric as-is and create several whole cloth quilts. However, the more I looked at the printed fabrics (shown below), the more I thought I’d need to cut them up.
I wanted this fabric to be the majority of the quilt, and I decided to use circles since I was looking for an abstract sunset over a city. Continue reading
Watercolor Coneflowers
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
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
Turtles on the Beach — Another Fabric Design
Spoonflower’s contest this week is to design a one-yard zigzag cheater quilt.
I immediately thought of the turtle I’ve used in a few other desi
gns. This post shows a Hawaiian design I made using the turtle. I figured it would be a fun motif to use in a zigzag design.
One of the things I love about creating designs to print on fabric is that I can make them much more complex than I could if I were to create a quilt using traditional methods of piecing and appliqueing fabric. Continue reading
Inspiration Photos for My Latest Quilt
Gallery
This gallery contains 11 photos.
I’m working on a new quilt, and the inspiration for it is the scenery of northern Wisconsin. A while ago we spent some time near Hayward Wisconsin (home of the Lumberjack World Championships), and I loved the peaceful lakes with … Continue reading
Hand Drawn Repeats
We have friends visiting from out of town, and the two middle-school-aged kids like to do art projects. I thought it would be fun to show them how to do repeat patterns using their own drawings. They can use their repeat patterns as wallpaper for their computer or phone screens.
The steps are pretty simple, leaving lots of time and energy for creativity. Continue reading
Not Boxed In
The latest design contest at Spoonflower is all about geometrics, and creating the design using only two colors (RGB #a7bb7d and #724b64) plus white. I like geometrics, so I thought this would be a fun design to work on, though I never would have picked these two colors on my own.
To get started thinking beyond the basic circles and squares, I looked up Geometric Shapes in Wikipedia, and discovered a bunch of fun shapes, like the Bankoff Circle, the Arbelos and the Asteroid…if they covered these in my High School Geometry class, I must have been asleep that day. Continue reading
Color On Cloth 