I just completed another donation quilt for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative (which has raised over $883,000 for Alzheimer’s research and awareness).
Like many of my recent small quilts, this one started with a photograph. I took this photo of a daylily in my yard after a rain, so the petals were still damp.
When I was in 7th grade my science fair project was on snowflakes, and I learned how to capture snowflakes in a plastic solution on glass slides and then photograph them. My inspiration was Wilson Bentley’s work. So, when Spoonflower’s weekly contest was to create a snowflake design, I knew I’d have to design something.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any of my snowflake photos any more, so I looked around the web for inspiration. You can see many more beautiful snow flakes like these at SnowCrystals.com.
I’ve been working on a snowflake design for another Spoonflower contest. When I thought I was all done with it, I realized that it would look better as a half-brick repeat rather than a straight repeat. It took me a while to rework it into a half-brick repeat, so I thought I’d show the basic steps in this post, and then cover the details in another post.
A half-brick repeat is similar to a half-drop repeat which I covered in this post. The picture below shows the difference between a straight repeat (on the left) where the stars are lined up on top of each other, and a half-brick (on the right) where each row of stars is offset from the rows above and below.
Each spring the Milwaukee Art Museum has a 4-day exhibit called Art in Bloom which pairs amazing floral arrangements with the museum’s artwork. We went to the show last spring, and I took tons of photos of the flowers.
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
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 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
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
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
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
