Spoonflower’s weekly design contest theme is “Sailing” and I immediately knew I wanted to use the Notan design I wrote about in this post.
That design used 4 different sail boat-inspired patterns (on the left below), combined Nolan-style into the 16 blocks on the right.
The October challenge for the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge group is Notan. Here’s the challenge description: Notan is a Japanese concept that utilizes black and white to demonstrate the contrast of positive and negative space. Often done as pen-and-ink
drawings, Notan can easily be adapted to fabric with stunning results. This
technique can help us evaluate our own skills with balancing the
positive/negative space in our quilts.
Notan is traditionally done in ink on paper, but is now often do
ne as a cut paper collage using the “expansion of the square” technique. This star cutout is a simple example — a star shape is cut from the black square and then flipped outward and placed on the negative white space, creating a positive/negative mirror image.
Color On Cloth 