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
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
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.
In this earlier post I showed how to create a tartan plaid pattern in Photoshop. That 
method simulates the weave characteristic of a real tartan plaid, with the distinct diagonal twill pattern, like the one shown here.
As an alternative, here’s a really quick way to create a seamless plaid in Photoshop Elements. Continue reading
In two earlier posts I talked about my process for creating a quilt design starting from a photo. In this post, I’ll go through the process of actually making the quilt based on the final design (shown here). 
With the strong circular element in the design, I knew it would be important for the grass shapes to line up exactly across the circle. Normally I prefer to make my quilts by piecing rather than some form of applique. I’ll often use Ruth McDowell’s piecing technique on a complex quilt. However, for this design, I thought that piecing would take forever and I wanted to complete the quilt fairly quickly since it was part of a class (“Inspired to Design” with Elizabeth Barton at Quilt University). Continue reading
In my previous post, I walked through the initial design process I used to create the quilt Prairie Grasses. 
I started with this photo, drew sketches to simplify the design and started on looking at value studies.
My first two value studies, shown below, were of the original sketch. I liked each of these, but I thought it would be more interesting to combine them in some way.
I recently completed the class “Inspired to Design” with Elizabeth Barton through Quilt University. The class is about the process of creating art quilts, starting with an idea, working up sketches, using value studies, creating color schemes and finally constructing the quilt.
I really enjoyed the class and I completed a quilt based on one of the designs I worked on. In this post and the next two I’ll walk through my steps in creating this quilt. Continue reading
In a previous post I talked about the improvisational approach I took to create a quilt from two silk scarves I bought while on vacation in Kauai.
That previous post showed some of the different layouts I’d tried–b
oth on the computer and on my design wall–for all the pieces I’d sewn together. The picture on the right shows nearly the final design. Just a few more pieces were added for the final quilt.
The completed quilt top is pictured below. Continue reading
Color On Cloth 