Adventure Quilter

Remember when I posted about making small fabric collages and then cropping them to get abstract design ideas?  Well, I decided to use one of my examples as the springboard for a new quilt. I used this photo collage of tropical foliage.

Using photo editing, I removed the color to focus on the design lines.

I DID NOT plan to make a foliage quilt. Or a green one. Instead, I wanted to mimic this angled composition and, if I had the right fabric, try to copy the scale and shape of these patterns. Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to use hand dyed fabrics in a fairly large scale.

Step one: plow through my hand dyed fabrics and find ones that had large scale patterns, and patterns that hinted at those shown above. Oh, and I was working larger than usual so the fabrics needed to be in fairly large pieces. These are the ones I pulled.

Kinda disparate, right? But, I was pretty much in love with the combination. And, after my recent class with Pat Pauly, I felt confident enough to try all of these together. Next, I needed to try them on the design wall and see if I had pieces large enough to work.

So, I liked the general tilted composition and the colors. And I thought the large scale print in the top left emulated the palm fronds quite nicely. But, I could see that I would have difficulty finding enough fabrics  large enough to fill the large corner spaces. (This was 48″ square.) Therefore, I decided to downsize to 42″, and to rearrange the fabrics so that the largest pieces could fill the largest spots.

The large scale print (top right corner, above) was one of the largest pieces of fabric I had, so I moved it to the largest spot. I used the same criteria with the bottom left spot. I wanted the top left and lower right corners to me almost solid, (like the sketch,) IF I could find fabrics to carry it off.

Notice the dark twig/berry fabric lower center above. Since it was not very big I knew I’d need to fill the gap above it with other fabrics. I could have moved the dark fabric up to center, but I liked the idea of having something that dark down low. Of course, it could all change easily!

I proceeded with plenty of trial and error: placing, studying, moving, and repeating. Most of the fabrics were folded at this point, rather than cut.

MANY changes came after this, but I was beginning to get happy with the colors and shapes. I found it to be invigorating and challenging!

I’ll show you more progress soon.

Ellen Lindner

In an earlier post, I showed you a quick exercise for generating abstract designs. After making several “postcard collages” I decided to use one of them to create a quilt.

This was the original collage.

I cropped it and got this. I think it’s much more dramatic skinny like this.

I played with it just a little bit on the computer and got this as my sketch.

But, oops, I had lost the skinny drama, so I had to change that back.

 Next, I pulled out hand dyed fabrics, and others, to see if I had what I needed. Yes, I thought I could make it work.

I placed a piece of muslin on my design wall and drew out my planned size. Then, I started working on the large black shapes. I figured they were the keys to the whole design, so I needed to get them in place first. Since I work in raw edge collage it’s a simple matter to cut the fabrics to shape and place them.

Later fabrics were tucked under the adjacent black.

Since all the designing had been done beforehand, and because I was working with fairly large shapes, it came together pretty quickly.

How do you like my visual cropping tool, above? That’s right, it’s toilet paper.

At this point, it was ready for a light gluing and then on to stitching. I’ll show you how I tackled that in the next post.

Ellen Lindner
P.S. What construction tricks do you have?

I’m one lucky girl.  I got to spend a week at ProChem taking a week long dyeing/printing class with Pat Pauly. What an EXCELLENT class room set up!

I was anxious to get started, wearing ratty shirt #1. (These dyeing shirts definitely “spark joy!”)

See the paper on the wall behind me? That’s because the top parts of the walls are pinable.  Very useful. We each had a full table and a comfy chair.  We had 5 laundry sized sinks at our disposal, plus one power sprayer/washout tub. PLUS a washer and a dryer!

But, this is where it really got exciting: our drying clothesline.

Look at the size of this thing! It goes way back to the left wall, with lines about every 6 inches.

I called it the fabric forest. And I got more than a little color on me because of going into it. (You KNOW I didn’t mind that!)

For fabrics that were too goopy to hang we had a large rolling structure with flat drying trays which slid out. This thing got a lot of use.

I’m already trying to figure out how hubby can make me a smaller one that disassembles. He’s an engineer and an expert wood worker, so I know he’ll figure it out.

I was really spoiled by the set up at ProChem and I really recommend it.  If you get a chance to take one of their classes, do it!

Ellen Lindner
P.S. Of course, I’ll show you some of my fabric soon and other class photos.