Ellen Lindner: Art & Creativity

After some designing, I was ready to plunge into unknown territory with my newest quilt.  This was my design “sketch.”

Click any image for a larger view

My plan was to use both stitching and paint to depict the imagery.  I had done this in a very abstract way on an earlier quilt.  In that quilt, my technique was to randomly paint a background piece of muslin, quilt it, then paint it.  The stitching created a texture of hills and valleys across the quilt’s surface.  This caused the paint to hit only certain spots, creating a very pleasing result.  I wanted to do something similar here, but wasn’t sure how it would work with a specific image.  Like I said:  unknown territory.

Rather than using muslin as my background fabric, I started with a batik fabric representative of foliage.  I lightly painted the background, using the colors I wanted to show in the “valleys” of the final quilt.  These areas would be stitched and were unlikely to pick up the paint.  Next, I drew the stitching design and started to quilted it.

Geesh.  That was a fair bit of work, and I didn’t even have any color on this quilt, yet! 
I was anxious to get to that part.  First, the sky.

OK, that was encouraging.  Perhaps this idea is going to work out, after all.

Ellen Lindner