Designing in Orlando: Part Two
Here’s round two of photos from my recent “Design Your Own Nature Quilt” class, in Orlando.
Cindy brought a great photo showing a stack of rocks in front of a waterfall. See how she decided to crop it, below.
Click on any photo for a larger view
She decided to depict the water with some scrunched white tulle. We auditioned this in class, but she decided to delay that part until she got home. However, she selected some strong and wonderful colors for the rocks and their respective shadows. This is going to be dramatic.
Beautiful lily pads and their flowers inspired Betty.
She constructed her background with a vareity of dark blues and yellow-greens. We came up with a plan for the flowers. She’ll fuse the tiny bits and create stand-alone flowers. Once she’s happy with those, she’ll audition the perfect placement among the floating leaves.
A variety of flowers against a clapboard building got Brenda’s creative juices flowing. She created a vertical sketch (not shown) showing her favorite flowers as the stars.
In the photo above, there’s a lacy purple flower on the left (although it barely shows here.) Brenda wanted to feature this flower, but didn’t have the right fabric. Fortunately, one of her classmates was generous and provided the perfect batik. Doesn’t it work beautifully? A great example of letting the fabric do the work.
And what about the clapboards? It would be tricky to add little gray strips to the background. So, I advised Brenda to do it the other way around. She cut the background fabric into strips. Then, she cut darker gray strips to be the shadows. These were cut larger than needed, so they could be tucked under the background/board fabric. This is much easier than cutting the shadows as skinny little strips.
These ladies did an excellent job! They cropped their photos to create better compositions, created working sketches, and started cutting fabric. They let the fabric work for them and made great starts on their own original quilts.
I’ll be doing a lecture for this group on November 5th, and I hope to see many of these quilts completed. I’ll pack my camera!
Ellen Lindner
P.S. I’ll be teaching an online version of this class starting September 21st. Full details here.
