Adventure Quilter
Ellen Lindner uses fabric the way a painter uses paint, with extraordinary results
I’m really happy with my latest quilt, Water Dance.
Water Dance
I wanted a lot of energy in the piece, and I think I achieved it.
The detail shot shows how I added double black stitching for emphasis. I use this technique quite a bit and I think it’s effective. I always do it in a rather loose sketchy sort of way.
For this quilt I used exclusively fabrics that I dyed myself.
See more information about Water Dance here. And see it in progress here and here.
Ellen Lindner
What do Michelle Obama’s purses, large chickens, and drought all have in common? They’ve all inspired African batik fabrics. Originally designed in the Dutch East Indies, these fabrics are now designed and printed commercially in Holland and sold – to a very enthusiastic market – along the coast of Africa.
You can learn all about it at the current exhibit, “Wandering Spirit,” on display at the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts, in Melbourne, FL.
The fabrics, along with garments made from them, are displayed beautifully. Most of the patterns are large, with strong contrasts, and vivid colors.
I attended a gallery walk lead by Dr. Gifty Benson, who is an expert from Ghana. She explained that the fabric patterns each have distinctive names: horse hair, bad year (after a drought,) Happy Family (of chickens,) and such. Even more interesting, special patterns are created to celebrate or commemorate notable events and people. For instance, in 2008 several patterns were designed to honor Barack and Michelle Obama: 6 patterns for him and 2 for her.
The fabric shown here is called “Michelle Obama’s Bags.” Can you see them?
There was another one called “Michelle Obama’s shoes,” which was printed with high heels.
This yellow dress was my favorite.
Check out the sleeves. Aren’t they interesting?
These fabrics are sold in 6 yard lengths. Buyers then cut them into 2 yard lengths and use two of the resulting pieces for a skirt, and a top. The third piece is often simply hemmed to be used as a shawl or a head wrap. (Or maybe some fancy sleeves.) You can see some examples of how the three pieces were used in the garments below.
Dr. Benson said that the release of new patterns is eagerly anticipated, because the women “just love them!” I’ll be they do have some fun planning how to make these garments.
I’m still thinking about the choice to honor Michelle Obama with prints about her shoes and her purses. It made me wonder what sort of prints would honor/depict me? How do you depict an outgoing chatterbox? Some big lips, maybe? A jumble of alphabet letters? It’s kinda fun to think about.
Ellen Lindner
I’m working on a new project, inspired by some great new fabrics. The bulk of these were painted by Pat Pauly. I purchased them to use together and they make my mouth water!
In the photo above I’ve folded each one to reveal the parts I intend to work with. I think a good dose of black will also be needed.
And maybe some other fabrics. Yellow-green, orange-red, blue-green?
Uh, no.
The hand drawn lines in the pink and white fabric got me thinking about lines so I spent some time doodling. One of my sketches resulted in a very irregular diagonal line. I thought that would be a good starting point for what would basically be a two-color quilt. I cut out my favorite parts and began to place things on the design wall.
Because the pink fabric is painted in broad chunky shapes, I thought I could use a chunky composition elsewhere. Eventually, I got this:
My scraps yielded a few of the painted circles, so I added them back in judiciously.
I was pretty happy with this. Still, I knew I needed to add some black. Just how should I do that without competing with the wonderful black lines already there? A quandary. (Hopefully, I’ll have a solution for the next post.)
Ellen Lindner
As I worked on the abstract quilt, I continued to take clues and inspiration from the original fabric. Since it was very angular, I wanted my pattern to be the same. Can you see how the shapes and lines of the side fabrics are extensions of the central fabric lines?
Same for the quilting. First, I stitched parallel lines on the two sides and in the middle I stitched around each little line.
Then, I decided to stitch parallel lines in this central area. Oh my! WHAT was I thinking? It was WAY too much starting and stopping for me and I gave up after the few lines shown above.
Plan B: concentric lines. It worked pretty well, except for the fact that my variegated thread gave too much contrast in some of my messy spots. I have a bit of redoing ahead of me.
Next, it was time to think about the main design elements to be placed in the foreground of this piece. Again, I wanted something angular, but when I checked, my sketchbooks I didn’t have anything like that.
So, I turned, once again, to the fabric itself. I took close up shots of several of the fabric shapes and found one I liked. (Although I edited it quite a bit.)
And, so here is the plan for the final motif.
I’m liking it a lot. Next will be determining what color to make the motif. Light or dark versions of the colors already present would be an obvious choice. But, I think I want to do something a little unexpected. We’ll see. Red maybe???
It’s been really fun to let the fabric inspire so many choices.
Have you ever done something inspired by a particular piece of fabric?
Ellen Lindner
Back in July I bought this beautiful painted piece of fabric from Pat Pauly.
Isn’t it gorgeous? I knew it could be the start of something wonderful. The only problem is that the scale of this fabric is much larger than I normally use. Which meant that I didn’t have other similarly scaled fabrics to work with. Still, I thought I could feature this inspiration fabric and add simpler fabrics to it.
First, I had to figure out how much of this fabric to use and a rough idea of the size of the quilt. I decided to use half of the fabric.
Then, I auditioned how I might cut it and reassemble it. Folding helped me visualize the new shape of the fabric.
So, I did this. The piece on the right has been turned 180 degrees.
Next, I began to audition other fabrics. I thought these looked pretty good.
At every turn, I used the starting fabric to help me make decisions. Such as the angles for the side pieces. I wanted them to enhance the angular nature of the starting fabric’s pattern. See what I mean?
Here’s the left side completed. (That is, pinned.)
And here’s the entire background when I THOUGHT it was finished.
I decided that one of the yellow fabrics on the right showed up too much, so I had to address that. Trial and error!
Thus far, I’ve shown you only the background. But I was also working on an idea for a foreground motif. I’ll show you that next time.
What would you do?
Ellen Lindner