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
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