After making small collages our online instructor, Jane Davies, asked us to visually crop them and to pay attention to negative space. Well, I’m sort of “known” for cropping things, so I was right in my comfort zone! Before: After: As expected, everything looked better when cropped. There were several reasons for this: – Due…
You can’t work with a bunch of pieces of colored paper without seeing some design possibilities! As part of my online class with Jane Davies, I was arranging, and rearranging, and rearranging again a wide array of colors and shapes. Our first assignment was to make a largish collage with multiple pieces. Mine missed the…
Finished! I’m very happy with it. See size and pricing info. Have you ever abstracted something like this? I like the effect. What do you think? Ellen Lindner
After studying my photo of a Christmas cactus, I decided to try abstracting it with one repeated shape. Maybe something like these “spike” shapes. Yes, I thought they worked well. My original idea was to fill the entire space with this shape, just changing the color for background grass, brick, etc. But, when I tried…
Once again, my Christmas cactus was beautiful this year. (Here in Florida it lives outside year round.) I began to imagine what an abstracted version might look like in fabric. Can’t you envision some bright, spiky red shapes? I was especially enamored with the cascading blossoms on the right side. Just to jump start some…
After a disappointing attempt at making a quilt featuring my large-scaled hand dyed fabrics, I dramatically down sized and tried again. This time I switched the color proportions, using turquoise as my primary color and fuchsia as the accent. I still found it hard to incorporate the leaf fabric. Maybe because it had a lighter…
As I mentioned in an earlier post, a specialty fabric or two can be the primary inspiration for an entire quilt. And that’s what I wanted to try. This is sort of what I had in mind. I had intentionally dyed some large scale fabrics in order to try my hand at this. Plus, I…
I finally got around to properly photographing my latest quilt, She Has a Great Personality. It’s meant to be a self-portrait in the style of a favorite artist. In this case, that artist is abstract painter Jane Davies. I thought working abstractly would be difficult, but it wasn’t too bad. I had more trouble deciding on…
Jeepers! I feel like the poster child for trial and error! While working on my latest quilt I had quite a difficult time deciding on what color to make one of the design elements. The issue was the white circles, as seen below. I loved their shape and placement, but I could see that they…
My raw edge collage techniques involves lots of layering. Sometimes perfectly wonderful fabrics get covered by something else later. However, I don’t typically rescue those underneath fabrics. Instead, I tell myself that I bought the fabric to use and if it’s function is to support later fabrics, and to give me flexibility then it has…