Category Archives: Design

Kauai Road…

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Having the line drawing of the palm trees and telephone poles helps a lot. All through this process, I could see how they would fill up the foreground. The sky, mountains, and bushes on the sides of the road are really background.

Once the mountains were in place, I went back to the road and began cutting fabric for the bushes and trees, but it was slow going. I then turned my attention to the sky, which is mostly cloudy. (It is, in fact, very often cloudy in this spot on Kauai.)

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Finding the right fabrics for the sky was hard!!!—so I went back to the greenery :-).

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There is a car in my photo, but it’s isn’t red. It needs to be red!

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After getting a lot of the foreground trees and poles cut, I went back to the sky. It was still hard, but I stuck with it. I did have to go buy some fat quarters which was a surprise. It’s getting closer to being ready to take off the wall!

 

Kauai Road, continued…

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Kauai Road

Working with only a rough sketch and no pattern shapes is very different for me. In my applique life, I have drawn patterns that many of you have sewn. The pieces are specific, and numbered. You trace around the templates to make a shape that fits the pattern.

I have also worked in the manner of Ruth McDowell, where I started with a photo and generated a pattern on freezer paper. In this kind of quilt, you may hunt for the right fabric for a shape, but you have a pattern for that shape.

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As I work on Kauai Road, I’m thinking about so many things at once: What color do I need? What fabric do I have? What size or shape should each piece be? And on and on…A person can only make so many decisions before her brain has had enough. Even though this is fun, it’s a challenge. So why am I working this way?

I want to construct Kauai Road more in the manner of Edrica Huws. I have mentioned her work before, on this blog post. There’s not much documentation on her sewing methods, but in looking at her work I surmised that she was not strictly bound by a drawing, and that she cut shapes more or less intuitively, by hand, with scissors.

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I am learning new things as I work this way, and it’s invigorating!

Figuring it out…

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When designing a quilt from a photo, you have to figure out where to start. I opened my photo in Photoshop and cropped in to focus attention on the part of the photo that I liked best.

KauaiRoad-01-Cropped

I usually work in Adobe Illustrator where I can make layers and trace over a photo to make a pattern. But there’s a cool filter in Photoshop called Find Edges. I used it to generate this almost-drawing:

KauaiRoad-01-Edges

I am not going to fuse or glue this quilt. The pieces will be pinned, then basted on a light fabric base. I projected the image onto a 60″ x 60″ piece of thin, prewashed, white muslin on my design wall. I used a soft pencil to draw a stylized version of the image onto the fabric.

I decided to work loosely, cutting fabric to fill in the different areas without making templates or pattern pieces. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the drawing needed to be on an overlay so that I could still see it as I added fabric to the wall. I cut a great big piece of upholstery vinyl, pinned it over the muslin, and traced the lines with a regular Sharpie marker—the kind that comes to a blunt point.

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I’m not aiming for photo realism here. Instead, I’m working in a looser, slightly more impressionistic fashion. It is both scary and fun!

Day to night…

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I just watched Stephen Wilkes’ TED Talk. He is a photographer with a vision—and some exceptionally cool equipment.

My Photo Class assignment for the week is ‘stuck in place.’ We have to pick a spot and stay in it for an hour, taking pictures. I had the same assignment last year and really enjoyed it. I’m glad to have seen this video before I set out with my camera :-).

Kauai Road…

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I have been waiting for the right time to turn my quilting in a different direction. Even if I make it to the ripe old age of 111 (my personal goal) I know that there are only so many quilts in my future. Now is the time to do it or let it go.

There are a variety of quilters who who make quilts based on photos. Each one brings a different perspective to the process. I hope to do the same. This is the photo that I’m starting with. It was taken on Kauai, on the road that runs near Hanalei Bay.

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I found the road on Google Street View. You can click around and follow the road if you want to. Let me just say that I love technology :-).

I’ll post more photos as the quilt takes shape.

You never know what you’ll see if you just look…

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I stayed in San Clemente while visiting the Surfside Quilt Guild and my hotel was just a mile from the beach. The one mile walk down to the beach was very nice, the uphill mile back to the hotel was good exercise :-).

I walked to pier for the last time Wednesday morning and took photos of seagulls because I think they are cute.

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They look like birds with an interesting attitude… sort of nonchalant and friendly. And these guys were posing for me so I got closer…

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Close enough to notice that their tails are dotted!

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Who knew! And once you notice the dots, don’t don’t you think that they pull the black and white color scheme of the feathers together? Nature is just jam-packed with little quirky details.