Friday, July 1, 2011

Quilt Inspirations


Quilt Inspirations
I have one Kaffe Fassett book, Glorious Patchwork.  In this book, he displays photographs that inspired the quilts, along with photos of the finished quilt.  I really love this.  If you go to his website, the movie that plays has a mosaic of images.

I studied fine art and still remember how I started looking at the world differently when I started to paint or draw it.  When I began with black and white, I saw every object as dark or light and imagined how hard I would press the charcoal or Conte crayon to make that shade.  Graduating into color was harder and again, I began to look at every three dimensional shape differently.  A green leaf is not just green, it is darker on one side, the veins might be lighter, so I would add maybe red to darken the green, yellow or even white to lighten it, sculpting a three dimensional leaf on the paper.

So when I started quilting again a few years ago, geometric shapes around me began to pop out.  There is a sign near my office advertising a real estate company and their logo looks like paper piecing to me!
Quilt Inspirations
I decided to go out around my neighborhood the other day and photograph inspirations that might become quilts some day.  It's amazing the variations.  After taking photos, I realized I could either use one photo/pattern for a quilt or I could combine may patterns.  I made a few mosaics but I feel like this is just the beginning.  There are so many other ways to combine images and so many more images to photograph.

Let me know what you think of all this.  It was just an idea I had and I know I've seen others do it, Kaffe Fassett of course, also Cherri House, just wondering how you would translate images into quilt designs?  I haven't quite decided yet, just playing with the idea.
Quilt Inspirations

2 comments:

  1. Very cool! There's a Flickr group all about posting pictures of quilt inspirations. It's not very big right now, but it's right up your alley! It's called [portland pairs] quilt inspiration through photography. It was created by Heather of [House} of A La Mode and Brooke from April Two Eighty.
    http://www.flickr.com/groups/1560768@N20/

    All your pictures would be perfect there! :)

    I've got a whole bunch of quilt inspirations on my phone. From a heating vent/register to a stone sidewalk to the bathroom floor at a train station in NYC. :) It's kind of a problem. :)

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  2. Hi Melissa, thanks! I didn't know about the group!

    ReplyDelete