Category Archives: series quilts

Completion of “Working In Series” quilts

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I have completed six quilts in my Working In Series class, and will show all of them in this post.  The class was very challenging and I recommend it highly for any of you interested in producing more art quilts.  Again, the class is taught by Elizabeth Barton through the Academy of Quilting (www.academyofquilting.com) .

Here are the quilts, in the order I completed them.

1.  Blue spheres.  The background is hand painted.  A variety of white on white fabrics were used for the strips.  The spheres started with circles in several blue and green fabrics.  The shading was produced with a white Paintstik (see earlier post for details).

Blue Spheres

Blue Spheres

2. Purple circles.  Deep purple background fabric, lavender strips (some hand painted), and a variety of purple circles.

Purple on Lavender

Purple on Lavender

3. Purple circles on yellow strips.  Half the yellow strips were painted with a diluted brown paint to darken them slightly to add more depth.  The background is dark purple.  A variety of purple and blue fabrics were used for the circles.

Purple on Yellow Strips

Purple on Yellow Strips

4. Black and white and red.  Black background fabric,  A variety of black and white prints for the strips.  Red-orange circles.

BLack and white strips with orange red circles

BLack and white strips with orange red circles

5. Blue, tan, and red.  Here circles were cut out of the original circles.  I like this idea and want to explore it further.

Blue tan and red

Blue tan and red

6. Cream, Blue gray and brown.  The blue gray strip fabric was a handpainted piece left over from a previous fabric painting class taught by Michelle Scott.

 

Cream BlueGray and Brown

Cream BlueGray and Brown

 

I can think of many ways to explore this theme further, and look forward to doing so in the future.

Evolving My “Sliced Circles” Designs

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Continuing on with my progress in the “Working In Series” class.   I did numerous sketches of fractured circles, split circles, etc.  I went looking for photographs of circular things, and walked around with my camera taking pictures of circular things.  I printed out some shaded circles from my drawing program.  I made some very uninspired sketches and mockups.  A few seemed promising, but didn’t get me excited.

Finally, I found some photos of some interesting old circular gears by searching online.  I printed out the photos and sliced them up, reassembling them into a collage of sorts.  I liked the feel of it and decided to pursue the idea.  I am not showing my cut and paste mockup here because the original photos are copyright protected.  But I will show you where I went from that mockup.

Here is my first mockup, using a watercolor painted background and some shaded spheres printed out from my drawing program:

Sliced blue spheres on white strips

Sliced blue spheres on white strips

You will see the quilt I made from this mockup in a later posting.

I began working on this quilt (I did an earlier post on how I used paint to shade the spheres) but at the same time I was working on variations of the design.  Following are a few sketches that I decided show promise.  Some of them ended up as quilts, and others are waiting to be developed further.

Fractured Circle Study 3

Fractured Circle Study 3

Fractured circle study 4

Fractured circle study 4

 

Fractured circle study 10

Fractured circle study 10

After these sketches I did some of the designs with turned applique and some with fused raw edge applique.  Stay tuned for the finished quilts!

Using Watercolor Paints for Quilt Design and Creating a Mosaic Quilt

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I have completed my class, “Working In Series” taught by Elizabeth Barton.  It was really interesting to watch the development of quilt series by all the students.  As in most online classes, only a few students actually carried through to complete a series.  In some instances, this was because the students had selected a  complex topic.  Those of us who chose simpler abstract shapes — or a small flower, in one instance – were able to finish the process. Students who chose topics such as a series of landscape quilts or quilts based on buildings had much more work to do to develop their series and were not able to finish within the time frame of the class.

I posted earlier about using watercolor pencils for quilt design.  Following that exercise, I purchased a small set of tubes of watercolor paint and painted some simple large flowers.  We were instructed to use black, white, and gray to make a value study and then paint others in color.  I am only going to present the value study here.  As you will see, I have no skill at painting!

Here is my black and white value study:

Watercolor value study

Watercolor value study

Using this value study, I drew a grid on top of the watercolor painting and assigned a “value” to each square.  The photo below shows a closeup of the grid and numbers.

Value grid with numbers

Value grid with numbers

 

I ended up with seven different value numbers.  I grabbed some black and white prints from my stash with a range of values from light to dark, and selected seven of the fabrics.  I cut a rectangle from each fabric and put a fusible web on the back.  I then cut one inch squares from each fused fabric, keeping the each fabric in a separate numbered pile.    A grid was drawn on a piece of white fabric (one inch squares) with an iron-away marker (Frixion pen). The squares of black and white fabrics were placed on the piece of white fabric, matching the numbered squares in the original design.  Once all the fabric squares were in position, I ironed the pieces down. The following photo shows the result.

Mosaic quilt from black and white value study

Mosaic quilt from black and white value study

I doubt I will ever turn this into a quilt, but the process is used by some quilters to make  spectacular quilts from photographs  (such as very large portraits) where the color and value of each small area of a photograph is matched.  Once the fabrics are selected, the process is very methodical.