I brought a variety of photos including ones of the girls as puppies, my favorite Alex picture, a couple of landscapes and a picture of my Brazilian Roses. I thought I had all my bases covered. Gabrielle started the day teling us a little of her background and some information on how she constructs her quilts. She is a multiple winner at the Houston International Quilt Festival. She does all of her work by hand including all of the applique and quilting. She uses colored pencils and pigma pens to make the hand dyed fabrics that she uses more pleasing to her. It was fascinating. I especially liked the way she was not really careful about how she handled her quilts. I've seen teachers go ballistic if a student dared to touch their quilts. Gabrielle didn't mind us handling them as long as we didn't spill anything on them.
She then talked about the inspiration we had brought. She spent time with each of us talking about focusing in only part of the picture to create a design. The variety of work ranged from a book of Georgia Okeefe paintings to a post card from a favorite restaurant in New Orleans. In every case she had us looking at individual elements of the picture rather than the whole landscape. I quickly realised that I had only one picture that would work for this class. This is the picture I used as my inspiration:
I thought I would focus in on the big pink flower but quickly realised that I would be digging myself into too big a hole to ever get out of. I decided to focus in on the leaf on the lower left. From that choice I then made three different sketches, each focusing in on a small portion of the leaf. Here are my drawings.
The second one looks very weird to me while the third looks a little spare. The first, however, looks like something I could work into a quilt. The biggest problem I have is that I am not confident in the fabrics I should use. I have a ton of hand dyed fabric from Judy Robertson in almost every hue so I may have too many choices. Here's what I am thinking today.. a blue green for the big leaf, a darker green black for the two leaves behind the main leaf. The backgound in a sort of medium purple grey. Fortunately with hand dyes there is lots of color variations within each piece of fabric so I should be able to find the right portion to use for each area.
There were a couple of 'AHA' moments during the class. First of all, because she does all of her work without a sewing machine all of fabrics are trimmed carefully on the back. She does all this trimming with little four inch scissors from Dovo. I thought that you needed duckbill scissors to accomplish her degree of accuracy. The other moment for me was when she said that you can create texture in a piece of fabric just by cutting it into pieces. For example, you can cut one piece of fabric for that big leaf and use the quilting to create definition OR you can cut it into five or six pieces first, applique them to the background and start your quilting with definition and texture already there. Not an 'AHA' but I was pretty proud that I could focus on such a small portion of the photo and get usable drawings.
I will keep you updated as I make decisions and complete this assignment. I know its going to take a while but I hope I create something worth having. Besides fabric choices I also need to decide how to actually construct this quilt... fusible applique, hand applique, freezer paper templates, reverse applique, and all the other applique methods. So many choices but, fortunatly, lots of time.
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