A few blog posts ago, I mentioned that I’ve had to get over my dislike of batiks. Let’s look at that a little.
Batiks are…not my style. Generally, at least. Up to this point in my quilting journey, I have used them very little. I tend to use bright colors and crisp patterns that appeal to me, and batiks always seem to be…I don’t know. Sloppy is a word I might use, but it has negative connotations that I don’t mean. Irregular might be a better word. Out of focus, to use a term from photography. The lines aren’t sharp – they tend to blend a little more than I’d like. Put batiks next to the clearly defined patterns that I normally choose, and they seem out of place. Like a watercolor painting contrasted with a nice sharp photograph. Each has their place, but you probably aren’t going to mix them into the same piece of art. Up until recently, I’ve tended to gravitate towards the photographs rather than the watercolors. Which, you know, makes sense…since I’m a photographer.
But the very qualities that make batiks ill-suited to fit with the fabrics I normally choose are exactly what makes them excellent for these projects. Nature is irregular and amorphous and…sloppy. Nature doesn’t fit neatly into a box. Batiks are perfect for attempting to recreate nature through fabric. (Which is sort of ironic – using the fabric version of watercolors to recreate photographs…but I digress.)
With some exceptions, batik fabrics read as solid – or, at the very least, variations on one color – from across a room. But there is random texture to them that mimics nature nicely, in a way that a perfectly designed, repeatable pattern can’t ever do. And so I have been going directly to the batiks to source many of the fabrics for these quilts. And that is a sentence I never thought I’d write.
That’s not to say that I have not – and won’t in the future – use fabrics elsewhere in the store for some of these quilts. Several of the fabrics I’ve picked out for the abstract iceberg quilt came from, of all places, the section of Christmas fabrics. (Hey – if you’re looking for whites and grays with silver, the Christmas section is a great place to start. You certainly won’t find them in the Halloween fabrics!) The key here is keeping the photograph in mind, but not closing yourself off to the possibilities that might lie in sections of the quilt store you haven’t looked at yet. I almost stopped after looking through the batiks for fabrics for the abstract iceberg. I’m glad I didn’t.
One word of caution: when you are looking for fabric for a quilt, take everything with you that you think you might use in it. Everything. At least a small sample of each. (This is just a word to the wise for any quilt, but particularly so for these.) For the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, I bought several pieces of orange fabric that, in my mind’s eye, I was sure would be perfect to go with the oranges I already had. And in every case where I didn’t have samples of the fabric I already had, I was 100% wrong. Was my mind’s eye wrong? Was the lighting weird? Who knows? But now I have these pieces of orange batik fabric that I don’t know what to do with (because orange isn’t normally my style AT ALL, and we’ve already talked about my relationship with batiks). So…yeah. Take what you’ve already purchased with you when sourcing additional fabrics, or be prepared to put the extras into your stash ‘cause you screwed up.