Author: Allison

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Choosing Images, Part II

I had another photo from Norway that I was sure I could turn into a small fabric image using a type of layered applique technique I learned in a class taught by someone in my guild. The image is fairly simple – a road, some rocks in the foreground, and some mountains in the background. I easily found fabrics that mimicked the colors in the image, and I set out to recreate it. I love the photograph. The fabric version is BOOORING.

It turns out that the texture in the image was what made it interesting. Take away that specific texture and replace it with a generic texture, and the image loses its impact. So as I look through my pictures to see which ones might end up as cool quilts, I have a lot to think about.

Each of the three types of categories of quilts I can create needs a different quality of image. 

Interesting images that I would have no hope of recreating with fabric can go one of three ways:

  • Is there an interesting element to it? If yes, then I might print the image out on fabric. Unlike the Crater Lake quilt, though, I want to be able to do something interesting to it once it’s printed out. I don’t simply want an image printed on fabric with standard fabric borders. I’m currently waiting on two pictures that Spoonflower has printed to arrive in the mail. I have two very different ideas for what I’m going to do with those two pictures. But I knew that I would have no hope of recreating those two photos to my satisfaction without printing them out on fabric.
  • Are there layers to the image? If so, that might be a good candidate for the layered applique technique I learned earlier this year. I can tell right now, though, that there won’t be many of these. First, I’m not a huge fan of applique. Second, this technique is relatively easy to do, but as I illustrated above, it’s a very specific photograph that will withstand this treatment. I’m honestly not sure I have very many photos that will suffice.
  • Are there lots of colors, or is the image something I like but that would be boring using either of the methods above? If so, it might benefit from the abstract treatment. The first quilt I’ve worked on, in fact, is one of these, and I have another one in my head that I’ll start trying to find fabrics for soon.

I’m still looking through the images I have to find ones that I think would translate well to quilts. I’ve considered and rejected many images so far. I keep having to remind myself of what I am looking for when I look through my pictures. I look at the pictures one way when I’m trying to decide which ones I like in general, but I have to reframe how I look at them when I’m evaluating whether or not they’d make good quilts.

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What Works and What Doesn’t (Mostly What Doesn’t)

When I started working in earnest on this project, I started with the images. With over 45,000 images on my hard drive, there’s a lot to sort through. I have my favorites – the images that I come back to again and again when I need a background for a business card or something to hang on my wall or an example of what my photography is like. I started with my favorite images, but I began to realize that my favorites weren’t necessarily going to translate well into quilts that build on the skills I have. Let me explain using an example.

One of my favorite images from Acadia is a night shot that I took in September 2014 from a pull-out on Park Loop Road. It was an accident – I was doing 30-second exposures of the Milky Way, and I had framed it with an evergreen tree in the foreground that was completely black, which made the Milky Way behind it stand out. One of the dangers of long exposures is that, in a camera’s world, 30 seconds is a LONG time. A lot can happen in 30 seconds, especially out in nature. A plane or a boat comes out of nowhere and now you’ve got a light trail across some otherwise dark piece of sky or water. Or, as in this case, a car drives by. I was trying to time my pictures such that I wouldn’t get the headlights or taillights from cars passing on Park Loop Road behind me. But…a lot can happen in 30 seconds.

In this case, I had the camera set to do a 30-second exposure. Once I pressed the shutter button, there was nothing I could do to close the shutter and end the shot. I waited until a car had passed behind me and, hearing no other cars coming, pressed the shutter button. About five seconds later, a car came around the bend, and its headlights shone onto the tree I was using to frame the sky. You know, that tree I wanted to be black. Oh well. So much for that shot. But the car didn’t just pass behind me and continue on its way. It passed me, then stopped and backed into the pull-out where I was standing. All of a sudden, during the 30-second exposure, I not only had white headlights shining on the tree from behind me to the left, but I also had bright red brake lights shining on the tree from behind me to my right. Let’s just say that it was a good thing that the camera wasn’t recording audio. I cursed up a storm. I was 100% sure that shot was a complete loss. So I kept going, and I did end up getting shots exactly like I wanted them – the Milky Way in the distance over the water, framed by completely black trees in the foreground. They’re nice images. They would be perfectly adequate…if I hadn’t gotten that one shot with the white and red lights on that tree.

This photo has become one of my favorites from that night. It’s an interesting image with a good story behind it, and it was a total accident. It was one of the first images I thought of when I started looking through my photos for quilt ideas. It’s also one of the first images I rejected. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even have to look at it to reject it. Someone who has a lot more patience than I do and is eager to work with little fiddly bits of fabric would have a field day with this image. I am not that person. The image is too detailed to really do well in quilt format, at least for me. If I had better thread painting skills and was interested in figuring out how to faithfully recreate stars and the nebulousness of the Milky Way, this would be an awesome quilt. Maybe someday, but I honestly wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

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Photography

Over the years, I have naturally been drawn to landscape photography. I can appreciate others’ facility with city photography, or sports photography, or photojournalism, but I do not have those skills. Nor, frankly, do I have the desire to develop them. On a recent vacation with copious opportunities for great wildlife photos, I realized that I was so focused on composing each image that I was missing the shots that could have been good in post-production if I’d just TAKEN. THE. DAMN. SHOT. I am not, and never will be, the kind of photographer who is in the right spot at the right time and whips their camera out to get that prize-winning image. But that’s also not what appeals to me, so I’m totally OK with that.

Instead, I need to plan. I need to compose my shot, maybe take several with different compositions to see which ones I like better, think about it some more, and then maybe come back when the light is different. I like to revisit the same spots over and over again for a different perspective. In my favorite places, I have shots from different times of year, different angles, different times of day. Acadia National Park is one of my favorite places to visit. In seven trips there over 12 years, I’ve been there in all four seasons. I’ve taken night photography classes there as part of their night sky festival in September. I have my favorite spots along the Park Loop road, which I visit each day I’m there. I go at different times of day, which usually means different parts of the tide cycle. I go in any weather. I don’t plan out where I’ll be each minute of each day, but I know my favorite spots, and I know I want to visit each of them, and there is a vague plan to do that. Repeatedly.

My favorite images are “uncluttered.” Some excellent photography has a lot going on. There’s a focal point in the image, as there always must be for it to be a good shot, but there’s a lot of other stuff in the image to look at, take in, and process. You see something new in it every time you look at it. Not my favorite shots. There is a simplicity to the images that end up taking my breath away when I get them home and really look at them. Take the Crater Lake shot that I used for the quilt above my fireplace as an example. There is a focal point – the tree – and the tree has texture and movement to it. There’s a line that your eye follows when you look at it. But the background is almost absurdly simple. When talking over potential quilting options for that quilt with a long arm quilter, we talked about, but ultimately rejected, the idea of adding texture to that sky. One of the things I like best about that picture is that the sky is pure blue – no clouds, no mist, no sun. Quilting over that, adding unnecessary texture, would have ruined the image for me. 

Fortunately, these types of photographs lend themselves well to my skills as a quilter. I’m never going to be the quilter who produces ridiculously detailed images with itty-bitty pieces of fabric. I don’t have the skills, and I certainly don’t have the patience. I also don’t see the world like that, but I marvel at people who do and just leave them to their own devices when they’re working on their own stuff. I am happy to stay within my own wheelhouse, which is simple without being boring. (Trust me – I have simple photos that are as boring as dishwater.) I want to visualize large swaths of color, with texture or not, and be able to recreate that from digital format to fabric.

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And All of This Leads To…

I was having a conversation with someone about photography earlier this year, and it came out that I don’t really consider myself to be an artist. At the time, I was thinking more about my submissions to an art show co-sponsored by the photography club I’m in. In 2023, I submitted four images to this juried show, and none were selected by the judges to be included. So I began to think about what distinguishes a good photograph from art, if anything. I had submitted some of my favorite photos to the show, and I was rather disappointed that none of them had been chosen at all. 

So it came out in this conversation that I, personally, don’t see myself as an artist. My friend was surprised to hear me say that. From there, a discussion of “what is art?” ensued, and I won’t bore you with the details of it. The conversation – and subsequent internal musings about it – has changed my perception of what it means to be an artist. I’m still not 100% sure I’d classify myself as one, but I saw my friend’s perspective when she pointed out all of the reasons she would put me in that category. And one of those reasons was the quilts that she’d seen me do in the years that she has known me (as well as the photography). And that conversation led me down the internal rabbit hole that has put me on the path to merging my quilting and my photography in a more meaningful way.

So…what does that mean?

In the months since that conversation, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to answer this question. Understanding my limitations as a quilter – I have little patience for small, fiddly bits, and I mostly detest applique, among other things – would it be possible for me to bring my photography into quilting without simply printing my photos onto fabric, like the Crater Lake and national park quilts, and putting a border around them? What are the possibilities?

The ideas that I’ve come up with fit into three general categories:

  • Printing the photo onto fabric, but then doing…something…with it afterward. Current ideas for this include printing the photo in black and white and adding color back in through thread painting, or printing the photo but only using one element of it, while recreating the rest of the image with regular fabric one can buy at the quilt store.
  • Recreating the image with regular quilters cottons from the quilt store. I have a couple of ideas for this, including superimposing an image onto a normal quilt pattern, or just projecting the image onto a wall or tracing it onto paper, which can then be used as a template for creating the image with fabric.
  • Using the image as inspiration for something abstract. This is actually the first idea that I’m attempting to work on – I found a published quilt pattern that mimics an image I wanted to use, and I’ve been a little creative with the colors I’ve used to do so. So far (it’s not quite done yet), I’m pleased, but I’m learning lessons as I go along.

As I mentioned before, I have about 10 quilts that are sloshing around in my head in various planning stages, and I just returned from a two-week vacation with 3200+ more images to play with (one of which has already been printed out on fabric). Fortunately, what appeals to me as a landscape photographer also plays well with the “doesn’t like little fiddly bits” part of me as a quilter – I tend to like the sweeping landscapes with large scale elements that lend themselves well to larger pieces of fabric that don’t take terribly long to put together. So I have lots of options, and I promise I won’t run out of them anytime soon!

The journey ahead promises to be fascinating, both from a learning perspective (this is what I want to do, so now I have to learn how to do it) and a “push Allison completely out of her comfort zone” perspective (watch me be forced to embrace batiks, which I pretty much have refused to work with up to this point in my quilting journey). Either I rise to the challenge, or I end up throwing things through windows – either way, it promises to be fun to watch!

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Crater Lake

The second quilt I attempted at the same time as the national parks quilt, in late 2022/early 2023, was born out of a need for some sort of artwork to go above my fireplace in my living room. I don’t ever go out and buy artwork. I have 45,000+ pictures (of varying quality) on the hard drive of my computer. (Actually, they recently outgrew my hard drive – they’re on a 1TB external drive.) Why, oh why, would I go out and purchase someone else’s art if I can display something I myself have made? I don’t take photos so they can sit on a computer somewhere. I take photos so that I can display them to remember all of the gorgeous places I’ve traveled to. So when contemplating the space above my mantel, I knew that there was going to have to be some sort of photo there, and the photo was going to come from my collection. 

At the same time, though, the idea of printing and framing something that would be the appropriate size for the space – about 30” high and 40” wide – left me less than enthusiastic for the project. I have a number of images, mostly 8” x 10” matted and framed to 11” x 14”, hanging in my house. I wanted to switch it up a bit, and I had just finished printing the images I was going to use with the national park quilt at Spoonflower. Was it possible to print out one large image on a yard of fabric rather than a bunch of small images on a fat quarter? Yup. Let’s do this.

I chose an image that I had taken in March of 2012 at Crater Lake in Oregon. At the time, I had plans to paint the wall that the fireplace was on a navy blue color. (Those plans changed, and a different wall was painted navy blue; the fireplace wall was painted gray, which was a much better decision.) So I wanted an image that had a good deal of blue in it. It had to be landscape orientation, and it had to be something that would be relatively simple to quilt, without resorting to handing it over to a professional long arm quilter. The Crater Lake images fit the bill stunningly, and I’m very happy with the one I eventually chose.

Once the image was printed, putting the quilt top together was REALLY simple. It needed a thin inner border and a wider outer border. And there’s where it stopped…and stayed…for over a year. I could not, for the life of me, decide whether or not I wanted to have it professionally long-arm quilted after all. And I was curious about whether or not I could do some trapunto quilting – something I’d never done before – with the tree. And because I could not make a decision, it sat. I finally decided that yes, I was going to attempt both trapunto quilting AND free motion quilting – neither of which I had ever done before with any success – and come hell or high water, I was going to get this thing done. I was sick of looking at the blank wall. And it got done in the spring of 2024.

Auditioning the quilt top above the fireplace after painting the fireplace and the wall
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The National Parks Quilt

I attempted picture quilts #2 and #3 at about the same time, in the fall and winter of 2022-2023. The second one I started was the first one I finished, and vice versa. The national park quilt started with a panel map of the United States with all of the national parks on it, along with miniature versions of all of the traditional national park posters. It was…not at all my colors. The brown was overwhelming; normally, I go for much brighter colors. Sure, the poster included many other colors, but the brown was definitely the color to contend with.

To make it palatable for my more colorful sensibilities, I had the idea to add some of my own pictures from the parks that I’d been in – 15 of them, at the time. Choosing the photographs was, again, rather difficult – from the hundreds of pictures I’d taken in the parks, how was I ever going to choose?! I did finally narrow them down to about 20 or so, for the 16 spaces I would need. So I had those 20 printed.

This time, I didn’t bother with my own printer; Spoonflower printed them for me. I was able to upload my own images into Spoonflower’s designer and print four images out on each of five fat quarters of otherwise white quilter’s cotton. Spoonflower’s printing is excellent – certainly far better than I could ever do at home! – and given the amount of printing I had to do and what the printable fabric and ink would have cost me, a far cheaper option than doing it on my trusty HP printer. I have not printed anything out at home since.

The final quilt is 60” high and 72” wide – the panel in the middle, with an inner border, surrounded by my images of the parks. The images have sashing to make them a consistent size – in this case, 12” x 12”. With the sashing, I was able to include green, which balanced the brown of the panel. The quilting is simply stitch-in-the-ditch around the images, with ties in the panel map in the middle marking the parks I’ve been to. It’s nothing spectacular, but I was really happy to be able to do something with my own pictures that wasn’t just matting and framing them and putting them on a wall. In a way, the green sashing is the fabric equivalent of a paper mat, but the finished quilt has a much bigger story to tell than any single 8” x 10” picture ever could.

The green sashing around the pictures balances out the brown of the panel

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Sand Beach – Acadia National Park

In the fall of 2014, I took a class with Karen Eckmeier on her Accidental Landscapes method. This was the first time I had an idea that I wanted to turn one of my photographs into a quilt. I had a picture of Sand Beach in Acadia National Park that I thought would be a good foray into this whole idea. So I set out to find fabrics that would mimic the colors and textures that were found in the image.

Finding the fabrics wasn’t too difficult, actually. I sourced some of them from a quilt shop just outside of Acadia, in Bar Harbor. Nessa, the owner of Fabricate and the friend of a friend, was more than happy to help me on my quest for just the right fabrics once I told her what I was up to. The rest I found just…around. I then used the Accidental Landscape technique to layer the fabrics to attempt to get a fairly faithful recreation of the image.

For a first attempt, this wasn’t bad. Looking back on it now, I actually think it’s pretty decent, given that I didn’t have a lot of experience with the technique and I have a strong history of just being impatient and following the “done is better than perfect” ideology. At the time, though, I was really unhappy with it. It’s out of proportion, and it just looks awkward. Since it didn’t come out the way I’d hoped it would, completing it put me off of wanting to do it again anytime soon. So I just sort of assumed that I wouldn’t ever be able to recreate one of my photos in fabric form, and put that out of my mind for a while. Apparently, about eight and half years is long enough to forget about the wonky first attempt and go back at it.

Two versions of an image of Sand Beach, one in paper form on the right, one in fabric form on the left.
The image and its wonky re-creation in an art show in the summer of 2015
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Grandma’s Quilt

In late 2014, my aunt was planning to have surgery early the next year. Because Grandma lived with my aunt and uncle, Grandma was going to have to spend a few weeks in a nursing home while my aunt recovered. At 98, Grandma was still pretty spry, and she was not terribly happy about this stay in the nursing home, but there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.

Grandma was by far one of the most difficult people I have ever had to buy gifts for. She wasn’t picky or ungrateful – she just had everything she needed, and there was nothing that she really wanted that could be wrapped and put under the Christmas tree. For several years, I had resorted to making her things – a set of cross-stitched teapots in plastic coasters that she could use when she had her friends over for tea one year, placemats to go with the coasters the next year, etc. 

With Grandma’s imminent stay in the nursing home coming up, I decided to make her a small quilt that she could take with her. But I had heard that items often get misplaced in nursing homes, so I wanted to make her a quilt that was very obviously hers. So I used images from a professional photo shoot with our extended family – Grandma included – that we’d done that fall, printed them out on fabric with my own printer, and incorporated them into a pattern designed for use with fabric panels from a book called Panel Play. With pictures of Grandma and her family literally incorporated into the fabric of the quilt, no one else could realistically say that the quilt was theirs!

Grandma loved the quilt, although I’m not 100% sure it ever made it to the nursing home with her. When she passed away later in 2015, my aunt returned the quilt to me for safekeeping. It has hung on walls in some of my homes since then – the fabric actually makes a great picture frame, and the quilt provides variety among the items that decorate my space. And of course, it’s a lovely reminder of Grandma.

As a first foray into using photography in a quilt, this was pretty simple. Printable fabric can be found in just about any fabric store worth the name, and the instructions are pretty easy to follow. Honestly, the hardest decision was which of the images from our photoshoot to use – there were maybe 150 of them to choose from! I used ten, and four of them were a series of photos of Grandma and my nephews (age 5 and nearly 8 at the time) where Grandma was sitting by helplessly while the two boys got into an argument in the chair next to her. I find that series of images hilarious, but my father was horrified that I’d used them.

A note about copyright: Normally when you use a photograph that has been taken by someone other than you (i.e., you don’t own the copyright), you need to get permission from the photographer (the copyright holder) to use that image. In this case, we had digital copies of the images from the photoshoot and blanket permission to use them in any format, and my quilt qualified under “any format.” With the exception of these photographs, all other images that I’ve used with my quilts so far have been my own images, so I own the copyright and can do whatever the heck I want with them. If you are making forays into using photographs in quilts but are not both the quilter and the photographer, make sure you get permission from the photographer before you make a copy of their image!

Grandma’s quilt comes together using Mom’s trusty old Singer machine
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Background on the Current Project

I’ve been interested in photography for a long time. I took art photography classes in high school and learned to develop my own black and white film (dating myself a bit, here!) and use darkroom techniques to get the images I wanted. When I joined the Peace Corps in 1998, the thing I most wanted to take with me from the U.S. was photos – mostly those that I took around home and on two major road trips from east coast to west coast and back again, stopping at national parks. Landscape photography has always drawn me in. With film, it was more difficult because I didn’t have the attention span or the patience to deeply learn the ins and outs of camera work. With digital photography, I was set free – to experiment, to learn, to get immediate feedback on what was going right and what was going wrong, and to get the images I wanted no matter how many takes it took to get me there.

I got my first DSLR in 2010, when I lived outside of Charlottesville, VA, within sight of Shenandoah National Park. Since then, I’ve taken DSLRs and other digital cameras on multi-state road trips, international vacations, and short jaunts around the corner or into the backyard. I’ve experimented with sports photography, night photography, and nature photography in addition to landscape photography, but it’s the landscapes that always have seemed to be the default for me.

Quilting is a newer venture. I taught myself to quilt in the fall of 2008, when I was seriously underemployed and had moved literally across the country for the guy I was dating at the time. I knew few people beyond my boyfriend and his grad school classmates, who, as PhD students, spent more time in the lab than out of it. I was, in short, bored. My mother’s old Singer sewing machine, a workhorse that was older than I was, had made the journey across the U.S., so I relearned how to use it and found a local fabric store and a book to learn from. Some of the projects from that year – placemats, a table runner, a couple of small blankets – can still be found in my linen closet.

My quilting skills can best be described as “better done than perfect.” I use my seam ripper as little as possible. I was recently, at age 51, diagnosed with ADHD, and my ADHD traits are clearly manifested in my quilting:

  • I start far more projects than I finish.
  • I get grandiose ideas but have absolutely zero follow-through, so few of them ever get realized.
  • I get bored and wander off if I have to do the same thing over and over again. 

I will never be one of those quilters who does intricate portraits or who can work with tiny blocks to create stunning works of art. I want my quilting to be simple and quick. The quicker it moves, the more likely it is to get done. All of the larger quilts in my collection took me years to finish, and each one was put away at least once for over a year when I got bored or frustrated and couldn’t look at it anymore.

When I was teaching, I had little time for quilting, or any of my other hobbies for that matter. Oh, I brought my crocheting to faculty meetings to occupy half of my brain while the other half took in the important stuff for work, but to dedicate an hour or two or five to putting together a quilt top was largely beyond me. So when I stopped teaching in 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, and got a job in the corporate world that really was only 40 hours per week, I decided that it was time to break out the hobbies again. Quilting was one of them; photography was another.

In 2014, I made a small quilt for my grandmother for Christmas. It was my first venture into using photographs in a quilt. We’d done an extended family photo session in the fall of that year, so I used some of the photos of us in a quilt pattern I found in a book called Panel Play. The quilt was little more than a lap quilt – it was meant for Grandma, at age 98, to take it with her when she was going to spend a few weeks in a nursing home while my aunt, normally her caretaker, was recovering from surgery. 

From there, the idea of using some of my own landscape photographs in quilts was born. Yes, I do still print some of them out on fabric – more about that later – to incorporate them into larger quilts. But the ideas are starting to expand out into other ways of turning what I produce with a camera into something that I create with fabric. There are three finished quilts (including Grandma’s), and about ten more planned in various formats – some with printing, some with thread painting, some using fabric to imitate the image, some using the image as inspiration for a color scheme or maybe something else. There are plans – well, actually mostly vague ideas right now – to try to figure out how to bring the beauty of some of my night photography – the aurora borealis and the Milky Way, specifically – to quilt form. What might any of this look like? Join me as I figure it out!

The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, picture from the summer of 1997.
The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in 1997. Even back then, the grand landscapes pulled me in. Maybe this will become a quilt someday?