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.
The image and its wonky re-creation in an art show in the summer of 2015
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
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 the Yellowstone in 1997. Even back then, the grand landscapes pulled me in. Maybe this will become a quilt someday?
