Category: Planning the Quilts

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Fabric Challenges

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.

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Choosing Fabrics

If you’re not going to print the photograph onto fabric and play with it that way, you’re probably going to need to find some fabrics that in some way mimic what you’re trying to capture of the photo. Colors. Shapes. Mood. All of those can be recreated in some way using the fabrics you can find in a quilt store.

When I was looking at fabrics for the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, I was mostly trying to capture color, but I wasn’t necessarily trying to be 100% faithful to the original image. There was no way that anyone could have gotten me to produce a quilt where all of that orange was replaced by the rust colors in the original image. Nope. That’s not how I see that image in my mind’s eye, and I knew the rust colors of the canyon weren’t going to translate well into a quilt. In retrospect, would I have incorporated a few rusts here and there among all of those orange strips of fabric? Maybe. I don’t know what that might have looked like. But I might have entertained the thought, at least, instead of simply blazing ahead with all of those awfully bright oranges. I wanted the quilt to be saturated colors, not muted ones, and the orange truly came through for me in that respect. I also liked the combination of bright blue and orange with a deep, dark green, and in that sense the final quilt is a success.

Look back at the unsuccessful (read: BOOOORING) version of that image from Norway that made me rethink all of the ideas I had to create fabric versions of some of my favorite photos. For that attempt, I was trying much harder to be faithful to the original coloring of the image, and look where it got me. It got me a snoozefest. Granted, I don’t necessarily think choosing different colors might have worked better, but certainly going with the original coloring wasn’t as successful as I had thought it might be.

I’m currently choosing fabrics for two of the three quilts I’m working on. (The third is thread painting, so no extra fabrics until I add a border, and I won’t even think about border fabric until the inside image is complete.) For the Tracy Arm iceberg one, I’m trying as much as possible to maintain the feel of the original photograph, if not the exact original colors. The goal for that quilt is to emphasize the brilliant blue green of the iceberg, which the photo does nicely. But I have a chance to keep the feeling of the photo yet enhance the contrast between the rest of the image and the iceberg. I have selected some fabrics from my stash, but I’m also looking for others. And I’m debating what to do about the snow on the mountains in the original image. I’m just not going to find that in a fabric. So – do I leave it out? Do I insert it with thread (not fabric) at the end? Do I attempt to find a good snow fabric that might suffice in small quantities? I might try all three and see which one I like best.

For the abstract iceberg image, I’m mostly going for the colors. Those are what drew me to the photo when it was being displayed on the big screen on the ship, and I think that image might not be as good if it were just plain white ice, for example. The blue green of the ice is compelling to me (hence my wanting to do two different quilts with that color as the emphasis). The challenge here is going to be finding the right blue green, with enough variation and quantity that it will fill out the quilt nicely.

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Printing Photos

Two of the quilts I’m working on involve images printed on fabric. There are two ways you can do this: either print the image out yourself on your home printer or get a service to do it for you. Both of these have worked for me at different times, so let’s talk about the pros and cons of each.

Printing at Home

If you want just one or two photos, and you don’t need them to be larger than a standard 8.5” x 11” piece of paper, print at home. A package of printable fabric will run you anywhere from $15-25 (USD, in 2024), and it will get you six pieces of fabric that you can run through your printer. Make sure you get the correct kind of fabric for your printer – it comes in laserjet and inkjet versions. Follow the instructions on the back of the package – they’re not usually terribly difficult. Last time I did it, I printed on the fabric, then peeled the fabric off of the plastic it was attached to (to make it stiff enough to go through the printer) and soaked the fabric in water to set the image. Once it was dry, I ironed it, and then I was ready to go. Your instructions may differ, though – read the ones for the fabric you’ve purchased, please!

Printing with a Service

You may find other companies that provide this service, but I use Spoonflower. Spoonflower’s printing services are usually used by designers who have designed some sort of pattern to go onto the fabric in a repeated way, but you can also just have them print one large image on a yard of fabric. The largest I’ve been able to get one of my photos is about 20”h x 30”w (for a landscape photo). The fabric is good quality, and the colors come out true to the original. I have been very pleased with the quality of the images I’ve printed. If you have a large number of small images to print, or if you want an image that is bigger than a standard piece of paper, use a service such as Spoonflower.

Don’t forget! You must get permission of the photographer (the copyright holder) if you did not take the photograph you want to use. You’ll note that I got Oscar’s permission to use his photograph even though I am not actually going to print the image onto fabric. Technically, I don’t need his permission to create the quilt – my quilt would be considered “fair use” of his image under copyright law because I am using no part of his original image in the quilt. (Also, because the image was sent to us in a logbook compiled by the cruise company with the instruction to “share with friends and family,” my use of the image in my previous blog post is allowed.) But as a photographer, I put myself in Oscar’s shoes. I would very much want to know if someone liked one of my photographs enough to use it as inspiration for another piece of art. So I asked. (I also told Oscar I would tag him on Instagram in an image of the quilt when it’s done so he can see how I used his image.) GET THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S BLESSING for whatever you want to do. It’s common courtesy, and it’s the law. 

Also don’t forget that you don’t have to print out the photo to use it as inspiration for a quilt! Use the colors, or the shapes, or both to capture the spirit of the image instead of the actual photograph itself. Of the three quilts I’m going to be working on, two involve printed photographs, but one doesn’t. Use your imagination!

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What’s the Process?

When I was going through the process of building the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, I wasn’t quite sure what form this blog would take. So I documented a few things, but not nearly enough to walk anyone through the process of doing it for themselves. Now that I’ve got one quilt under my belt (mostly anyway), I’m going to start working on several new ones. As I work on them, I’ll document the steps I take so that someone else might be able to follow in my footsteps someday. So…what’s next?

I have three images I’m working on. Let me go through them one by one.

The first image I’m working on is a picture I took in the Lofoten Islands in Norway in the fall of 2023. This is the classic Reine (Hamnøy, really) rorbuer shot that every photographer wants to get. I got it home, and I removed all of the color in it except for the red of the fishermen’s cottages, which is classic Lofoten style. Then, I had it printed out on fabric. The idea, once I gather the gumption to tackle it, is that I will replace some of the color from the original image using thread. I’ve never done this before. I’m a little scared. This will take me a while to begin – I guarantee it.

This image is also printed out on fabric. I took this on a recent cruise in Alaska – Tracy Arm, in Tongass National Forest, to be specific. The icebergs in Tracy Arm, which come off of the South Sawyer Glacier, are sometimes this lovely shade of green-blue that I found rather impossible to resist as a photographer. I had the whole photograph printed out on fabric, but in reality I’m just going to use the iceberg part of the image. The rest of it I will recreate using regular fabrics I can find in the quilt store. This one I am really, truly excited about.

This is another one I’m excited about. This picture was taken by Oscar Farrera, the official ship photographer on the Alaska cruise I went on. I saw this picture on a screen on the ship and asked Oscar if I could use it as the inspiration for a quilt, and he agreed (although I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m nuts). This one is going to be more abstract – there’s no way I could do a faithful rendition of this using fabrics from the quilt store, so while I will indeed be using other fabrics, the idea is that I’ll use the colors and the shapes in the original image to inspire the end result. Unlike the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, though, I do not (yet?) have a pattern I’ll be following. In fact, I’m still not 100% sure how I plan to do any of this, but there’s nothing like figuring it out as I go along!

At this point, you – like Oscar – may be questioning my sanity. “Three pictures?” you ask. “Why three?” Excellent question. There are several reasons. 

  1. It’s going to take me some time to figure out the thread painting bit of the Lofoten quilt, so in the short term, I’ll really only be working on two quilts. But I do suspect I will start work on the Lofoten quilt before I finish at least one of the other two.
  2. It’s also going to take me a few weeks to find a critical mass of fabrics for the abstract iceberg quilt. I have several fabric stores I want to visit, and while a couple of them are in the area, a couple aren’t, and they are, unfortunately, in totally opposite directions from my house. In addition, most of the stores are open during my working hours on weekdays, so I have to go on weekends. It’ll probably take me a month or so to get to all of them. While I’m gathering fabrics, I’ll probably attempt to work out what exactly I’ll do to them once I find them, so there will be some planning behind the scenes that may or may not be documented.
  3. ADHD. I get bored easily. I found that while I was working on the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, I needed a distraction from it because I was really sick of sewing all of those orange strips together. Fortunately, I took a three-week break from working on that quilt right in the middle because I went on vacation, so I was able to take the time I needed and come back to it excited to work on it and, most of all, get it done. I do not have any vacations planned anytime soon, so I’m going to plan now to work on several things so I don’t get bored or frustrated and attempt to walk away from any of these projects permanently. When I’ve had enough of working on this one, I can work on this other one.

So, for those reasons, I’ve got three projects moving along at a slow but steady pace.