Tag: photo quilt

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Fabrics Before Grids

As mentioned earlier, I also went to the first two of the quilt shops in the All New England Quilt Shop Hop this past weekend. The shop hop runs through the end of October, and there’s no way I’ll get to all 91 shops, but it was a nice day on Sunday so I thought I’d go out for a drive. I particularly wanted to look for fabrics for the bargello quilts. I actually decided to start with the fabrics for only one of them, even though I drew out the plans for both on paper. I figure if the first one is a disaster, at least I won’t have purchased all of the fabrics for the second one!

I decided to start with the College Fjord image (above). I measured out the image at 30” x 50” on paper, and I had a general idea of what I thought it might look like. In my head, this quilt only involves solid fabrics (especially the sky), and it only involves shades of blue. (We’ll talk about the clouds in the picture later – I have a plan for those.) One of the stores I visited this weekend had not one single solid in the whole place, but the other shop had a whole section of solids, which I brazenly raided for the blue shades for the mountains. I started to also pick shades of blue for the sky, but I really quickly realized that I am actually going to need a blue ombre to achieve what I want to achieve there. Online fabric stores for the win! Ombre ordered – waiting for it to arrive in the mail.

I can hear you asking about those clouds in that image. The clouds – along with their reflection in the water – make that image what it is. I can bargello the heck out of a million shades of blue, but if the clouds aren’t there, the image just wouldn’t be the same, would it. My secret weapon – mother-of-pearl buttons. A little backstory…

When I travel, I try to buy fabric or yarn from small local shops, rather than trinkets, to take home with me. (I’m still trying to figure out what to do with a particularly lovely skein of purple, green, and yellow Mardi Gras yarn from New Orleans.) On the Alaska cruise I recently went on, we stopped in Alert Bay, a small First Nation community between Vancouver Island and mainland Canada. I found the mother-of-pearl buttons in a small shop on my walk back from the U’mista Cultural Center with Caroline, one of my cruise-mates. My thoughts, even then, went to using those buttons to recreate the clouds of that image when I finally made a quilt out of it. I am SO looking forward to actually doing so!

Looking for local fabric and yarn has become a really fun thing to do when I travel. In each town we went to on that cruise, I looked for a local yarn or fabric store. In Haines, AK, I found some yarn and a new-to-me-but-not-local maker of lovely knitting needles. In Sitka, I found a shop with both yarn and fabric and came away with a panel of Alaska national park images and some yarn made by a local-living-elsewhere. In Wrangell, I never found the fabric/yarn store (or maybe it was closed? we were there on a Sunday), but I did enjoy the Stikine Stitchers’ annual Fourth of July quilt show in the windows of all of the shops. How lovely that even in such a small town (pop. just over 2000 people) there’s a quilt guild that’s organized enough to put on a show each year! I found the buttons in Alert Bay, and in Vancouver (where the cruise ended and I met up with a friend for a couple of days), I found some fabric AND some gorgeous beads whose color mimics the iceberg in the Tracy Arm quilt. How much fun I am going to have with all of this stuff!

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Paper Piecing the Hard Way

On Saturday, I got out the projector and some large pieces of paper and outlined three potential quilts – the Oregon waterfall and the two bargello quilts. I’m pretty sure I have all of the fabrics for the Oregon waterfall quilt, but I haven’t yet started putting that one together yet. I think I need a full day for that one, so I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon. (I have some pretty busy non-quilting weekends coming up over the next few weeks.)

This was an interesting process. First, trying to trace an image that disappears into shadow if you stand in the wrong place is a pain in the ass. Second, trying to line up a ruler – in this case, a yardstick – with a projected image is actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. I mean, how hard could it be? Line up the straight edge of the yardstick with the straight edge of the image. So, so much harder than it looks. One side of the image was shorter than the yardstick, so that one was easy. But the other was not, so I needed a waypoint. I am 100% sure none of the horizontal lines I drew are straight. There’s no way.

The Oregon waterfall image was far easier than the other two. After all, it was just a matter of outlining the different areas of the image that would be covered by different areas of fabric. For the most part, this was straightforward. I drew lines, I made notes, I labeled different parts of the image. Now all I have to do is make all of the template pieces and put the thing together. That is a project for another weekend.

The bargello quilts were another story. I drew out both of them because I had the projector on and it was just easier to do both while my brain was immersed in the logistics of them. All I really did was draw a rudimentary grid, labeling the water line and providing some structure for the rest of it, then outline each image as if I was going to do it with the technique I’ll use on the Oregon waterfall image. Each of the bargello quilts will be about 30” x 50”, and I was a little surprised to find that some areas of the images were much smaller than I’d imagined they would be when projected on the wall. I’m not quite sure how well that will translate to the bargello pattern, but I haven’t yet overlaid the full horizontal grid lines over it yet to see how well it’ll work.

Now that I have the images on paper, I can start to produce those grids to see whether or not what I have in my head will actually work!

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A Productive Weekend, Part II

Besides the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, I was also able to work on two other quilts this past weekend. First, I quilted the Tracy Arm quilt. Because this quilt is so small and mostly applique that has been top-stitched, it didn’t need a ton of quilting, and I actually did it with the clear monofilament on top with white bobbin thread so that it’s there but it doesn’t show at all. I just quilted a couple of lines along the edges of the water, the iceberg, and some of the mountains, and then I went around the outside of the inner border. Pretty straight-forward quilting that, as I’ve discussed, doesn’t interfere with the image in any way. Once the quilting was done, I was also able to sew the binding on; the last element that needs to be finished is the hand-sewing of the binding. When it’s done, I’ll post a picture.

The last part of my productive weekend was finishing the abstract iceberg quilt top. I was able to slog through the remainder of the block piecing, and then once that was done, it was a fairly easy process to just sew the blocks together. I did end up with a couple of pieces that were upside down when I sewed them together – I need to remember that for next time I do this pattern. Fortunately, I caught those errors quickly and was able to fix them easily, and I learned how not to make the mistake again.

a quilt top that mimics the colors and textures of an iceberg

The issue that came up once I finished piecing the blocks together – which I am very pleased with! – was trying to figure out what to do for a border. I briefly toyed with the idea of just quilting it without a border and then binding it like that, but the more I thought about it (and tried to imagine it in my head), the less I liked that idea.

The modern world has made it easy to seek design input from others, and someone I regularly seek input from is my mother. It is not at all unusual for me to get stuck on a piece and take a picture of it to text to her, usually followed up by a phone call where we talk about what I’ve considered, what direction (if any) I’m leaning toward, and what she thinks about where I should go from here. I don’t always take her advice, but usually something she says gets me unstuck in some way. But this time, even she said she wasn’t sure what she would do for the border of this quilt.

We did agree on one thing – the border couldn’t be one of the fabrics already used in the quilt. To use one of the fabrics from the iceberg pieces would have brought too much emphasis to that fabric in the iceberg, and that would have been weird. We disagreed on where to go from there. Knowing that my plan is to put this quilt on a navy blue wall in my living room, I didn’t want the border of the quilt to be dark – it would just blend into the wall if I did that, and then what’s the point? So the border needed to be either light or bright. We toyed with the ideas of darker teals or grays. My initial idea was to go with a white of some type – I didn’t know what type, though. Mom hated that idea. I later texted her two border possibilities from my stash, both of which she rejected as being too “busy.”

I ended up at the fabric store the next day, where the owner reminded me that the border doesn’t have to be the same fabric all the way around. I ended up with one fabric – a darker teal with some blue in it – for two sides, a metallic-y white for a third side, and more of the water fabric (which I had at home) for the bottom. I haven’t yet attached it all, but we’ll see what it looks like when that happens. The plan is to use the metallic-y white for the binding as well. So the plan I ended up with is really a combination of all of the ideas we had, which probably makes the most sense given that neither I nor my mother had strong feelings about any of the single-fabric plans.

Yet again, the plan for this one is stitch-in-the-ditch quilting on my domestic machine, but this one is a far more reasonable size. Still lots more work to be done – I’ll post a final picture when it all comes together! I have to say, I’m really looking forward to posting the final picture on Instagram and tagging Oscar so he can see it.

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Thoughts in the Shower

I really need to learn to keep a notepad near the shower so I can take notes on things that I think of while I’m in there. While half of my brain is occupied by the repetitive (and boring) act of showering, the other half gets to wander far afield. Sometimes it focuses on work that I have upcoming. Sometimes it repeats conversations I’ve recently had, heavily notated with the things I wish I’d said at the time. Sometimes it hits on five different topics, so that I forget about the first one by the time I step out of the tub. Yesterday, I visualized and planned quilts.

I won’t take you through the whole thought process that went into this, but I was thinking about this whole idea of using a published pattern, or a traditional way of piecing, and trying to build an image around it. Because I’m me and I know that I get bored easily, the established pattern needs to be easy – something that’s not terribly intricate and doesn’t involve absurd amounts of planning. (For some people, what I’ve already done for the abstract iceberg quilt constitutes “absurd amounts of planning.” The definition of “absurd” is simply “something I don’t wanna do.”) Side note: along this same line of thinking, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to incorporate a log cabin pattern into one of these things, but very few of my images lend themselves well to squares, or even rectangles. But I digress.

Somehow, the image of a bargello quilt came into my head. (Yes, I hear you yelling “I thought you said you DIDN’T want to do absurd amounts of planning!” Bear with me.) And I must admit, I got a little excited at the prospect of figuring out a way to do one of these images in the abstract with bargello. I mean, think about it. Bargello curves. It moves. Like a picture, it is designed for your eyes to travel across it. It is the perfect quilty medium for interpreting hills and mountains and movement.

I have done one bargello quilt before. It was a small table runner, and I swore I’d never do one again. Even though my piecing has become more consistent over the years, it’s still just inconsistent enough that I can pretty much guarantee that very few seams will match on any bargello quilt I make. But perhaps, with a bargello quilt that imitates nature, matching seams isn’t really the point. Let’s be honest – who’s going to notice when it’s hanging on a wall?

I’m trying to imagine myself attempting bargello on a larger scale. I’m not going to lie – it mostly terrifies the stuffing out of me. But I have not just one but two images that would be pretty much perfect to attempt using this method. One is a mirror image picture – mountains and skies over mirror-smooth water. (I’m DYING to do something with this image and was kicking myself that I hadn’t yet figured out a way to do it well.) The other is another scene from the Lofoten Islands in Norway that just contains a lot of that kind of undulating movement that bargello quilts do spectacularly well.

So I will most likely be breaking my oath to myself never to attempt another bargello quilt. May the Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on my soul.

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Not What I Thought I’d Be Working On

A couple of blog posts ago, I talked about what I thought my next project would be, now that I’ve finished the Tracy Arm quilt. Well, that one has stalled out. I still don’t have a definitive image of what it might look like in my head, and when I really looked at it to start to source fabrics for it, all I really saw was green and white, and two colors do not an interesting quilt make. So I have, for the moment at least, tossed that one aside in favor of another one that is similar but has more color and texture variation.

The more I look at this one, the more I think I will like the challenge of it. I’m going to use the puzzle-piece-layering method that I learned from Trudy, but this will be the first time I use it on a piece that does not have a sky, and that idea sort of intrigues me. First, I have to figure out what the pieces will be, then I have to find the fabrics. (If I’m honest, I’ve already found a couple of them.) I think this one will be just a little smaller than the Tracy Arm quilt but larger than the boring Norway one, and of course, it’s a portrait orientation image rather than a landscape orientation. So it poses some interesting challenges.

What’s going to be a real challenge for me is recreating the waterfall. I’ve got a couple of different fabrics that I want to try out to see what works. One is a little darker but already has the vertical lines in it; I may just have to embellish those lines with some thread painting (which, by the way, I still have not yet attempted with the Norway fisherman’s cottage image). The other fabric is lighter with some muted colors on it, but has no lines on it, so those will need to be created from scratch. So the question now is – is sewing going to recreate those smooth vertical lines of the waterfall? Or am I going to have to get more creative than that? And of course, all of it has to wait until I get my sewing machine back. *sigh*

Depending on how long it takes to hear what’s wrong with my sewing machine and get it fixed, I may start collecting fabrics for other projects soon as well.

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Making More Decisions

My guild has a Wednesday night Zoom meeting each week, just to hang out and work on whatever project we’re working on. I decided that I’d see if I could get more done on the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt. I ended up going to the quilt store beforehand to find the border/binding fabric. I took the quilt with me to get the border fabric (as one does), and I noticed that some of the iron-on adhesive had come unstuck, so I decided that I would need to sew things down. While I was there, I got some monofilament thread to sew down the iceberg.

So I spent the Zoom call sewing the fabric pieces down. Because I am remarkably consistent in my choices of colors for things in general, I already had all of the regular thread I needed to be able to sew all of the pieces other than the iceberg. The colors weren’t exact for all of the fabrics/threads, but they were close enough that the difference simply adds dimension rather than blending in seamlessly. I actually really like the sewing – it brings out some things that hadn’t been clear before.

Sewing with the monofilament on the iceberg was a challenge. I used regular thread in the bobbin, which may have been a mistake. Some of the stitching was perfect – it did exactly what I wanted it to do, and it’s invisible unless you look up close. But then there were occasional sections where the tension decided to go wonky, so the bobbin thread shows on top. I’m not quite sure what happened there, but I may need to make a bobbin of the monofilament thread just to finish it up. I gave up before I got to that point. I pulled out and sewed over one particularly long stretch where the bobbin thread was on top, and the same thing happened the second time I sewed over it, so I threw in the towel because I was frustrated and it was getting late. But I’ll go back at it at some point soon.

The fabrics for the borders – both the green for the inner border that you see in the picture I posted in the last blog entry and the darker blue I got for the outer border – went into the laundry when I got home from the quilt store, so I’ll tackle the border some other day. I do wash all of my fabrics before I do anything with them. I work with reds occasionally, and I have screwed up a quilt because the red ran in the laundry (even after I washed it!), so I do try to get everything laundered before I use it. It doesn’t really make a difference what you do – you just have to be consistent at it. 

One more decision that I’m going to have to make: the quilt top is stiff in places because of the iron-on adhesive. But the iron-on adhesive is not all over the top of the quilt, so some places are just…fabric, while other places are layers of fabric with the iron-on adhesive. If I’m just going to hang the quilt on the wall, that’s not a big deal – no one will feel it regularly and realize that it’s different. But if I plan on doing something else with it, I might need to figure out how to make the feel of the entire top consistent. My inclination is that I’ll simply hang the quilt on the wall so it’s not a big deal, but I do have to make sure that decision is the right one before I sandwich the quilt.

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When the Weather is Bad…

…spend the day in the sewing room. However, I did not get done what I had planned.

I thought today would be the day I projected the abstract iceberg image up on the wall and figured out what fabrics would go in which spaces. I was completely wrong. Instead, I worked on the Tracy Arm quilt. In fact, I finished the image part of it, which was a bit of a surprise.

I used a modification of a technique that I learned in a class in April taught by Trudy, one of the members of my quilt guild. I don’t think it’s Trudy’s original technique – if I remember correctly, she learned it from someone else. But she has done a lot with it, mostly with landscape templates that she has made up. I made this piece in her class the day she taught it to us.

The technique involves cutting out what are essentially puzzle pieces and adhering them to a piece of muslin using an iron-on adhesive. The selection of fabrics is crucial, and there’s a method to it. I used the same technique on the unsuccessful Norway image in the Choosing Pictures, Part II blog entry. The technique is fairly simple – an image can easily be done in a few hours – but a lot of thinking goes into it. That’s the technique I wanted to use for the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt.

As you remember from the previous blog entry, I had most of the fabrics for this, but I wasn’t entirely sure that the sky fabric was the one I was going to use. Well, I used that sky fabric – it turns out that once I laid it out with all of the other fabrics, it was perfect.

All of the fabrics with Post-Its are part of the Tracy Arm quilt

The plan was to recreate the entire image except for that awesomely fabulous iceberg right in the middle. I had the image printed onto fabric, and I planned to use that as a template – much like Trudy’s templates – get the fabric pieces to be the right size. I also planned to cut the iceberg out of the original image and basically paste it as the focal point – rightly so – of the recreated image. 

The challenge for this particular image was that it was much larger than a sheet of tracing paper, which is necessary to get the mirror image pieces you need of both the fabric and the adhesive. Rather than attempting to draw the full image out on one sheet of paper, I ended up tracing individual pieces of the image onto paper. Fortunately, I only needed to extend the paper for one piece, and I had some smaller pieces I’d cut off of the foundation papers for the abstract iceberg quilt yesterday.

One of these days, I’ll learn that I need to go back and look at the instructions for a technique like this if I haven’t done it in a while. I completely forgot about the whole mirror image part of creating the templates, so I had to redo some stuff about halfway through. But most of the fabrics were batiks, which are thankfully reversible, so I was able to get away with screwing up…this time.

I also didn’t have a piece of muslin that was big enough to act as a foundation for all of the pieces, so I improvised. I ended up using the sky piece and the water piece as foundations for some of the pieces, so I simply had to find a foundation for the middle 3.25” of the image. The printed image had about 8” of white border around it, and once I cut it off, I was able to use one of those pieces as the foundation for the middle of the image. It took math. I am not good at math. But somehow it worked. 

Since I was using a piece of the original image in the recreated image, the scale of the recreated image had to match the original as closely as possible. Where I and my ADHD might have just fudged it for an image that was entirely a recreation, I really didn’t want to get to the end and find out that the iceberg was bigger or smaller than the space that it needed to go in. So I measured, and I marked things with chalk to show where they should go. And the iceberg fit PERFECTLY in the end. I was rather proud of myself, honestly. I was so scared of getting to the end and discovering I screwed up somehow that I really took my time to get it right.

I’m really pleased with how it came out. The iceberg is, as it should be, the absolute centerpiece of this quilt.

There are still some decisions that need to be made. In the original image, there is snow on some of the mountains in the background, which I pretty much ignored when I was choosing fabrics figuring that I could add it later if I felt I needed to. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to do so, and if I did add it in, how I would do it. (More fabric? Thread painting? Paint? Something else?) I also have not yet decided whether or not I want to sew down the applique in some way. I feel like I probably should, but I am not sure how to deal with the iceberg, which has little fiddly bits I had to cut out that would be lost if sewed over them. So. many. decisions.

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And Sometimes, the Serendipitous Happens…

So today, I went looking for more fabrics for the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt and the abstract iceberg quilt. I needed water and sky for the Tracy Arm one, and I just wanted to see if I could find more of the silvers/whites/ice blue-greens for the abstract one. I went to quilt store where I worked part-time a number of years ago. It’s not too far from home, and I had a feeling I might be able to find some good stuff. I was able to round out the collection of fabrics for the abstract quilt, and I found a good water fabric for the Tracy Arm quilt. I did get a fabric for the sky, but the jury’s still out on whether or not I’ll actually use it.

But that was not the headlining story of the day. I think I mentioned when I posted about the Horseshoe Canyon quilt that I randomly found the pattern that I ended up using for it one day while I was sourcing fabrics for it. I don’t go into a project with a pattern in mind. For the abstract iceberg quilt, I was trying to find fabrics for it in hopes that I might one day be able to see a way to put those fabrics together, but I didn’t yet have a good picture in my head about what that was going to look like. Today, I found an awesome pattern for it!

The abstract iceberg quilt, to me, is very vertical, even though the image itself is in landscape orientation. The lines of the iceberg are up and down, not side to side, and while they’re not totally parallel, there’s a certain interval to them. When I imagined putting together that quilt, I thought about putting together tall vertical triangles – like really skinny Christmas trees. Some of them might have been upside down, but that’s the image I had in my head. I just didn’t know how to vary the colors within those larger triangles.

The Aura quilt pattern by Alison Glass caught my eye in the shop today. It was exactly what I was looking for. And I literally spent the rest of my day figuring out how I was going to adapt that (portrait orientation) pattern to the (landscape orientation) photograph.

So here’s the current plan: the pattern calls for a series of 8”w x 10”h blocks that are foundation paper pieced in A and B halves. I will make a quilt that will end up being 48”w X 30”h (so 6 blocks wide and 3 blocks high). The idea is to project the image (using a friend’s projector) onto my design wall at those exact dimensions and line each of the papers up with the part of the image that it will cover. Once the paper is lined up properly, I’ll choose a color – white, silver, dark gray, ice blue-green – for that piece of fabric based on the main color that’s in that piece on the image. Then I’ll be able to count up the number of pieces for each color and cut as necessary.

In theory, this will work. I was able to project the image at those dimensions on my wall, and I have all of the foundation papers copied and labeled. I have a mapped diagram of the blocks together (the pattern included a coloring diagram, which was helpful), so now all I need to do is put it all together and label the foundation papers.

I am still looking for fabrics, though. I have four ice blue-greens, four light gray/silvers, and a dark gray for the water at the bottom of the image. I want to get one or two white-on-white fabrics because I do think those will come in handy for a few spots. And I need a black for the sediment streak on the right side of the image, but I might be able to find something useful for that in my existing stash – I don’t need a ton of it.

I was supposed to go kayaking with a friend tomorrow, but the weather forecast is calling for thunderstorms most of the afternoon, so we called it off and will try again in a couple of weeks. I guess I’ll just have to stay home and work on this. Darn!

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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!