Tag: photo quilt

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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.

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Horseshoe Canyon

This is my first attempt at a quilt based on a picture as part of this new project. The image I chose is from a 2019 visit to Arizona and the Grand Canyon. My friend Nicole and I took a day trip to Antelope Canyon and stopped at an overlook over Horseshoe Canyon on the way back. This is an example of a picture I like that didn’t have a particular focus element in it that would make it interesting printed out on fabric. It also wouldn’t have lent itself well to the applique method I learned, so I decided this would be an abstract version.

I like this photo because it has movement, and I think the colors go well together. When I was looking for the fabrics, though, I could not bring myself to use the rust color of the canyon itself. The blue of the sky and the dark green of the river – those are totally in my wheelhouse, and I was actually able to use some fabrics I already owned (always a bonus). But I am not a fan of brown, and I wanted the deep green of the river to pop out a little more than it did in the original photo. So I decided to use a brighter orange instead. I liked the combination of dark green, bright blue, and orange – somehow, they just fit together (in my head, at least).

I also found a published pattern called Leading Edge by Canuck Quilter Designs that mimicked the shape of the river as it flowed through the canyon in my image. I ended up changing the order of the rows in the design (as you’ll see), but basically keeping the structure of each row the same. Finding the published pattern that just happened to mimic the image that I was trying ro recreate was a fluke of nature. I’m still not quite sure how that happened as it did. I’m glad it did – I would not have known how to approach recreating that image without the pattern – but I also know that I’m not going to be able to do that with all – or perhaps even any – of my quilts going forward. But this was an excellent way to dip my toes into creating an abstract version of this image. And I’m pleased with the result.

I learned a lot in this process. I leaned into the orange perhaps a little harder than I should have, and in retrospect, I might have sprinkled some of the rust colors in between the orange stripes for variation. But I am unused to working with orange (give me a blue, green, purple, or even red any day of the week, but oranges, yellows, and browns tend not to find any sort of place in my work), so the end result – to my eyes, a wall of bright orange – sort of hit me in the face as I was putting it up on my design wall right at the very end. Could I have stopped and adding a few rust stripes in? Sure. Was I going to do so? Nope. (See my early posts on how it’s better done than perfect.) I chalked it up as a learning experience, and I’m moving on.

I do like the final result. It needs a border, and I haven’t figured out what that might be yet, and I am yet hoping that the border will bring it all together. Because of the orange stripes, there’s a ton of texture already in the quilt, so the quilting is likely to be stitch-in-the-ditch along some (not all) of the orange pieces, plus some texture in the greens and blues. I’ll post a picture when it’s all done, too.

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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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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