Quilting experiments 2

Following on from the previous post, I decided that I wasn’t that happy with anything yet, so I went back to the computer and tried floating a few of the ideas so far on the back of the sofa and here’s the result.



To get the area on the sofa back I selected it in PS and then copied it to a new document, this then allowed me to paint in the stripes and also try some filters, and when I was happy I just pasted them back onto the sofa to see what they looked like.

Artistic- palette knife


Artistic-rough pastels


Artistic-coloured pencil


I didn’t really like any of these ideas so I went back to the original squares that I created when I did my colour study exercise (Sandra Meech) and selected an area I liked. As I wanted to soften the line I put the squares into PS and put the Liquefy filter on them to bend the shape a bit. I also went back to the idea of the composite and floated an image and some text over the top, and drew in some simulated stitch marks.



At last I was beginning to feel I was getting somewhere. I decided to go for graduated blocks of colour which would give me a cross between squares and stripes, and I had a quick go on in PS to see if the idea was viable.



Getting there! But too much purple and the design process on the computer felt too restrictive.



I now went back to the sketchbook and using this book as a guide I started to create ideas for stripes and lattices.



I worked to a size of 12x12 cm with the intention of scaling up to 12x12 inches, but due to a mistake later on this ended up as 12x10.5 inches.
The design on the bottom right is a WIP and the top left is the one I chose to work with, using my dyed fabrics.



As you will see from the picture above I got so carried away that I cut the bottom section the same as the top, hence the discrepancy in the sizing. I also managed to join everything back to front so the design didn’t match the sketch.
Still it’s all part of the learning curve.



As I didn’t like the new arrangement I changed the format to portrait.



I could now see that these bold colours needed knocking back, so I set about overlaying them with images printed on to ExtravOrganza and printing straight on to the fabric with the little printing blocks I made from Funky Foam. The bottom left fungus has been printed onto ExtravOrganza and painted over with Procion, (Koh-I-Noor) it worked very well. The other prints have been done with a permanent stamping ink.
I sandwiched this top layer with a layer of lightweight Warm Bond, a thermally bonded cotton batting, and a layer of soft pre washed calico. Lots of quilting stitches to finish off.



This is the first of 3 samples, the other 2 are still WIP’s which I will blog about, together with the throw binding and the sashing, next time.