The Fabric Makes the Misfit

 When I had the idea in my head to make misfit birds, I had to think what constituted a "misfit." How could I convey, using fabric alone, that this bird was a "misfit" while following the basic brief for this quilt   - that all the birds would be PINK?

This is, in a nutshell, what I "do." I use my fabrics to get the message across. Wanda has said "You use your fabrics to do the heavy lifting in your quilts." That's exactly it. I believe that, all things being equal, fabric selection determines the success or failure of a quilt, and that you really should make your fabric work FOR YOU, because, like, duh, isn't that what it's for?

For the misfits, I wanted fabrics that would be sorta pink, or have a lot of pink in them, but wouldn't be the   things you normally associated with "pink." To get to the fabrics I had to figure out what a misfit was. What do "misfit" teenagers look like? They wear a lot of black, they may have tattoos. They may dress sloppily, or wear mismatched clothes. They may wear clothes with subversive images or ideas.

I thought this pink fabric with the spiderwebs would make the viewer think not only about spiders and spiderwebs (yuk!), but would also suggest tattoos. OK, so now we have the basic part of the bird. But now we need the rest.

I tried different fabrics, but nothing really supported the spiderweb. But then I did this and I thought, I like the colors and the swirls.. AND THEN I HAD A BRAINSTORM!

What if I SWITCHED the two fabrics? Made the swirly fabric the wing and the spiderweb fabric the body?

And then I saw this fabric scrap!!! OH HOLY HELL YES!

Then I figure out how to make the spiderweb fabric work best in the shape of the bird breast and body.

Audition beak fabric, determine placement and shape...

Add some funky legs, (because hello, misfit bird) and Voila!

Remember, YOU know this is a misfit bird because you have watched me create it. YOU know the story about the families of birds, the siblings, the whole concept. But when I show the finished quilt, nobody will know any of that. Viewers will only figure it out as they look carefully at all the birds. They will put it together, because I have left a lot of clues.

AND, because I chose my fabrics carefully, and used them to their best advantage. I remember someone told me once "You have the best fabrics." I said "Maybe, maybe not. But I know how to get the best out of the fabrics I do have. That's more important."

You can get my tutorial about making birds here, at my Etsy shop. They don't use traditional patterns or templates and they are NOT paper-pieced.  

The Fabrics of Blue Ice

 

These are the fabrics I bought last week. They arrived, surprisingly enough, on Sunday. After taking this picture, I ran them through the washing machine.

My friend Buffy asked if I took my fabric out of the dryer slightly damp and ironed it right away to get rid of the wrinkles. As if. I get it out of the dryer, and then drape it on a table, like this, or over the back of a chair to minimize wrinkling. If I leave in in the laundry basket and Millie naps in it, I have to run it through the washer all over again.

Buffy asked about how I bought fabrics. "I was so surprised to read that you rarely buy more than half a yard." That's partly because I can buy more fabric that way, and it's also part of my experience. Unless I am making a quilt with eight major fabrics, I can get away with buying a lot less. 

I thought in addition to seeing what I bought in the top photo, that you might be interested in hearing WHY I chose the fabrics I bought, and I thought you'd like to see them "up close and personal." This dark blue black print looks pretty obvious when you see it with the light shining right on it, like in the photo above,

But this is what it really looks like, and once I get it up on the design wall, all you are going to see is almost all black. This is what I mean when Julie and my son say "your quilts look great in pictures, but in real life they are SO MUCH BETTER. It's like they are completely different." As you can see, I bought a full yard of this. I felt this was going to be the "backbone" of the quilt, and I didn't want to run out.

This blue is a bit too green, but otherwise this fabric most closely resembles the color story I saw on the road last week. When I buy fabric, I care not one whit about which manufacturer or which "line" I buy from.

This is another fabric I bought a full yard of. For me it has POTENTIAL written all over it. I knew my quilt would have other colors than dark blue and blue and white, so to me, this was fine. I don't think "Oh that could be like star in the night sky...." I don't get that fussy. Generally I scream through the fabric options pretty quickly, stuffing everything I like in my shopping cart. When I've gone through everything, I'll open up the design board and put all the fabrics in it to see if they play nicely together. It's pretty obvious when stuff doesn't fit, so I delete it from the cart. I'll make decisions about how much to buy of each when I've narrowed down my choices.

If you want specific color combinations, you don't always have a wide selection from which to choose. If you say "Dark blue with black and white" 90% of people will think "Night Sky." This isn't exactly a wildly creative rendition of these colors, but it fits the profile of what I needed, so in the cart it went. Now look, we all know it is so dark I can't put it right next to the very first fabric I showed you (because that would make a BLOB of Too Much Dark), but I know that before I get started. So that's another reason I didn't buy a yard of this. Plus I think this print is a lot less interesting to look at than that first one. (Oh, and if you look up at the sky at night, you will not see blue patches like this.)

This is a gamble (for this quilt anyway.) It is Big. It is BRIGHT, it can steal the show. But all quilts need a little bit of the unexpected, a kick-ass fabric that grabs your attention and MAKES YOU LOOK. This could be it. Besides, as you will see from my other choices this fabric holds all of the other colors (literally) and will tie with all the other fabrics that have those colors in the quilt. AND ANOTHER THING. I have learned that the PRINT carries your eye, but also CONNECTS the colors throughout the quilt. This will have to be used very judiciously, so it doesn't take over. And if it does, it will be because I decided to let it.

I have no reservations whatsoever about this one. It will work just fine.

This will probably work. If the blocks are big enough this will be fine. But it wouldn't work for smallish blocks, because the light dragonfly bodies could bump up against other fabrics and "leak" into them. I don't like that. I generally like to see my fabrics and blocks clearly delineated.

There is ONE fabric designer I know and love dearly. This is Philip Jacobs. Why it is here should be no surprise to anyone who is familiar with my work. Clearly since I am planning to make "long rectangles" I will use this fabric in the direction for which it was intended, and because of the scale I bought a full yard. (Besides, it's Philip Jacobs!!!)

I don't think I fully realized the scale of this print when I threw it in my shopping cart, because it is pretty clear that while it is TERRIFIC, I should have bought more. This is a half yard cut, and I will have to use it very judiciously to get all the bang for the buck this fabric offers.

This is an interesting pair. They are from the same fabric line, and although when you look at them like this you can see they are clearly different, they share so much similarity, that in the quilt you may think they are the same print. So clearly I only needed a half yard of each.

These two are blenders. The one on the left, I have no doubt will work fine, the one on the right... I don't know. It's almost too pink. We'll have to see what happens on the design wall. Sometimes you don't know these things until the fabric is in your hands. If it doesn't fit in this quilt, no worries, it will land somewhere else.

Violet lives on one side of blue (blue + red = violet), and green lives on the other (blue + yellow = green). Teal is really blue-green. In the real world, according to our light spectrum, as things get darker they get more violet (not black, black is just the absence of all color because there is no light). So even though I am tinkering more on the blue violet side of the spectrum, as this moves to the light, there can also be green, and since so many of the other fabrics had some green in them, it is appropriate that these fabrics are in the mix.

(OK, so I didn't do that whole logical thing above when I was picking these fabrics. I just thought, Oh, these will go, so they went... right into my shopping cart.)

The fabric on the left brings the color story I have in my head into the light, but because it is a geometric, it might not work. (But it might, so that's why it's here. You never know until you try, and cut properly (you all know how much I love to fussy cut), this one could be perfect. The one on the left is roll-over-brain-dead obvious. (At least to me.) 

That's it for the "darks and mediums." Now for some lights.

If I want the one on the left to read as LIGHT I'm going to have to be careful about how I cut it. The one on the right is iffy, but again, no risk = no reward.

BY THE WAY... and totally off topic, go watch this: Seven Minutes of Terror. (It isn't what you think.)

Yes, you have seen this print before. This is a different colorway.
 

These are the fabrics I had in my stash when I got started. CLEARLY this are too much the same, and needed help. I put my hand down so you could see the scale.

Here are more from my stash. Some of these might work, some won't, but hey, better to have a BIG selection from which to choose.

Many of these PROBABLY won't work, but hey, quilts change direction midstream sometimes, and you gotta go where it leads. What the quilt wants, the quilt should get.

If you haven't heard me say it before, let me say it now: The success or failure of a quilt depends ENTIRELY on fabric selection.

Well that's it for now. I hope you have enjoyed this trip through my head and why I bought each fabric in this group.

MYFWFU Tutorial on Sale at Etsy!

It's Official!

My new tutorial, "Making Your Fabric Work For You" is ready and for sale at my Etsy shop, here.

It's available for ten US dollars and is an immediate download, so you can get started right away. I'm very excited. I hope you like it!

 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I had help from my friends Julie Sefton and Allison Tom who proofread and helped me edit the tutorial and transform it from a bunch of pictures with no text into what it is today. Together we refined, rearranged and re-rearranged everything in it so it was much more cohesive and thorough. We even added 17 pages!

Allison is a beginner quilter, and her questions often made me realize (as my friend the Selvage Fairy put it once) "there are things that you know that you don't even know that you know." In other words, Allison put me right on the spot. "Well on page X," she wrote to me one day, "you say this. But on page Y, you say the opposite. Which is it?" Um.

Allison lives in Vancouver, and I am across the continent in New England. We spent at least four hours on the telephone talking about this. Julie is an experienced quilter, and knew where I was going with this, but Allison's questions really made me focus. I sent her the original presentation without any text. Two days later I sent her the presentation after I added the running commentary I usually give when I presented it to a class.  "I learned so much from looking at the pictures," Allison wrote back later,  "But with the text I learned three times as much."

After I had finished the tute, and was preparing the marketing photos and blurbs, Allison asked if she could write a few words.  Here they are:

"I asked Lynne if I could write a brief paragraph about this new tute for her blog. I'm the beginning quilter who's been editing and commenting on the "Making Your Fabric Work For You" tutorial.  (I worked on the Liberated Birds too!)

"Now, I've been reading Lynne's blog for well over a year and have read many old posts too.  The day by day discussions of the challenges of these wonderful quilts captivated me.  There was so much to learn just following the blog.  But the tutorial has serious value added.  Of course, lots of information that's liberally sprinkled through the blog is pulled together here and presented in an orderly manner.  Conversations that started in the blog or in her classes are completed and filled out. 

"But Lynne never stops at "that'll do," as we all can see every day. She's created new slides and new text and the result is a careful, step by step exploration of her strategies to explore and use her fabrics to create those beautiful combinations; to make you look and look and look; and, of course to tell a joke or two along the way.  This is a great investment in learning to see fabric, color and pattern and to create more beautiful quilts."

Thanks Allison. I know damn well I couldn't have said it better.

:-)

Sneak Peek

This is one of the pages from the new tutorial I am working on, "Making Your Fabric Work For You." Regular readers know I use my fabric to do the "heavy lifting" in my quilts, bringing more interest and vitality to them. The tutorial has over 59 pages of examples of how I do this.

There aren't any patterns for anything, no exercises, just things to help you look at your fabric differently so you can be more creative. Imagine you're visiting me in my studio, and I'm talking to you. That's what this tute is like. Except now you'll have all that information so you can review it whenever you want.

It's currently in the final editing stages. I have a beginner quilter and an advanced quilter reviewing it for clarity and flow, in addition to the usual spelling and punctuation errors. It'll be available for sale as a digital download from my Etsy shop within a couple of weeks.

And then I'm getting back into the studio. Talking about making quilts isn't half as much fun as actually making them!