Ice Blue

 

I added a small deep space border to the Ice Blue quilt.

Here is the finished flimsy on top of the fabric I have selected for the backing. This quilt is going to be gorgeous. Or maybe "handsome" isn't a better term.

This isn't the quilt I had expected to make, but that is what making art is all about. It's about following an idea where it takes you, and if it's a dead end, then you have to switch gears and figure something else out. You can't judge your end result against the first IDEA you had. Because an idea is only an idea. It doesn't exist until you make it real. If I had not brought you all along on the road of this quilt from first inspiration to the final quilt, you would never know that I had stalled.

However, I do think the color story of the quilt matches the original color story I had in my head, and that works for me.

On to the next thing.

Once Again, From A to B

I talk a lot about how I start a quilt without a fully formed idea in my head, and that's true, but only partly. I NEVER start if I don't know where I am going. I may not have a COMPLETE idea, but I do have an idea and I have a pretty good idea of what I want it to look like when I get started. If I am not sure, I don't start. I do something else.

For my granddaughter's quilt, I knew five things.

1. I knew it was for a little girl, 3 years old
2. I knew she loved dinosaurs
3. I knew I didn't want the dinosaurs to be overwhelming. I wanted the quilt to have longevity.
4. I knew it would include bright happy colors, flowers, animals and perhaps insects.
5. I knew it would be a diamond quilt, and I have those "wired" which means I totally understand how they go together and what makes them "tick" and how to make them "work."

It can be argued that the success or failure of a quilt depends on fabric selection. I had to do an internet search for dino fabrics, as my "usual" sources had thin options. I ended up buying five one yard pieces from Spoonflower, but they had the large scale dino fabrics I thought the quilt needed.  One of them had roses in it, which made it automatic because my granddaughter's middle name is Rose.

These were the large diamonds I already had in my leftovers bin that I wanted to use in the Dino Quilt.

But I also knew the quilt needed other things. Since I have so many leftover elements from other Diamond Quilts, I didn't think I'd need to buy more fabrics, but when I found the pink with fawn (above), owl, chipmunk, rabbit and fox, I thought it was gorgeous. But was it "too pretty" to be in a dino quilt? I wasn't sure, so I texted my DIL. You can see her reply in the screen shot above.

I placed orders with three online fabric vendors. One order arrived almost immediately, but I had to wait a week for the other two. But I could start. The diamond quilts have seven vertical rows of large diamond, evenly spaced. So I made some plumb lines, and figured out where they should hang. These would be guidelines to help keep the design straight. They are just crochet cotton with whatever I could find as a weight at one end, tied to a pushpin that got stuck at the top of the design wall. They are dead useful in designing quilts.

Here you can see the string of the plumb line as it divides this big diamond in half, keeping it straight.

I may have had to wait for SOME fabrics, I did have stuff I could work with, and I knew the small scale dino prints would work as the medium sized diamonds. So I placed the big diamonds I already had on the wall, leaving spaces for the big dino diamonds to come. And then I filled in with the medium diamonds. I can hear you thinking. Lynne, you're NUTS!

Actually, NO, I'm not, because when you fill in the design wall, that isn't a complete design, it's just a START!  You don't really know if your idea is going to float until you have all the various elements lined up in one place. Now, if you make a quilt from a kit or a published design from somebody else, then you generally don't have to worry about this because somebody else has made all those decisions for you. (If you have a block that uses five fabrics and you make a test block and the fabrics don't look the way you expected them to.. that's good to know before you make all of them. This is the same idea.)

OK, I'm gonna get on my soapbox here and a lot of you might get a bit pissed off, but here goes:

I don't care HOW GOOD you think you are. An idea in your head will NEVER look exactly the same on the design wall as it did in your head. An idea will ABSOLUTELY look different if you graphed it out on paper, colored it in, or used a computer program. YOU NEVER KNOW until you SEE the REAL THING in front of you. And a little bit of it does not equal the whole thing.

And JustGail, who asked yesterday if I used a camera to get a different view, the answer is most emphatically YES! Go read this post for the most recent example.

I told you I planned to use the smallish dinosaur prints as the medium diamonds. And that was a good idea, but it turned out the quilt was WAY TOO BUSY, so I had to replace SOME of them with other prints. You can see a few of them here in this photo of some of the blocks that have been sewn together.

I make all my design decisions as I look at what is happening on the design wall. I look at pictures in the camera (OK, my iPhone), but the decisions are made in front of the real thing.

It was my painting teacher, Armand Szainer, who told me that it was more important to BEGIN than it was to finish. Begin, begin, begin, he said. What he meant was that it was most important to look at whatever it was you were doing with a FRESH EYE, to not fall in love with it, and to BEGIN AGAIN if it was not working. You cannot get ANYWHERE unless you GET STARTED.

Success in your head doesn't mean squat. I used to tell my painting students to put more damn paint on their palettes. "It isn't doing you any good in the tube," I'd say. Same thing with quilters and their stashes, "You can't eat fabric," I tell my students. "It isn't very good at heating your house, and you already paid for it. Cut the damn stuff up and make quilts."

Any questions?

From The Beginning

As I have been writing these posts, I have come to realize that it might be helpful to bring you through ALL the steps I go through when I select fabrics for my birds. So here I will bring you step by step how I selected, discarded and eventually decided what fabrics to use for a bird.

Here's the inspiration photo of J & P. I was attracted to the teal shirt J is wearing and the contrast with the rusty red shirt my brother is wearing. Originally I thought the beak fabric would be the tan of the ground.

I first picked the teal on the left, but it was kinda bland, so I picked the one with the slightly larger print. I don't have a lot of muddy colors, but this brick red seemed the best match.

Yeah, I like this brown for the beak, but there was something else sitting nearby I wanted to try.

As soon as I set it down, I knew the gold would NOT work the way I wanted it to as a beak.

OK, so I know what COLORS I want, now I have to make sure I have the right FABRICS to tell the color story.  Time to go back to the stash and see what's hiding in there.

This is left over from the backing of the Treasure Trove quilt. There are a lot of bird wing possibilities here.

Then I saw this Philip Jacobs fabric from my I-just-bought-this-washed-it-but-haven't-ironed-it pile. Oh yeah, this turquoise flower has bird wing written all over it. (And you thought I bought it for something else?)

Time to review the brick red...

Oooh... this red ruler fabric would be VERY cool, especially since it looks like tape measures and my brother is a carpenter, but that's not quite the color I want, so back to the stash I go.

WELL! The dark areas of this fabric is exactly what I am looking for. I already know the color would work with my turquoise, but I'll have to arrange the fabric precisely to get the look I want. (It's called "fussy cutting").

OH YEAH! This looks perfect. ... But then I noticed that bright green in the middle of the turquoise flower, and I thought, Ooooh!  What would that look like?  Only one way to find out.

YES YES YES YES YES!

Now, almost any of these combinations would have made a good bird, but I don't want to make OK birds. I want to make AWESOME birds, so I even though what I first choose is OK, I keep pushing to find something better. That's the real lesson here. Don't settle. Keep pushing those ideas around.

The first idea you come up with is invariably not particularly original. Keep trying new things. Try different fabrics with different patterns and different scales. Move the color around too. If you are using a turquoise (which is a light blue green) try fabrics closer to blue or green. My brother's shirt is much closer to the color of fabric I eventually selected, but either of the brick red (dark red orange) would have been equally successful.

Also, a bird with either of my final beak choices would have been worked. I particularly like my birds with beaks that have a nice contrast and add a little ZING, but a bird with the tan beak would also be very beautiful. (You could also have used that purple from the flowered fabric.) The answers are usually sitting right in the fabrics you have in front of you. You'll never know until you try.

A great IDEA is only an IDEA until you make it happen. Execution is just as important, and is often quite another kettle of fish! Here, I've placed the beak wrong, so when I add something to the right side of the block, I'll end up with a snub-nosed bird. Argh.  and the size of the wing triangle cut off the green part of that turquoise flower, so the green beak doesn't connect to anything. It doesn't need to, really.  And I am having doubts about the combination of wing and breast fabrics.  When I get thoughts like this, it's time to take a break. I'll stop and have lunch. Then I have an errand to do. When I get back, I'll reassess.

 I've decided I like the fabrics and colors even though the bird is a bit dark. I unsewed the beak panel from the rest of the bird, and then took the beak apart from it's a background and then put it all back together, making sure I'd end up with a pointy beak and enough room for a seam allowance.

I'm happy with it.

Getting From "A" to "B"

When viewers look at my quilts, I am often asked "How did you come up with that idea?,  "Where did that come from?"

I often struggle with an answer, not because I don't have one, but because I am amazed that people struggle with ideas.  To me, ideas are all over the place - my problem is choosing ONE to play with.

I'll talk about getting ideas later, but for now, I want to explain what got me started with the Black Box quilt.  In other words, I want to tell you how I got from "A" to "B."

At work I often work with the Accounting Team, and frequently voucher the invoices.  I look at a LOT of invoices.  Just after the first of the year, one of our vendors changed their logo and the new logo for Index Packaging had this image of an open box.  I thought it was interesting, but didn't think much about why it attracted my attention.

Between making my unique quilts with letters and houses I make fairly straightforward quilts. (Insofar as The Red Sticks and Laughing Out Loud are "straightforward") Mostly it's just a way to relax.  Right after I started working on the Red Sticks, I wrote a blog post about getting to work. It was "Pick Up The Pencil."  Shortly afterward I was reading Twyla Tharp's book, The Creative Habit. I'd had it for years, but this time when I picked it up the title of Chapter 5 really hit me.

 A box! I thought of the logo for Index Packaging... that open box! (We get invoices from Index Packaging about once a week, so that open box registered in my brain on a regular basis.) What was different about that image was the fact the box was OPEN and you could see INSIDE! When I think of a box, I think of a package that gets delivered by the post office or UPS. I think of a brown carton, sealed up, closed. THIS BOX was OPEN, indicating things could come OUT of it!  BINGO! Two separate things - the quote and the image of the open box, now fit perfectly together.  I drew this in my sketchbook:

As soon as the idea was on paper, I knew this would be my next quilt. I didn't have the whole concept clear in my head. I knew the box would be slightly wider at the bottom, to be reminiscent of a magician's hat. I knew the words "out of the box" would be in an arc above the box. I knew the box would be black, and I knew the box should be coming out of the dark somehow. I also wanted the flaps to look like a real box.

I did not have all the answers, but I wasn't worried, because I knew that ideas get generated through the process of working. A few days later I wrote a post about the new quilt, and I've shared the process of creating and making the quilt over the last few months.

Remember though, a great idea is only an idea until you make it real. Having an idea is nice, being able to execute your idea is good, but having the confidence to keep pushing through roadblocks is vital.

The first step, the idea, will "hit" you in an AHA moment when you least expect it, but only if you've been "collecting" things that inspire you.  More on that later.