Ten Weeks of Colour Inspiration Tuesday: the Quilt Story chapter that was started almost by accident!
What started as a side project has morphed into a regular part of the Clever Chameleon week! Ten weeks ago I published the first Colour Inspiration Tuesday with the intention of occasionally playing with colour combinations I might like to use in quilts. However, it turns out that making colour palettes can be a bit addictive for someone who loves colour. I have found that it is easy to end up with at least one idea a week. So, Colour Inspiration Tuesday has quickly become a weekly post.
Not only that, but the last few weeks I have found myself contemplating more deeply the possibilities of each colour scheme in quilt design. How would I use these colours and for whom? This has led to Colour Inspiration Tuesday now currently including one or more sketches of simple quilt layouts that use these colours. No patterns yet, so don’t get too hopeful. But they are visualisations of where I would start if I was using these colour schemes to design a quilt. Can you see the escalating pattern here?
Maybe patterns will follow?!
One of these colour schemes (Jewel Tone Triangles) has led to a real quilt that I am in the process of putting together. You can read about the process so far in this post: Jewel Tone Diamonds Quilt.
To access the colour palettes of Colour Inspiration Tuesday available so far, click on the thumbnails below.
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It’s been one huge celebration of quilting in Adelaide! Festival of Quilts and Quilt Encounter Week, including a visit from the Tentmakers of Cairo.
This past week was one of the biggest in the calendar of the Quilter’s Guild of South Australia. The State Guild Quilt Show and the guild’s annual live-in quilting retreat’s 25th anniversary, back-to-back. I am not sure why it was organised this way this year. Festival of Quilts has been in November in the past. Perhaps it was to give country quilters a chance to participate in both in one trip? Or maybe it was to capitalise on the Tentmakers of Cairo? Anyway, a great week for quilters, and an exhausting week for organisers – I take my hat of to you all!
Today’s blog highlight is definitely the Tentmakers of Cairo coming to town. But first, a quick look at the South Australian Festival of Quilts.
Festival of Quilts, Adelaide 2017
I would love to tell you more about the Festival of Quilts. But photos were allowed only on the proviso that they are for personal use only. So there is only limited interesting news I can tell. I can tell you that the quality of the quilts is very high and still rising.
I can show you what I entered into this year’s show. This is the first time I have entered, and I was very excited to receive a ribbon! Judges commendation!!
My quilt entry for the “South Australia – Ocean to Outback” challenge category. It is called “Celebrate SA”.
The brief for the quilt challenge was to make a quilt of 55cm square or 55x110cm on the theme “South Australia – Ocean to Outback”. I abstractly portrayed some of the highlights of our state with a happy pelican imposed over the top. Pelicans are not particularly numerous here, but they ubiquitous. You see them on the coast, in the wetlands at the end of my street in suburbia, on the River Murray, and in the salt lakes of the outback. And they travel all over the state at will. Anyway, more on this quilt another time – today I really want to get to the Tentmakers of Cairo exhibition.
But just before I do….. To top off the joy at getting a ribbon, I also just found out that the whole collection of challenge quilts is invited to Brisbane to be a Special Exhibition at The Mad Quilters’ Gathering in August. What fun! Sorry – I am a bit excited by all this!
Dandelion Wishes re-visit
Quilt guild project: Modern quilt jigsaw.
Remember my Dandelion Wishes Appliqué Mini Quilt? If not, you can find the tutorial for it here. I now know much more about the project that I made this for, as promised.
This project is going to run for nearly a year, and everyone is invited to make an unbound mini quilt of size 40x60cm. They will be trimmed to puzzle shapes and be sold as a fundraiser. Unsold pieces will become part of a special travelling exhibition. Apparently there are prizes up for grabs for guild members who participate. I will keep you up to date about this project as it progresses.
So, finally.! We’re here. Introducing the…..
Tentmakers of Cairo at Quilt Encounter 2017
Quilt Encounter participants were very fortunate to have two Tentmakers of Cairo, Essam Aly and Hosam Hanafy visiting and presenting at their retreat. The exhibition was also open to the public, which is where I come in. Photos were welcome, and I want to share with you the colour and happiness of these works of art.
There were lots of beautiful medallion-style designs.
These appliqués are done almost exclusively by men. There was one piece that was done by one of the craftsmen’s sister. I am pretty sure it is the one in the photo directly above. But this is apparently not typical. Also, each family from the Tentmakers has its own designs, and copying other family’s designs is forbidden.
There were also panel designs, which remind me (probably not surprisingly) of Arabian carved door panels.
My Favourites from the Tentmakers of Cairo
The last “category” of quilts I want to show you is my favourite. It is the pictorial appliqués.
These pieces were called “quilts”, but what they really are is appliquéd wallhangings. They are lined on the back with canvas and they are bound, but there is no third layer inside, and there is no quilting. Just beautiful appliqué and hand embroidery. The work is needle turn appliqué, and the men are extremely adept – they are fast and use massive scissors to trim their work as they go with great confidence. If you ever get a chance to see them in action, it is definitely worth it. It will definitely Colour Your Mood for the better and Brighten Your World.
I’m glad we went early in the day to this. A lot of these pieces were sold and out the door by the time we left!
Finally, I will leave you with some shots of the detail in the pictorial appliqués. I hope you appreciate some of the humour and colour that is embodied in these works. Enjoy!
The Dandelion Wishes Mini Quilt: a Handiquilter group homework exercise
At our last Handiquilter meeting we were given not one, but two homework exercises!! We are allowed to combine them if we see fit, but I have had no inspiration in this direction. So I am doing them separately. The first mission, should we choose to accept it, is to do a small whole cloth design using changing thread colours as the main design element. I have put this exercise on hold for now.
The second homework exercise is to participate in a project for the upcoming SA Quilter’s Guild Festival of Quilts. The organisers of this project are asking for small modern quilted pieces of 23″x16″ in size. The theme is “modern” and the edges don’t need to be finished. The organiser has a plan to extensively trim and then finish the pieces to make an interactive display.
I have decided to participate in this second project. It gives me a small inexpensive project to do, with a deadline. Perfect for my current mission to actually do more quilting practice, and do it without breaking the bank. Hopefully, I will be able to tell you more about the project after I’ve seen it at the quilt festival in a few weeks. At the moment I am a little short on details, and I’m not sure about how much is public knowledge for sharing. So you’ll have to wait for the whole story.
In the meantime, you will have to settle for a free appliqué template of the Dandelion Wishes mini quilt I made.
My Dandelion Wishes Mini Quilt concept
“Modern” to me means lots of negative space, bold (probably solid colours), improv piecing and/or heavy on the geometric shapes. I am not doing any piecing for this project. (Just a tactical decision, I quite like improv piecing.) I have decided to appliqué a bold, colourful word (the pretty kind of colourful, not the other kind!!) in the centre of a neutral coloured background. There is a clear need to confine the design to the centre of the mini quilt, due to the aforementioned trimming plan. So lots of negative space also allows for this.
The word I have chosen is “wish”. My mini quilt will have the word “wish” raw-edge appliquéd such that the “i” is the stem of a stylised dandelion clock, and I’ll have several seeds escaping, blown from the stem. Not a totally original meme I know, but I will be drafting it from scratch, and it will be 100% the way I want it.
Here is the scan of my concept drawing:
My Dandelion Wishes Mini Quilt process
Dandelion Wishes design:
I scanned my original sketch and used Inkscape software to outline the shapes.
My Dandelion Wishes mini quilt appliqué design
If you would like the pdf to print this design for your own use, you can download it here: Dandelion Wishes appliqué pdf.. Don’t forget to reverse the shapes when you trace them to produce a readable design!
Fabric choices:
In my current stash I do not have any large pieces of neutral fabrics I would consider typical for a modern background. I am definitely more a batiks and brights girl. I did find one mottled grey batik that might have sufficed, but in the end I didn’t think it would be right.
Using the reverse side of a fabric if it suits is a valid choice.
So, being short of shopping time, and trying not to buy fabric for quilting practice, I have had to think a bit more laterally. In the end I have decided to use the reverse side of a fabric that I am not overly fond of. The front is a wispy gold brown colour with white roses printed on. However, the reverse is a light cream colour with a sort of dreamy, wispy quality. Not a solid, but I think quite appropriate for the wishes theme.
As for the appliqué…. again, there not many solid colour scraps in my house. I have settled for bright printed fabrics.
Auditioning fabrics for the Dandelion Wishes mini quilt
Appliqué pieces:
I generally print appliqué shapes in reverse onto sticker paper (rather than tracing them by hand straight to fusible adhesive). I do this to save time. Once the fusible adhesive is ironed onto my fabrics, I just stick the sticker printouts onto the paper backing of the adhesive and cut through all three layers. Fabric, adhesive and sticker. When I peel off the paper backing for the adhesive, the stickers are removed too.
I use stickers for printing out appliqué shapes when I am not in the mood for tracing.
Free-motion Appliqué:
Once all the appliqué pieces were ironed into place, I layered the mini quilt top over scrap wadding, pinned it and free-motion stitched 4-5 times around each appliqué shape. I added a stitched spine to each leaf, thread painted the dandelion parachutes and seeds and signed my name. Then I added a backing, ready for quilting.
Thread painted dandelion seeds
Quilting:
So, by this stage, I am not at all sure that this design particularly fits the “modern” theme anymore. I only used one solid fabric in the whole thing, ended up substituting the stylised geometric triangles on the dandelion clock for a more traditional pictorial representation by thread, and didn’t improvise a thing. So I have decided just to quilt it however I want. I have chosen a wavy line design occasionally broken with circles to emphasise the dreamy quality of the background. Is this modern? I don’t know, it matters little.
This design wasn’t as easy as I assumed!
I thought this quilting design would be quick and easy, but today I am having trouble getting a nice even stitch length. I think it is a combination of tiredness (the whole family was sick last week) and the long stretches of stitching. Normally I quilt motifs that change direction frequently, so the quilt doesn’t travel far in any one move. So the awkwardness of this was a bit of a discovery, and more “practice” than I had anticipated. Which obviously is a good thing, after I have moved on from the mild frustration of suddenly wishing I had a stitch regulator on my HQ Sweet Sixteen….
Be careful what you wish for…. I don’t really wish for a stitch regulator, what I really want is not to need one!
Anyway, it is now all finished and trimmed to size. Obviously, if I was finishing this as a normal mini quilt, it would need a binding of some sort. Or I could turn it into a cushion…..
The Dandelion Wishes appliqué design fits nicely on a throw pillow.
So, there you have it. If you make something with the Dandelion Wishes pattern on it, I would love to see it. How will you make it your own? Perhaps you can make it more “modern” than I achieved!!
Welcome to the launch of a long-held dream! My all new Clever Chameleon blog and website is a patchwork and quilt design resource, focused on helping you make your quilts most truly your own. Whether you want to find a new pattern, design a pattern, change a pattern or add to a pattern, The Clever Chameleon blog will offer you ideas to give you confidence on your next textile journey. As I explore all sorts of techniques to expand my skills, I will share my journey with you – my quilt story to empower yours.
A quilt made from another quilter’s scraps and then gifted to that person is just one example of a very powerful gift!
Chameleons are one of the best known colour-change-artists. But did you know that that they use colour as a social signal? And that these signals affect other chameleons around them?! It strikes me that quilters are like this too. We can convey mood and message in our work, through choices of colour, pattern and form. Quilts and textile art pieces convey love, happiness, comfort, thanks, memories, fun and many other things through our design choices. We express ourselves – and in doing so, affect others around us. The clever quilter knows the power of the quilt, and plans their project for the biggest impact. After all (and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you) – quilts are expensive and time consuming to make. So we might as well get the most value for our efforts, right?! Absolutely!
We can all create
So accordingly, the Clever Chameleon blog is a collection of my ideas. thoughts and experiences around designing, embellishing and personalising quilts and textile crafts, laid out especially for you to draw from. I love designing my own work, and I am usually drawn to strong colours and contrasts. So expect plenty of brightness.! I enjoy watching my kids design their own makings and seeing the joy that this brings them. Conversely, I feel disappointed when I hear people say that they don’t do art because they feel that they can’t “draw/create/do art like ….. (insert your favourite excuse here)”. I believe that we CAN all definitely create awesome stuff that makes us joyful on the inside and is meaningful to us or an intended recipient. Some of us may even turn out to be Picasso’s; who knows?! Let’s create joyfully like children before they get bogged down in self-consciousness.
Home is where the art is. Children don’t hold back on their creativity and neither should you!
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” – Pablo Picasso
I also like writing and teaching ….. so on this blog I am going to gather my thoughts and link in some great resources about improving your quilts and making them truly yours and truly awesome, in the hope that you might learn something that you wanted to know. Maybe even things you didn’t know that you want to know……
Learn and Connect
If you hang around here, be prepared to catch the urge to design and personalise your own quilts to make them special. Let me know what topics you’d like to cover. Learn to Colour Your Mood. Let your quilts Brighten Your World. And always Quilt Your Own Story!
Ten Weeks of Colour Inspiration Tuesday: the Quilt Story chapter that was started almost by accident!
It’s been one huge celebration of quilting in Adelaide! Festival of Quilts and Quilt Encounter Week, including a visit from the Tentmakers of Cairo.
The Dandelion Wishes Mini Quilt: a Handiquilter group homework exercise
So, there you have it. If you make something with the Dandelion Wishes pattern on it, I would love to see it. How will you make it your own? Perhaps you can make it more “modern” than I achieved!!
nt to find a new pattern, design a pattern, change a pattern or add to a pattern, The Clever Chameleon blog will offer you ideas to give you confidence on your next textile journey. As I explore all sorts of techniques to expand my skills, I will share my journey with you – my quilt story to empower yours.
