April 23, 2010 | Filed Under Technique:Design, Technique:Dyeing, Twelve by Twelve | Comments Off
The good news is that a week or so out from the next Twelve by Twelve Colourplay reveal day, I have at least one piece completed. Just the same, every time I walk into my studio, I see this shibori with the Kilauea palette on my design wall and I keep thinking I should do something with it!
At first, I decided against using this shibori for the challenge as I didn’t want to cut into it - don’t we all get that feeling sometimes? Now I can see some potential in cutting out a 12×12 square for a wholecloth work and using the leftovers in another 12×12 piece.
It’s all a question of time and priorities and I don’t know that I can fit this in over the weekend before I head off to the
Australasian Quilt Convention in Melbourne. As
Heather Bennett has recorded on her blog, even small-scale art quilts take many hours to design, construct, quilt and finish. I may need to keep the creative fire burning a little longer…
December 18, 2009 | Filed Under Inspiration, Technique:Design | Comments Off
As you will have noticed, I like to take photos especially when I travel. Even if the resulting photos are not great compositions, a camera is a great tool for capturing shapes, mood and colour. Over on Art and Quilts, cogitations thereon, Elizabeth has an interesting post showing how you can use your computer to reduce the resolution on your photos as to distil the basic colours and the proportions that they are used.
I went through a similar exercise (but without the aid of a computer) when creating one of my few hexagon quilts as part of my online City & Guilds course:
This weekend I will be back in Denver, Colorado. Let’s see if the winter colours yield new inspiration.
October 1, 2009 | Filed Under Technique:Design, Twelve by Twelve | 10 Comments
In twelve hours or so, our Twelve by Twelve challenge quilts will start to appear online. I’ve made two pieces for the theme of “Twelve”. They are utterly different and it’s hard to choose but here is the runner up:
One of the things I enjoyed about my work as a commercial and regulatory lawyer was learning about different industries and areas of public policy. It was always interesting to make client site visits, although wearing cream trousers on the day of a tour of a railway workshop was probably not the most prudent choice. Similarly, I enjoy learning new things through my art quilts and this theme challenge was no exception.
Early on in the challenge, I realised that a basic colour wheels has 12 colours. Then I worked out that there are twelve notes in the music scale. Then I thought, what if I transpose some music that uses all twelve notes into colour?
Despite studying music and music theory to Grade V level, I don’t recall learning about atonality or twelve tone music but some musically inclined members of an online quilting list that I belong to soon put me on the right track.
According to ever-authorative Wikipedia (ahem): “The 12-tone technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any through the use of tone rows, an ordering of the 12 pitches. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key. ” For the western ear, the results are not always melodious.
So Dodecaphony contains 12 tone rows, each of 12 notes. Rather than locating and transposing someone else’s music, I derived my tone rows using a random number generator. The “notes” are one inch squares of my own hand-dyed fabric over which I have couched some woollen yarn to create a mosaic effect.
I’ve put an audio version of the first two tone rows of Dodecaphony on the Twelve by Twelve blog - a little mood music to add to the suspense. I just hope I’ve chosen the “right” piece for the reveal or, if I haven’t, that I can swap them!
September 16, 2009 | Filed Under Technique:Design | 3 Comments
From trees, to ferns to feathers:
July 26, 2009 | Filed Under Technique:Design | 3 Comments
Mucking around with circles and Photoshop:
June 18, 2009 | Filed Under Quilters' Guild of NSW, Technique:Design | 1 Comment
One of the benefits of membership* of The Quilters’ Guild of NSW Inc is access to an extensive library. Recently I borrowed Ann Johnston’s Color by Design which is a veritable recipe book for painting and printing with dye. With its spiral-bound format, this book provides a practical guide to exploring colour and design directly onto fabric. I was really impressed at the clear instructions and beautiful photographs so when I saw Ann’s expanded second edition of The Quilter’s Book of Design on sale at the Sydney Quilt Show, it was a no-brainer to bring a copy home with me.
As someone with no formal background in art or design, I was first introduced to the elements of design in my City & Guilds coursework with
Linda Kemshall. However, not everyone can take these kinds of courses and, even if they do, it is instructive to revisit the principles of design from time to time. As the title suggests,
The Quilter’s Book of Design is aimed squarely at quiltmakers. It is not a dry, analytical textbook but a rich resource with inspiring images from the author’s body of work. I heartily recommend that you buy or borrow a copy for yourself.
* The membership year commences on 1 July. Download a membership form and join or renew your membership now!
March 6, 2009 | Filed Under Technique:Design | Comments Off
It means reaching beyond my scraps, but my kaleidoscope quilt needs to be enlarged to make it a more useful size and pleasing composition. This was confirmed after I mocked up a version on Electric Quilt 6. EQ6 is such a useful tool and I’ve only scratched the surface of its functionality. Glynis experiments a great deal with EQ software and you can see some of her designs on her new blog: www.patchworkmaniac.wordpress.com
January 20, 2009 | Filed Under Technique:Design | 1 Comment
Thanks to Di for leaving a comment about Adobe’s Kuler Palette Generator. With this online tool, you can generate a palette from an image or from a colour. You can also customise the output. For comparison purposes with yesterday’s efforts, here are the Kuler-generated palettes for Dreamline#2 and Binary Notes #2:
January 19, 2009 | Filed Under Technique:Design | 3 Comments
Playing around with two online palette generators today, I was reminded how we all see colour differently. The first palette in each set was generated via the Big Huge Labs Palette Generator. The second palette was created via www.degraeve.com. Neither generator seems very adept at picking up the ‘zing’ colours that quilters love but it’s still fun to see what they come up with.
20 July 2009 PS: See also www.colourlovers.com/palettes/add
Next Page »
