Creating an Art Quilt | National Quilters Circle

today I'm going to show you how to design and create art quilts it's a good idea to start with an inspiration piece some people like to use a photograph but since I'm a painter as well as a quilt maker I'm going to start with the painting this painting is called pedal power and this is the quilt that came out of the painting and you can see it's really beneficial to use a color palette that you may have started with in your painting and if you like the colors which I did I'm going straight into choosing the fabrics using that exact same color palette now if you look closely I love these fabrics particularly the batik SIU's batik Saul the time when I make art quilts and this art quilt also has traditional fabrics that you can see it's really up to you you can combine any sorts of patterns of fabrics that you like and that's what really is part of the fun of making this quilt alright so let's start with our second example of our inspiration piece this painting is called Jun blooms and this is the quilt that came out of the inspiration piece now the thing I like best about this painting is the color palette so you can be sure I wanted to use the same palette in this art quilt and it's a little bit complex it's sort of an abstract floral and when I went to create the art quilt it was my decision to try to simplify the shapes a little bit and yet not destroy the complexity of this piece so those are some of the decisions that you make when you're creating an art quilt all right so let's move on to this landscape quilt and this reminds me to talk about the concept of a foreground middle-ground and a background which is something that I put into that concept by using all of my art quilts because it gives a sense of depth and kind of draws you in to looking more closely at the scene so this was a really fun piece to make and here's my foreground is like a garden you've got a little road sort of leading you back into the middle ground with the buildings and then the background is you know the starry night found this fabric that reminded me so much of n Gogh's Starry Night painting so that this was a really fun piece to make we'll come back to this one a little bit later when I talk about finishing your art quilt so let's get started with the basics of the first step being I always start with a really small drawing we call it a thumbnail sketch this one's about three by four inches and from that I make my line drawing and that's going to become my templates for the quilt this is the prod the final project that I'm working on and it's the tropical hibiscus plant that you know I was trying to decide something that would give me the feeling of a tropical night in the Caribbean perhaps so it was a really enjoyable quilt to design and this one's actually not that difficult it doesn't have that many template pieces as you can see here all right so once you get your line drawing done and your template shapes you're going to be working with a value sketch now the value sketch is I think it's one of the key pieces of the puzzle because I like to work from the darkest starts darks to the lightest lights and include all of that range of values in NEP that I do it just makes it more interesting the darks bring some drama to the piece and the lights give it Sparkle so keep that in mind if you're going to design your own piece after the value sketch I start to think about color and what kind of colors would you picture if you were making a tropical scene so this is the fun part for quilters we of course love fabric and I went to my stash and started picking out swatches I usually cut them about this size tape them to a white piece of paper and you can see when we talked about value that I do the same thing with color I tend to line my colors up from light to dark as you can see here and the reason I do this and I do this with every quilt that I made not just art quilts but standard quilts as well it just helps me to organize the colors in my mind and again keep in mind values so that when you go in to plugging in your color into that black and white value sketch you'll just have a much better idea of which colors you're going to place where all right so it's getting exciting now with the fabric coming in next I'm going to make a color sketch and how about going back to this black and white design so with the colors you decide which colors are going to go into the darkest areas the lightest and so forth and this is a color sketch made of paper colored papers you can also make your color sketch on the computer with something like Photoshop or you can make it as simple as using colored pencils there's just a variety of ways that you could start thinking about placing color into your sketch so the nice thing about having a plan like this is you when you go to actually gather up your fabrics and go to the store perhaps you can bring this right along with you and it's it's just an enormous help to walk into the store with a pretty good plan all right so let's start building up the quilt now we're going to do this in layers and here we go with our background layer and I like to make my backgrounds in three pieces because I like them a little bit more complex and so here's my three pieces my templates now the main thing I want to tell you about this is that when you cut out your background pieces be sure and leave a good quarter of an inch all the way around your template shape and the reason for that is that when you start putting these pieces together you're going to have an overlap and you're going to need that when you stitch down your pieces I use a zig-zag stitch usually as my favorite stitch for the edge stitching here and you could use any kind of decorative stitch that you wish so again your other decisions are going to be are you going to use a colored thread an invisible thread that's completely up to you okay so let's bring back our loops let's bring back our main piece here and talk about the next step which would be putting in your middle ground and that is the actual plant itself so you start cutting your pieces out of the chosen fabrics and then you fuse them down I use fusible web to really get those pieces stuck down well especially handy when you have these little points you don't want those peeling back up again or some people use a fabric glue which is fine as well it's a good result but you if you use a fabric loop just be sure that you have to stitch stitch all the way around those pieces because they will pop off eventually the last layer here is your foreground pieces which are these overlapping kind of fern spiky fern shapes and then I finished off with bringing in some more color with these orange plant down here and started to embellish with some other shapes like trailing down from the sky and that kind of thing so the last thing I need to do is think about how I'm going to finish this piece off so let's bring back this little quilt here and you can of course use a standard binding for the finish on this quilt and in this case I decided to frame it just as I would a regular picture so I started sewing on these borders and ended up with three borders it felt a little bit harsh with the kind of straight edges of the borders so I found this nice little mohair yarn that I couched down and I think it was a good effect it was also a little bit whimsical then I started bringing in some of the shapes from the actual piece out into the the borders which ended up that I went a little bit crazy with that but that was fun you can see here or even more shapes that I fused down and you know when you're finished when you start adding shapes and it just doesn't work it's a little bit too much so that's all that's left to do on this little quilt here just to decide how I'm going to finish it off so you may want to take a class or get a pattern and start making your own art quilt I hope you think it's as fun as I do

Channel: National Quilters Circle

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Keywords: quilting, quilting tips, quilt, quilt tips, sew, sew quilts, sewing, quilt patterns, quilt projects, quilting projects, quilting patterns, national quilters circle, nqc, quilter, quilting videos, quilt videos, quilting how to, stitching, learn to quilt, quilting class, quilt class

Id: VcN1v8sVD-Y

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 25 2014