Kaffe Fassett on Quilting

one of the amazing things about making a patchwork is trying to get a wonderful harmony wonderful excitement out of a given range of colors and to have a balance Brandon and I collaborate on work all the time it speeds things up otherwise you're sitting there trying something thinking is it right is it right and when I'm start to do something I say Brandon come and look at this so it's very reassuring we do it for each other yeah well what we're doing is we're putting up pieces and creating these big squares of diagonal stripes until it looks balanced color wise my love affair with Patrick started when a friend of mine bought a wonderful old antique quilt so I would say that a lot of my ideas come from the decorative arts world lyza Lucy suggested that I link patchwork lyza Lucy was a rep in America she said you will design fabric to go into these quilts one day so then they said okay we're going to launch this as a range of fabrics for quilters would you do some patterns to go with it that's how I got started that was Westminster asking me to get started and so working with Rowan and Westminster creating these ranges of fabrics and then of course making quilts to show off the fabrics to show the quilts in a beautiful way that would amplify the colour when we start a book we're taking the latest collection of the cave collective which is Phillip Jacobs Brandon ably and myself creating a collection for that year and we take that those fabrics put them into quilts then we take that quilt to a wonderful location and we try to find a location that has a lot of variety so we've got wonderful colored walls we got a bit of garden as' we've got landscape we've got this and that all within a range that we can fly to and have a billet on the edge of it and just walk around this location and get all of our strong when I first started designing fabrics there was a great resistance to the kind of thing that I'm doing in fabrics I liked scale I liked operatic panache and so I would design big roses you know the size of your head and big cabbages and things like that on my fabrics and people responded to it most of the patchwork world in those days was working with little repetitious patterns from the Civil War or thimble berries they were people that that produce little typical things and that was those were the big sellers and the dominant look of most shops you would go into what it was interesting is that we now dominate the field in the sense that we're influencing a lot of other companies to come bigger scale and more color what I look for in a really good quilt is for my eye not to stop traveling I want to look at it and have my eye wandering around and not fall into a black hole or into a bright light so that I want an evenness of attention the great companies of this world there are very few who produce good materials for us artists we need our pink boxes of color our beautiful jewel like threads and our wonderful fabrics so I am so enamoured of anybody that puts in the time and everything that has to be in place in order to produce a beautiful market of fabrics that keep coming year after year and allow us to be creative and travel the world and make our books so I am very grateful to run you

Channel: Make it Coats

Views: 57,940

Rating: 4.9740682 out of 5

Keywords: Kaffe Fassett, Rowan Fabrics, Westminster Fabrics, Rowan Yarns, Sewing and Quilting, Quilting, Quilting Projects, Rowan Sewing, Sewing Projects, Rowan Knitting

Id: bzd9BEuKdh0

Length: 4min 28sec (268 seconds)

Published: Tue May 20 2014