Kaffe's One-Off Quilt Experiment

just recently I've been thinking very deeply about the wonderful aboriginal paintings in Australia that I've seen on my various trips and one of the things that I noticed about them there was this intensity of dots a whole language of using spots and dots and some of them were quite monochrome one in particularly that I saw recently had a white base with darker spots on it and I just thought that was very interesting and I had quite a few fabrics that Branton had designed that were black and white and had this kind of white base ah and this particular one called onion rings which I'm gonna show you pieces here this is onion rings which is I think a wonderfully useful fabric it gives you beautiful movement and a kind of primitive geometry available this August and this is another one that I really like very much it's kind of a take on a simple checkerboard but we've got you know the kind of abstract craziness checkerboard kind of falling apart then his wonderful jumble we have a whole collection of these in wonderful colors now when I put this onto the quilt you can see that it's very very bright and what I wanted was a kind of overall level of color and intensity and if this was just too bright so what I did if you can move in here rosy is put a little dot in the middle of each of the circles so that I created another kind of fabric and that took the edge off of the brightness and let it sink back into the composition I think you can see there that they now work quite well so that's something what one you can do with a with a permanent marker just make your own fabrics become your own designer uh I have things like this in it which is an old fabric that I designed that had several different colorings in the same fabric and that created a very nice little texture like here you can see I also use some Liberty fabrics but some of them even though if you look closely a wonderful texture but when you get back from it it becomes just a kind of mass and I wanted a certain level of brightness here and and and a scale that made it really articulate so you could see all of the different elements so when I took out those really small ones they're going to show well this is the smallest thing which is the kind of snakeskin but even though it's quite small dots it is creating quite a larger pattern and that makes it just work but you have to be careful that things don't just disintegrate and become totally mushy in a competition like this another thing that I did was to cover up certain bright things I put in that went flat this is a beautiful little articulate pattern if you look closely at it based on African beads but because it was so dark it stood out and so I've taken that out what else I like that oh this is another one that was interesting I love this big bold piece of marbling that I bought in a in Houston at one of the markets but because it was so strong the light areas I had to do something about that so here you can see I've added little black spots to make that integrate into the composition so now you can just look at the whole thing without me in front of it and see what fun it is to create a design like this I think is just playing with just one kind of textural idea and doing so many variations on it but keeping it close enough in tone that it becomes whole integrated mass and keeps you looking the main thing I think I want in a quilt is to not have you figure it out in the first five minutes of looking at it like a stark red and white quilt that is just very readable you look at something like this because you keep finding mysterious little corners I think my last thought on this composition is that this is a once-off experiment that I just thought I would share with you it's using a lot of my stash things from the past because it takes a collection of elements to put together that all have the same mood in the same level of contrast now you can't really get that out of a current collection anywhere I don't think so this is just an experiment if you want to try it start collecting and you could do it in any kind of color way you could do it all in reds or blues or something like that it could be quite exciting there are six inch square so that's the only thing to remember and have fun wait you

Channel: Kaffe Fassett Studio

Views: 33,734

Rating: 4.9292517 out of 5

Keywords: Aboriginal, quilt design, quilting, quilt, kaffe fassett, freespirit fabrics, brandon mably, black and white, monochrome, fabrics, freespirit

Id: paAhIGLQXcM

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2019