Susan Carlson Quilts: Polka Dodo Fabrics

hi this is Susan Carlson and welcome to my studio people always ask me how do I choose my fabrics and sometimes it's because of a theme and that theme can be something quite obvious or maybe it's just something that's kind of fun such as polka dots now what you're looking at is my quilt polka dodo it's a dodo bird that is made with all polka dot fabrics it came to mind as I was looking at my fabrics I saw a few polka dots in my stash and the two words came together polka dodo was completed thirteen years ago and when we wanted to update the blog post the quilt stories I wanted to pull some of the fabrics that I'd used now I've added a lot more fabric in those 13 years but I did find a few things for the body and then for some of the detail work too regardless of your subject matter or your theme you still want to have a nice range of values in your fabrics and having the the value range will help you create form in your subject matter so here are some light fabrics that will lend themselves well to highlights in the fabric in the subject matter and and now here kind of moves into some of the middle range fab values this fabric actually goes dark to light so I can kind of use that as a little bit of a blender and then these go into the darker values which will be the shadowed areas of my of my subject again helping to create that form when I first started thinking about using fabrics with dots in them I automatically thought of asked Australian Aboriginal fabrics and these have wonderful dots in them the the designs but as in the end it really turned out that I just used them in a few places and the most obvious ones were in the background actually now if you look up here this fabric was used for the border up on top and then over to the side I used this fabric here so I found this to me it was nice you know long verticals and it kind of had that border sort of idea had made a nice edge and I've picked an area there we go right in there that matches that right in there and I cut along the design and so then that design kind of worked into the the background area in a nice way and I did a similar bit on the other side and then down here it was kind of to me this was kind of like a landscape kind of a very abstract landscape behind the bird and I took some of this fabric and again cut along the design too just because it was so interesting and then also it helped merge especially down into this way when it kind of became more of a grassy sort of area and you can see some of there's another Australian Aboriginal print which I can't find anymore it may have been used up in the last 13 years but that was a really fun one to use as well so in most of my quilts one of the final touches that I give or an hour I consider is adding sheer fabrics and they come dark they come light they come sparkle and they come with polka dots on them and adding these sheer fabrics I think made a really big difference in the final look and personality of polka dodo so one thing I'm going to point out right away because it's one of the questions that I probably most often get asked as far as tore the whole quilt goes is how did I do the shadow underneath the bird and that's done with one piece of netting here's the netting that I used and let me just let see it let's put it right against there you can see that it's got polka dots in it of course and one piece of that just went over the background I tucked it underneath his feet and it gave a beautiful little shadow alright so let's just keep moving up on this bird under this the light-colored wing there's a lot of shadow and I used a lot of these black netting and tulle sorts of fabrics to go over the existing existing fabric pieces to add more detail more shadow to different areas now we've got this one here this has got some great little purple polka dots and you can see them showing up right in here it's actually more of an organza so it's more it's a little more opaque than some of these other things I'm going to be showing you but it adds a really nice dark shadow underneath that wing to help bring out that contrast and that value change now let's go let's see look over which let's see what I got coming next over here in the tail let's jump over to that this one here a little bit of kind of an iridescent silvery sparkle that again added nice contrast so that some of those feathers are receding and letting some of the lighter feathers come forward again giving form to it up here in the back the back of as the his back recedes it would get a little darker so I used actually a little bit of this here got some great sparkle in it and you can see that you know helped recede the as as form is going away from you you want it to get a little darker so that helps again give him a little form let some of this brighter stuff come forward this one is one of my all-time favorite pieces of of tool it's a it's a finer netting called tool so you can see it doesn't make a huge difference as far as shadowing or value change but it was just what I needed to kind of give a really nice definition to his lower beak separating it from that upper beak and over here you can see it added a little more interest this is the fabric that's right there under his neck and by itself you know it's a pretty little polka dot but when you put something on top of it like this it adds another layer and it kind of randomizes the polka dots so it's not you know as regular looking and then the last thing I want to point out as far as these dark valued sheer fabrics go is this one has just a little bit of sparkle in it again it's another favorite and I put that right up here to add a little sparkle on top of his beak like you know some sunlight is hitting and you can see there's also some other sparkle fabrics that are also added and those those golden sparkles are on the top to help bring the highlights out and let the darks recede netting and tulle also comes in white or other light colors and they can help add a little extra highlight or light value to an area such as the top of the head here's white on white like this one here this is another flock - wonderful little flocked spots polka dots and then here now is some iridescent polka dots that i've used here on the neck and then working its way back around into the highlights of his back alright so that's just a few of the fabrics that I used in the creation of polka dot oh I know that it was over a hundred different fabrics but it was really kind of fun pulling out some of these old friends and reminiscing a little bit

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Id: qVmp7pdtAd4

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019