Creating Art Quilts

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 gonna start with a painting. This painting's called "Petal 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'll look closely I love these fabrics, particularly the batiks. I use batiks all 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. All right, so let's start with our second example of our inspiration piece. This painting is called "June Blooms", and this is the quilt that came out of the inspiration piece. Now, the thing I liked 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 a 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, a middle ground, and a background, which is something that I put into, that concept I use in all of my art quilts, because it gives a sense of depth, and kinda 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 van Gogh's starry night painting. So 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.

The first step being, I always start with a really small drawing, we call it a thumbnail sketch. This one's about a 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 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 gonna 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 darks to the lightest lights, and include all of that range of values in any piece 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 make, 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 into 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 gonna 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 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 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 gonna 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 gonna have an overlap. And you're going to need that when you stitch down your pieces. I use a zigzag stitch, usually is my favorite stitch for the edge stitching here. And you could use any kind of decorative stitch that you wish.

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, 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.

It's 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 if you use a fabric glue, just be sure that you have to 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 spiky fern shapes.

And then I finished off with bringing in some more color with these little 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 gonna 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 borders, which ended up, I went a little bit crazy with that, but that was fun. You can see here are 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 gonna 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.