Mosaic Quilts & Mosaic Quilt Patterns

As a modern quilter and teacher, one of the things that I like to impart to my students is that pretty much anything goes with fabric and quilting. You can do whatever it is you want to do, as long as you can get the results that you're looking for. I like to have a lot of fun when I'm playing with fabric, and there are lots of ways to do that. One of my favorite ways is not to piece. Piecing can be very, very, very taxing for me, so I like to do things that don't require piecing.

And one of my favorite new things is making mosaics. Now, I'm not much of a iron-on adhesive type of applique girl, but I do use iron-on adhesive when I make the mosaics that I make. It can be a lot of fun and pretty fast, but what's really, really neat is that you can make anything. You can do something that's figurative or you can do something that's very, very abstract. This piece is made by my studio mate, Tamara Leberer, and it's a very abstract mosaic.

Mosaics simply are pieces of fabric that are cut apart so that you can reveal some of the background fabric and let it come through. They're kind of based on stained glass, and often black is the background. They are pretty simple and straightforward. Once you've got your iron-on adhesive on the back of your fabric, you're kind of good to go. You can free form cut or you can draw beforehand, and the quilting is really simple, too.

So let me show you the method that I use when I do these. I start with a drawing. So this is just an 8 by 10 piece of paper, and then I drew a heart first, and then I subdivided the heart and then I subdivided the background. Then I decided that the background was a little too much, so I put this kind of wavy square in there. After that, I numbered the sections according to what they were.

So the hearts have numbers and the letter H to go with it, and the backgrounds have numbers also. Then I just simply labeled these as line number one and line number two, and then this as the square. So I kind of knew where things were. Then I cut them up. So I cut the whole pattern up and placed those little pattern pieces behind the fabrics I plan on using.

Then I simply cut the fabric up and then recut it up. You can use a rotary cutter when you do this and you can use scissors. I use scissors because I like to do this while I'm watching TV. So I put a little table in front of me and the scissors and the fabrics that have the iron-on adhesive, and I kind of just cut at will and start. So, you can see here that there are quite a few small pieces in the heart itself because that's the focal point.

So everything here is small. I try to leave a somewhat equal amount of black showing in between each piece, but that's really not that important. When you get the whole thing done, if they're equal or not doesn't really matter. What really matters is if you can see the design, you have some nice negative space poking between the beautiful fabrics that you choose, and then you have some differentiation in the sizes that you use. So here in the background I chose to use much larger pieces, and we have a really linear aspect.

I changed the direction of those lines in each of the portions and really played with contrasts of color, keeping the colors in the heart warm and the colors in the negative space cool. And I think I put this together in probably about an hour, hour and a half. The quilting might take me another hour, so it's a really quick, fun project. So this next one that I'm working on, this was my original drawing, and I numbered the sections like I said before. I actually put in some of the division lines here so I could get an idea of how I wanted to separate one section from the next by how small I cut the little bits and pieces.

So here's my copy, and then here's my background. So the first thing I would do is choose my fabrics. And what I've chosen here is a group of really bright yellows and oranges and reds because this is a sun. And then, my background is going to be just these two blues, one like a turquoise blue, and one more of a blue-green. They all have an iron-on adhesive on the back.

And you can use just about any iron-on that you like. I like to use Fine Fuse because it doesn't make the fabric too stiff, but you could use Wonder Under, or even Steam-A-Seam. Some people really like Steam-A-Seam for this technique because it's slightly tacky or sticky and it stays in place for you. So the first thing I would do is cut out one of my units. Now, again, I'm not a perfectionist, so I really don't, how do I say this?, spend a lot of time on things being exact.

Then I'll choose a color that I want for that. And I'll probably use the reds and oranges in the bigger star points or sun points and use the yellows in the smaller because I'm gonna use those in the center, too. So I simply choose a yellow fabric that I want for that section, and I put the piece behind it with the numbers or the writing face up so that I know that my fabric is going to be face up after I've cut it out. You could pin this on, but again, it's just not a concern of mine. So I kind of just free form cut it with the pattern as a guide.

Now one of the things you have to kind of accept if you use this kind of loosey-goosey methodology here, is that it's not going to look exactly like it looked in your picture. So then, once I know where things are gonna go, and to be honest, I would have done all this center stuff first and then these outer things last, but I really wanted to just show you the positioning. Now I had decided, when I drew this, that I was going to just cut it into units and leave the top portion whole. So that's how I work. I'm simply going to cut off that top portion and then just start cutting units and letting them stay in place, so that I know what order they go in, which is pretty easy to figure out because they are descending in size.

And once that's done, you're gonna want a nice pair of tweezers because that's very, very helpful for placement. So once I know exactly where this goes, and I'm just gonna kind of eyeball and pretend that this is where it would be, you use your tweezers to place everything. And that way you can get your distances nice and see that equal amount of negative space behind. so you just kind of re-put together the unit that you cut apart. Now, if I wanted to do these in several colors, I could do that too, because I've got multiples of this same unit all the way around, and I could do each one in a different color and then swap out the colors in the stripes.

But because this is a textured fabric, or if you had a printed fabric, I like the print kind of remaining intact, even though there is space in between. Oops, upside down. So once I had that in place and I have the spacing fixed exactly how I want it, then I just iron it down. And once the whole thing's ironed down, then I'm ready to layer and stitch. So we can look at these two over here and discuss that quilting.

Now, if you're not a free motion quilter, you can still do this technique really easily. This main piece here, you can see that there's just stitching along two sides of every area, so there's no stitching across here. That's what the iron-on adhesive is for. It's gonna hold things in place for us. I tend to want a piece that has great longevity.

If I sell the piece, I want to know that it's not gonna fall apart. This quilting here on the edge is just enough for that to take place. So when I do this piece, I can simply come in here and stitch along each of those sides, anything that I know that I can put a continuous line on. Now, I wouldn't do these sides because that line is not continuous. You can see that the black moves.

Whereas the line this way is continuous, so that would be the way to quilt. You can quilt with matching thread or you can quilt with contrasting thread. Generally, I quilt with black thread. That way I don't have to change the thread color at all. And on something this size, I would quilt with my walking foot on because it's easy to turn it and I don't have to worry about taking all that bulk underneath the sewing machine.

So I hope you can see how fun and quick and easy doing mosaics can be, and that you'll give it a shot.