Untitled Darned Quilt II

Feeling very pressed for time as I prepared for teaching my classes at the upcoming Cotton-by-Post “Quilts of East Africa” festival in Ailsa Craig, Canada, followed by teaching classes at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas at the end of this month, I nevertheless felt the need to do something creative for myself.

What better project than to make a new Darned Quilt?

Armed with three rolls of gradation fabrics I purchased recently from Amafu Hand Dyes during the South African National Quilt Festival in Johannesburg, it did not take me long to reach for one of those luscious bundles of color and leap into action! I quickly constructed a background with the help of some lovely coppery orange rayon “art silk” embroidery thread. But, oopsie! The background came out a bit bent!!

Background for a Darned Quilt

Some quilters would think the crookedness of this piece was a mistake. Seeking a new and different way to interpret the challenge of darned quilting, I see it rather as an opportunity!

I faced such a situation once before in the creation of my art quilt, “Rhythms,” and discovered then a useful way to turn what appears to be a negative state of affairs into a positive one. Here’s how you let an error inform you about a way forward!

Applying simple principles of plane geometry, I knew that that the edges of my fabrics were parallel. Going crooked in the construction of this background resulted in a piece of material whose two long outer edges were essentially parallel, too. By cutting apart the background with a straight line somewhere in the middle of the piece, I could shift the bottom of the background to the top of it. That would give me a background that had straight and parallel outer edges as shown in the edited digital photograph mock-up.

Darned Quilt II Mock-up

Now, the challenge is how best to assemble these two panels in a way that will conceal the join effectively, develop the composition of the design as it moves the work forward, and give a most unexpected result. Before I make this cut, though, I must first decide how best further to enhance the background material.

There is this interesting striped fabric I’ve been hoarding in my stash. It echoes beautifully the colors and line quality of the Darned Quilt background, so I feel I must add it to the piece. I shall plan my embellishments for the background to repeat the colors found in the stripe.

Untitled Darned Quilt II by Dena Crain

Notice the green, beige and black in the fabric; I will select embellishments that pick up on those colors. As I do so, I am very much aware of the need to add both light and dark value contrasts to the work. This photo makes the material look as if it also contains pale turquoise, but there is none present in the fabric itself. That accident of computer imagery makes me wonder whether pale turquoise might well find its way into the finished Darned Quilt!

That is about as far as I got in one afternoon. Today I hope to do the embellishing and perhaps get as far as making the cut. I have a few ideas in mind for how to join the two panels together, but I will save those for my next work in progress journal entry.

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Ok, so yesterday I decided to play around with digital photography editing again. The first decision I made was to rotate the background to produce a vertical orientation. I like this better than running the background crosswise. Then, with the help of Adobe PhotoShop Elements, I cut up my background on my computer screen. What follows is the progression of cuts and shifts. You can use the comments form below to tell me which one you prefer, if you like, but only if you can clearly say WHY? As you get to know me better, you will realize that’s my favorite question – WHY? Anyway, here we go:

Step 1: First cut straightens the design's long outer edges

You might already realize that I’m thinking in terms of filling in the spaces between cuts with the feature fabric shown above. The primary design issue for it will be which way to run the stripes, but I’m already leaning in favor of cutting on the crosswise grain line, so the wavy lines in the background will carry on across the striped insertions between cut panels of background. For now, however, let’s carry on:

Step 2: Second cut balances the first one

Step 3: Third cut breaks symmetry

From this point on, I began rotating sections of the background so I could see the effects. What do you think?

Step 4: Large section rotated

Step 5: A new rotation

Finally, I played around some more with cutting and rotating, just to see what might happen.

A fourth cut expands the width of the quilt

Step 6: A fourth cut expands quilt's width

Step 7: Alternating rotations produce more interest

As you can see, this has been an interesting experiment in design, and even as I write, I still have not yet actually cut into my background panel.

Digital photography editing is such a powerful tool for artists and designers! You can also imagine that I might well continue cutting and shifting, playing with different options. Big question: When is enough, enough? When does a design become overworked?

Students often ask me this question, and my reply is usually “When you can’t think of anything else to do that makes the image or composition any better than it already is.”

We get into difficulty when we keep adding elements to a design that are intended to correct for some previous fault, without actually having that result. Say, for example, you put a large circle into your design, cut from some color or value that doesn’t belong. You do not recognize immediately that the shape does not fit into the design, probably because your mind has already moved on to some other matter. You begin adding other elements to make the design better, but nothing you do seems to help.

Failing to take time to consider what is the root cause of the problem, you continue to add new elements in an increasingly desperate attempt to pull the work together. Instead, you cause it to fail, to become overworked.

The solution? When you get that first inkling of fear that the design is going astray – stop! Do nothing else until you re-examine all your prior steps. Locate whatever element or quality does not fit comfortably in the design and eliminate it.

You should immediately feel better about the design. If you don’t, then you probably eliminated the wrong thing; go back and try again. When you finally succeed in removing the culprit from your work, you will immediately feel much better, intuitively sensing that you made the right decision and the work can move forward again.

Now, back to my Darned Quilt background panel. The foregoing exercise in digital photography editing has served its purpose. It has allowed me better to understand in advance the results of possible actions I may take with this work. Because of this experience, I have decided that the work will move forward in a slightly different direction than what my photo mock-ups show. I now have it in mind to work with two feature fabrics, and to cut and shift in such a manner as to permit their strips to cross here and there. Such a step will add complexity to the work and make it more interesting.

In the meantime, however, I have embellished the background. It now looks like this: