A Pretty Little Pouch

Well, pretty by my standards anyway. I really love this box-style pouch shape, so cute. I also LOVE the Ruby Star Rising fabric. I paired it with linen and kona solids in aquas and yellows to compliment the Ruby colors. I followed this tutorial for the pouch. It's fully lined. I hope my partner in the swap likes it too!

It's a gorgeous, sunny day here in P-town. I think I'll try to go soak some of it up before it disappears. Cheers all!

Project Modern Challenge 2

Woah, I can hardly believe it! My yellow quilt is one of the winners of Project Modern Challenge 2! I'm super excited! All of the entries in the flickr group look amazing, so I'm really surprised I'm one of the chosen 3. Here is what I submitted:

This quilt measures 62"x50"

This quilt is called "Yellow Quilt". I was inspired by a very bold, graphic photograph I came across of a tile pattern on the side of a building. I had been wanting to make a quilt for our brown and yellow family room, so I decided to take this image and translate it into a yellow quilt. This is a color that I have not worked with much and I wanted to really challenge myself. My process started with pulling the original photo into a CAD program and drafting a pattern for the quilt over the photo. I then took the drawing and 'colored' it with several different schemes in Illustrator until I came up with one I liked. With my color scheme in hand I ordered 10 different kona solids from the yellow palette. I didn't end up using all of the solids, I really wanted to add some prints for a bit more of the fun, modern feeling that I was going for. It was really hard to find fabrics that gave me the feeling I wanted and were truly monochromatic. The solids range from the palest wheat-yellow to a deep ochre, and the prints are all yellow on yellow and simple dots. It was really fun and challenging to make a quilt with a limited palette like this, and it has given me a lot of confidence that I can step out of my comfort zone and come up with an end result that I am really proud of.

I'm just still kind of blown away and in shock. Thanks Malka (The Challenge 2 Judge)!

A Process Post

So I made a monochromatic quilt for Project Modern Challenge #2. I thought I'd give you all a little insight into how crazy my process is when designing a quilt. Remember that I was trained as an Architect and not in using textiles in any way. So this whole process just seems normal to me - even though looking at it all spelled out it seems a bit insane and ridiculous.

It all started with a really cool picture that I happened upon on flickr while searching for cool pics of Architecture. This is the picture. I did not take this photo, I just found it online.

I really like the movement in this pic and thought it'd make a great quilt - a great monochromatic quilt. So my first move was to draft it up in AutoCAD. I draft EVERYTHING up in AutoCAD. I'm weird that way. This is what I came up with:
Pretty do-able for a quilt, 29 rows made up of little pieces. Then I imported the file into Illustrator and colored it. I decided on yellow, because we have a brownish room in need of a yellow quilt. This is what I came up with next:


I really fell in love with the yellow image and was highly motivated to keep going by this point. So my next move was to separate all the rows out and dimension each piece for cutting. This terribly dull and boring image was what I came up with next:

I used this as my cutting guide to cut out 1 row at a time. I was afraid to cut anymore than that for fear of getting pieces mixed up. Oy, it took awhile to get all of the rows made up, and i did make a few mistakes in the process and ended up ripping some pieces out. I know, this is all the boring part, I'll show you the finished product in my next post. How do you guys go from idea to cutting fabric? Anyone else feel the need to put everything into the computer before cutting? Cheers, Jill