[ Lost in the Landscape ]

botanical fabrics and quilts

One of our fab­u­lous wed­ding presents was the offer to make us a quilt. We could pick the design. We could pick the fab­rics. How gen­er­ous was that?

That got me look­ing at fab­rics in a totally dif­fer­ent way. One of the things I real­ized was how many of the designs had botan­i­cal ori­gins. Here are just a few of the plant-based ones that I found inter­est­ing. Some are fairly real­is­tic, some are so styl­ized that you have to look hard to see the botanical-ness of the inspi­ra­tion. But no mat­ter how abstracted from the orig­i­nal, the gar­den lives on in the fabric.

And after por­ing through all the fab­ric choices there was the issue of the design. There were so many options…traditional quilts, dou­ble wed­ding rings, strip and curves designs, water­color quilts…books and books filled with inter­est­ing designs. And then I ran across the online cat­a­log of the 2002 Quilt Visions quilt exhi­bi­tion at the Ocean­side Museum of Art here in San Diego County.

Liz Axford. Bam­boo Boo­gie Woo­gie I,60″ x 44″, hand-dyed cot­tons, machine pieced, machine quilted. [ source ]

The quilt looked like it wouldn’t be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult to piece. How­ever, being an art quilt, it had lots of over-the-top labor-intensive details going on with it…stuff that to me looks like there’s hand dye­ing and pos­si­bly hand-printing involved. Unfor­tu­nately, the museum site didn’t list the specifics. And they didn’t even list the artist! I did see the print cat­a­log of this show, and I’ll post the artist as soon as I can research who she was. [Note: Thanks to Linda, I’ve got the cat­a­log in my hands, and I’ve now been able to fill in some of the infor­ma­tion the web­site lacked.] I found it inter­est­ing that the brief writeup in the cat­a­log said that she had been inspired by bam­boo, and that she was a mem­ber of the Inter­na­tional Bam­boo Society–You can really that influ­ence in her design.

For­tu­nately, what I was most inter­ested in was the con­struc­tion method. Commonly-available fab­rics could lend a sense of the orig­i­nal but also take the design into dif­fer­ent ter­ri­tory. I played with dif­fer­ent fab­rics com­bi­na­tions and ended up with a ten­ta­tive first draft selec­tion of thir­teen fab­rics, includ­ing two of the ones pic­tured above. And play­ing with the basic con­struc­tion method and enlarg­ing it I came up with the Pho­to­shopped mockup below.

At this point I’m just play­ing. I sus­pect that almost everyone’s first quilt attempts may not have a lot of sub­tlety to them, and I worry that this is a lit­tle that way. But like I said this is just a work­ing draft that will prob­a­bly change when looked at by a sea­soned quil­ter. What’s fairly easy to do on screen may be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult in real quilt­ing life. And these are fab­rics thrown together from look­ing at them online. I’m sure that actu­ally select­ing real-life fab­rics will change the result.

But gosh all this is so much fun–You can eas­ily see why quilt­ing is a $3.3 billion-a-year industry!

September 01 2008 04:41 am | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: botanical designs • fabrics • inspired by nature • quilts

7 Responses to “botanical fabrics and quilts”

1. Nancy Bond on 01 Sep 2008 at 9:11 am #

   I enjoy quilt­ing and I like the artis­tic design you chose to high­light. It wouldn’t be dif­fi­cult to piece, but as you men­tioned, most of the work is in the actual quilt­ing of the piece and the fin­ish­ing. This would be stun­ning, though. What a won­der­ful gift!

2. Shibaguyz on 01 Sep 2008 at 10:13 am #

   Jason sews and I knit/crochet… we both want to quilt this win­ter but never quite get around to it. Now you’ve inspired us and we’re think­ing we’ll have to get out to the fab­ric stores.

3. lostlandscape on 01 Sep 2008 at 7:56 pm #

   Nancy–Thanks for your com­ments about the rel­a­tive difficulty/ease of mak­ing this quilt. There were lots of inter­est­ing designs that looked like even more work, at least in the piec­ing stage.

   Shibaguyz–What a great col­lab­o­ra­tive project a quilt can be for you, espe­cially as the sea­son turns dark and rainy. Have a great time shop­ping. There’s a local quilt­ing store that I’m dying to try out. Sounds like I’d be able to spend most of an after­noon there…

4. Greg on 01 Sep 2008 at 8:53 pm #

   At work, espe­cially while staffing the buf­fets, I get to see a lot of peo­ples’ cloth­ing and am always a lit­tle tick­led at all the flo­ral patterns/ inspi­ra­tions we choose to adorn our­selves as we cel­e­brate spe­cial occa­sions. (You’d almost get the impres­sion we were a cul­ture that val­ued nature, he mused wryly.)

   You’re flirt­ing with some lovely fab­rics there (well, pattern-wise…I’ll have to wait ’til I’m on the com­puter at work to speak about your col­ors), and the bam­boo quilt is just beau­ti­ful! I look for­ward to hear­ing more about this project…I am sur­pris­ingly intrigued.

5. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » more on quilts and nature on 03 Sep 2008 at 4:27 am #

   […] in my very hands the exhi­bi­tion cat­a­log to the Quilt Visions 2002 show. This is the show that had a bamboo-based quilt design that I really liked. Look­ing through the cat­a­log I found a bunch of other quilts based on nature […]

6. Greg on 03 Sep 2008 at 8:01 am #

   I really like those last two fab­ric swatches, now that I can see them in proper col­ors, and it seems to me the two play very nicely together!

7. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » the quilt’s progress on 20 Nov 2008 at 2:59 am #

   […] wrote ear­lier about Linda offer­ing to make a wed­ding gift of a quilt for John and me. I got word last week that […]

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