Getting Creative with Quilt Patterns

You may not think you're a designer, or even very creative--and I'm betting you're wrong about that!  Quilters always put their own spin on the quilts they make, whether it's switching out colors or fabrics or tweaking a pattern a bit.

Monday is Design day at the Spinster, though I admit that I've been a little behind on that.   A lot of prep is on my agenda for the day but I wanted to still do a little bit of creative thinking on DD.  I've had some ideas for tweaking the "Cornered" pattern and I think it will be a decent example of how some simple changes in an existing pattern can make it creatively your own.

When I first designed Cornered, I pictured it as a quilt of solids, mostly in the pastel ranges.  I still like the idea, actually, and one fine day I'm going to make it.

When I saw Moda's "Calypso" collection, though, I fell in love with it.  (It was a cold, gloomy day, which didn't hurt; I needed some cheer.)  The pattern uses 10" squares and 2-1/2" strips so I
came home from Cut Up and Quilt with both.

I put together a block.  My left eyeball started to twitch.  Back to the drawing board.

I thought about using a solid to set off the print fabric, without competing with it.  But, to use the print strips (not enough of that gorgeous fabric), or the 10" squares. (But why waste those colorful strips?)  In short, I still wanted to use both the squares and the strips--the fabric was so wonderful.

The solution was to swap out solids and prints, with half the blocks having a solid background and print strips, and the other half having print background and solid strips.   The most obvious option was to alternate the types of blocks, and that might still be a reasonable design but I decided on more of a medallion effect.

I like the way the strips in the center weave in and out, don't you?  This was the pattern sample.


Because I like the way the strips weave in and out on the solid background, and because I have a couple bins full of scrap/leftover 2-1/2" strips in my stash, I thought it might be interesting to do a scrap version.  I made 4 blocks today, and that's not enough to see the weaving effect.  I'm not sure yet how I feel about it, but I'll keep moving along with it, and see where it takes me with more scraps.

I'm using muslin as the background, but you could certainly use neutral scraps.  At least, *I* could use scraps, coming out of the bins of neutral scraps.  :-)


How would you adapt the pattern for yourself?

Design Inspiration

Last night, as I was busy lying awake with all sorts of things running around in my head, I decided I'd rather have quilt things *playing*' around in my head and I turned to my insomnia contract:  come up with six quilt design ideas.  (The contract also includes a clause that I need not ever make the designs, not that they are full thought out.  Often, by the next morning, they don't looks quite as good in my mind as they did at 2:30 a.m.  And, frankly, it's not unknown for number 6 to be pure desperation design.  Maybe that could be a new trend in quilts.)

Here are the 6 ideas from last night--these are all modern, in my head:
1) Outside, looking in
2) The hand you're dealt
3) Metered
4) Emergence

And, OK, I don't remember the other two.  Did I mention desperation?  Apparently my brain won't even acknowledge that it came up with the other two.  I do keep my design journal next to my bed but I was too lazy to turn on the light and write them down. 

Well, swell, but why did I bring all of this up?  I've been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about what inspires design ideas for me.  After completing my contract, I turned to thinking about what inspired those idea. And I'm interested in what inspires others.

I've written before about some of the ways I think of designs for quilts:  combining traditional designs and tweaking, looking at the world around me, etc. etc., etc.  But I'm thinking more about details of what inspires me.  (I'm a little worried that if I analyze it too rigorously it won't be inspiration any longer, but calculation.  So I won't go too deeply!)

One of my favorite ways is to look at design in other art forms, from graphic design to packaging to photography to whatever.   Sometimes for my weekly "art date" I sit down with Pinterest and just browse through the "design" pins.   I don't fine inspiration in all the pins, and I would never use someone else's design work but I may find an idea for a quilt in the colors of something, or a piece of a shape, or the balance of a design.   Last night, while browsing Pinterest "design" I found at least 3 pins with shapes that showed up, in somewhat altered form, in the above ideas.

Nature is a constant source of inspiration and, since it is all around us, all the time, it's a living design journal.   A mother robin, who failed miserably at trying to build a nest over my front porch light (she gave it a game try for two solid weeks), finally built it in a yew outside my front door.  I'm a little more worried about her little babies in this lower, more vulnerable position but it did give me an opportunity to get a better photo of the nest.

 The immediate inspiration for me, here, is color.  The gray-ish browns, the shades of green, that amazing blue, even the winter kill gold, would be wonderful in a quilt.  Shapes are also getting my creative brain moving--the random lengths and sizes of the nest twigs, the shape of the eggs, the long and narrow needles--any or all of the may end up in a design, whether together or in completely different designs and quilts.

More about the color pallette in the next post.

What inspires you?

The habit of creating

Creativity has been a focus for me over the past couple of years:  reading, thinking, taking classes, practicing.  I've learned more about creativity and will be continuing to learn.   I've just started reading 'The Creative Habit" by choreographer Twyla Tharp.  She writes about creative people and how they put themselves into the creative flow--what I would think of as a "trigger."  For a dancer it might be the morning workout, for a writer it might be walks in nature, or whatever tells the mind and soul that it's time to open up ad let the creativity flow.

It takes me a while to develop new habits (though not quite as long as breaking old ones) so I'm not there yet, but I'm working on forming a creative habit in the morning--and morning sometimes means 3 a.m.  My morning routine includes some stretching exercises but now I keep my sketch book on the bedside table, and before I'm up to do the exercises (and still stumble into the shower) I welcome the day and then steer my mind to the creative flow to come up with one quilt design idea, which then goes into my sketch book.  I may not ever make that quilt, but then again I might, and the more ideas to choose from when it comes time to sit down and sew, the better.   What excites my quilting imagination today may not interest me at all next week, or what seems pretty marginal today might inspire me--or a new idea--tomorrow.

Because I'm of a certain age, I spend a lot of time awake during the night and now I've started to challenge myself during those times.  When my mind starts the infinite loop of worrying about one thing or another (don't things always seem worse at night?) I now challenge myself to come up with 6 new quilt design ideas; the focus of my brain switches off the worry and to something more comforting.  Now, I'm not saying that all of my 3 a.m. ideas seem quite as worthy in the morning, but I have designed some interesting things in the pre-dawn hours.    I have a choice at 6 a.m., then:  choose one of the six ideas to go into the sketch book, or I can enter the list of 6 ideas into the sketchbook in lieu of the one, daily design.

So far, it's working pretty well.  I missed it yesterday morning (did I mention that it takes me awhile to develop a new habit?) but my sketch book is growing quickly and, better still, I start the day with creativity flowing, and that can only be good for the rest of my day.

Do you have a creative habit?  What gets your creativity flowing?

Random block thoughts

It's not what you're probably thinking.   It isn't random thoughts about blocks, but thoughts about a random block.   As a part of a creativity exercise, with permission to just play and be silly, I decided to try something that I've been thinking about for some time--or a bit of a variation.  (I'll try the original idea some day; it just wasn't today.) 

  I pulled out the 6 books that are sitting on top of my quilting bookshelves, opened them up and pulled out a step from one of the blocks.  Truthfully it wasn't completely random because steps that are very specific to a particular block wouldn't work, but general technique steps.    I chose which one would be most appropriate for the first step, then randomly numbered the others.   And those became the instructions for building 4 blocks.

1) Make a string block (or, 4 blocks)
2) Stack them, and make 3 vertical-ish cuts; shuffle each section, and sew.  Square up
3) Cut diagonally, corner to corner, and make half-square triangles.
4) Using fold and flip method, add triangles to opposite corners
5) Sew 4 blocks together, with sashing between
6) Twist the blocks

So, I raided my bin (confession time: ONE of the bins) with strips and strings, waiting to be sorted some day (wink, wink)

and selected greens and browns to start piecing.

When I had pieced enough strips to make squares from the piecing, I squared them up to 11-1/2" (the largest that I could get out of all 4 blocks.)

 

After stacking them, I did the vertical-ish cuts and shuffled them so each block would have 4 different sections.

Here are completed blocks.  

I'd like to tell you that I then went on to the next step but I liked these so much that I quit!  It turns out that this is going to be a good technique for a quilt concept that has been rolling around in my head for several months now.    Maybe one day soon I'll go on with the other 4 steps.  Or maybe I'll start with plain squares, rather than strip pieced.  Or maybe I'll start with a 9-patch, or maybe....

So many ideas, so little time.....

 

 

Cross-Pollenated Creativity

Today I had an "aha!" moment on a writing project, turning it into much more.  My chosen project as part of my Kaizen Muse Creativity Coach training is to write a book (or article, depending on how it all turns out) based on some of  my Dad's stories about his experiences growing up.  The first story/experience is about helping to wire the farmhouses around the town where he drew up, in 1938.  It's been evolving in my head, and had developed into an appreciative comparison of his growing-up years, without electricity, and my life, which was surrounded by electricity and conveniences therefrom.

So, the cross-pollenation happened today while I was watching a quilting video, and it hit me:  this is history, I'm a quilter (in addition to a writer, albeit amateur).....this is perfect for an appreciative quilt comparison, too.   I can research traditional quilt blocks that help to tell the stories of Dad's life, but also design modern, art quilts that express them, too:  representing his era, and mine.  Each informs the other.  And the book just changed and expanded, better than it would have been without that cross-pollenation.

And so, it seems to me, it is with arts.  They aren't ideated (is that a word?) or created in a vacuum, away from other arts and experiences.  Artists find inspiration in so many different places and objects and experiences, including other art forms.  Whether you consider yourself to be an artist in "just" one form, or you dabble in many, generations of artists in countless media and forms contribute to  the world's experiences, and inform everyone's artistic ventures.

When I am knitting or crocheting, the patterns and colors and textures become a part of my creative body of work and will no doubt appear, in some form, in quilting or in writing or spinning or even developing slides for presentations and classes I do for work.  When I see a painting in a gallery or on the web, my brain files away my impressions and memorable aspects.  I'll never copy that painting but a color combination, or a texture or general impression will become a part of me and my creative life.  Nature's art is a constant inspiration, and my gardening brings more to the art party.

The many wonderful friends I have made through dabbling in various arts also inform and enrich my creative life, in more ways than I could describe.   You all know what I mean.

No work of art (and whether we are making a quilt or knitting a scarf or writing a book, it IS art) is born out of nothing.    It is all of pieces of everything we see, learn, and experience.  What a glorious life we have, surrounded by inspiration, waiting to feed our creativity.

Goldilocks in My Project World

I have projects.  Lots and lots of projects, across all manner of arts and crafts--spinning, weaving, knitting, crocheting, bobbin lace, scrapbooking, and especially mini-scrapbooking.  If you are reading this there is a fair chance that you have a wealth of projects, too.

Here are some of my reasons for having so many projects; see if you own any of these, yourself:

 1)  A 2 year old has nothing on me for attention span, and I can't blame the modern, digital, soundbytes world for it.  I know that's the popular theory but I've always had a short attention span.  Apparently, I am not alone in that.

2) One of my great passions is for learning; I just like learning new things.  Once I've learned something, I've been-there-done-that and am ready for the next thing to learn.   I'm not talking about learning the macro, like "quilting" or "spinning" (though I suffer from that, too) but a particular technique, or pattern, or material.

3) I really do start out planning to finish everything but, in spite of all those good intentions I work on something for awhile and then get bored.   And get distracted.  ("Oooo!  Sparkly things!")  I suppose, if you wanted to be unkind, you could call it a lack of focus.

 I know artists who finish a project before they start a new one.  I admire them for that, I am even a tiny bit jealous and I'm happy that that works for them--but I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me. 
There are benefits to having a treasure trove of projects from which to choose--at least for me:

a)  I add to my tool kit of techniques and skills, in a shorter period of time.  Granted, I don't practice most of them enough to reach 100% perfection but, to be honest, I don't need to reach perfection in all of them.  Some of them I learn and practice enough to know how they work, or to know that it isn't a technique I want to continue.

b) Those things that I don't perfect are still tucked away in the back of my creative brain, dormant until some point at which they might raise their hands to be used in a project that hasn't even been conceived yet.  Will some things lie dormant forever?  Probably, but that's OK because the percentage of those that will be used later is much higher.

c) Even if I never use a technique or skills, as is, it's a larger repertoire for adaptation. Just one little change can make it perfect for a new project or idea. And from there, there will likely be another change....or two....  (It may end up looking nothing at all like the original.  But that's OK;  in fact, that's great!)

d) It's all part of letting creativity have its way in my brain, and through my hands.  And that is better than OK, that's what it's all about.  End products are nice, and I will always want to finish some things, but I'm coming to realize that the creative process is at least as important, if not more so, than the end product.   If your livelihood depends on end product you may have to focus more on that but why not have some fun along the way--maybe the stress of production need will be eased a bit if you feed your creative soul all along the way.   If you do need product for your business, what do you think?  How do you feed your creativity?)

e) Multiple projects "feed" off each other in my creativity.  It's true, sometimes I put something aside because it has started to bore me to tears but, even when I do that, it often finds its way back--something for my hands to work on while my creativity plays around in my head, or a different texture or skill is just what the more current project needs, or what I need for a break.

So, is this all just rationalization for a short attention span?  I used to think so, but I don't any longer.  And what about Goldilocks?    The challenge, for me, is to find the right number of projects.

If there are too many I'm in danger of being overwhelmed with all that is waiting, unfinished, for me. I  also have chosen some creative endeavors that are not inexpensive, especially if you want to use good materials.  And you almost have to use good materials because life's too short to spend a long time on a project that isn't going to acceptable in the end, right?  But I don't have an unlimited budget so too many projects means a better chance that really fine materials are languishing in a closet, and that's a shame.  (So, re-purposing of materials is important.)

If there are too few projects everything feels stunted and creative flow is blocked.  I get fidgety.  Last night I finished a knitted lace scarf and already I'm trawling around for another.  Oh, I have plenty of UFOs, of course, but I'm itching--literally (or is it twitching?) for something new.

What is "just right" for the number of projects?  I'm not sure I've found the perfect balance yet for me.  But that's OK.  :-)  I've renamed my UFOs to AFOs (Almost Finished Objects)--no matter how close to, or far from, finished they are.  They're just perfect, wherever they're at in completion terms.

What's right for you?