Craft Nectar

To the casual observer some of our quilts look pretty straight forward and easy to design. The trained eye, however, notices the subtle differences in proportions and in the use of negative space. Negative space is the the area around a motif or the space between the things that really stand out. In this quilt the negative spaces are the white diamonds and dashes found between the blue and green wedges. Once you look for them the quilt takes on a totally different look. Those magical shapes give the quilt an added bit of visual interest and open up a world that many people never notice.

You know about the negative space in the FedEx logo right? That logo that you’ve seen 1,000 times, right?

Have you ever noticed the elegant arrow between the “E” and the “x”? That wasn’t an accident. That’s some masterful use of negative space. If negative space is a new concept to you, try looking for beautiful uses of it in graphic design or in tile patterns or paintings or packaging. Understanding the concept of negative space helps you understand why some fabrics are easier to work with than others and helps you choose fabrics more easily.

Mint Julep is a calm quilt by design but could become a wild and crazy mix of bright patterns as long as you kept them within a dark or light value so the transparency band reads. I add this because some readers have asked about how to make transparencies without going out to buy a ton of new fabric. You can use whatever you have on hand, is my guess. You’ll just need to sort it by value so the transparency works. You don’t need a lot of yardage to make a compelling transparency, you just need a little bit of the right value.

And yes, I know that you’ll never look at a FedEx truck the same way again. That’s what great design does. It makes everything you look at a little bit more interesting.

And I’ve got to tell you about that green sofa that we used in the photo shoot. I bought that Mid-Century Modern gem for $100 off eBay from someone in North Carolina. It was covered in the original nubby, cigarette-smoke-infused wool from circa 1963. It was shipped to Chicago on the belly of a Greyhound bus for a song. It reeked of cigarette smoke so much that we kept it on our sun porch until the upholsterer could come to pick it up. It’s slim and trim, makes every room it’s in look bigger because it doesn’t have a skirt and its arms are slender. And always looks neat while still being comfortable. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

We had another design in mind for the last quilt that was to be included in Transparency Quilts. The final photo shoot was a few days away and I approached Bill, as I am known to do, at the last minute suggesting that we audition another quilt for the book. I had an eclectic stack of fabrics in my hand and told him that I wanted to see how many different genres of fabric we could put together without looking chaotic. We decided that if we took out all of the saturated ones and pastels that it might look cohesive. We auditioned dozens and dozens of fabrics before we came up with this bunch. There’s Amy Butler next to a primitive batik next to William Morris. We titled it Small World and it became one of our favorites. It was the most fun we had had choosing fabrics in a long time. We were delighted when the editors at C&T chose Small World for the back cover of the book.

“I think we need to go even bigger with this eclectic idea and submit something to American Patchwork & Quilting,” I suggested. Without missing a beat Bill was pulling handfuls of fabric out of our stash and laying them out on the table. In the end, we cut up 36 fat eighths for this quilt and it has become one of a favorite as well.

Photo used with permission from American Patchwork & Quilting ©2011 Meredith Corporation, all rights reserved

The wonderful editors at American Patchwork and Quilting decided to put this quilt entitled Fabric Fusion on the cover of some of their newsstand issues (if you’re a subscriber, you got the other cover) and we have been deluged with orders for kits.

Part of what I love about both of these quilts is that they both remind me of that great Louis Armstrong quote about music: “There are two kinds of music, the good and the bad. We feel that way about fabric. There are lots of fabrics that are supposed to be for modern quilts that I find very difficult to use. Conversely, many Civil War reproduction fabrics that are often overlooked by modern quilters have soft colors that are a welcome foil to all of the brights out there.

Both of these quilts have prints, plaids, batiks, primitives, tone-on-tones, reproduction fabrics and large-scale prints in them. Our hope is that quilters will rethink some of their assumptions about what goes with what and be able to see new possibilities for fabrics that are already in their stashes but they haven’t been sure how to use. These collections of fabrics were carefully thought out but with a little thought and editing, you could probably find some unexpected combinations of your own among those in your stash.

So do tell. What fabrics are in your stash that you want to use but aren’t sure how to use?