The Woman With The Belted Dress x Two

This is a pattern I drew up and used for a several quilts a few years ago. I like the asymmetrical placement of the woman, the long hair and the halter dress. When I first designed it the woman was very thin. I thought "who looks like that?" and I added curves to the poor thing so she looked like a real woman! I added the belt because it was fun to accessorize and I can use more fabric!! That is the back story of this design.

Today I used this pattern to make these two wall hangings for two separate reasons. The quilt in the first photo is for a fundraiser in my community for the local free clinic. I want to contribute a donation to this worthy cause. The dress fabric is a hippy psychedelic fat quarter I picked up on my journeys and simply could not put it in another quilt where it seemed appropriate. But my lady could wear it as her dress! I have fallen in love with chevrons and this background fabric was a great contrast to the red hair and the dress. I added red glitter to the hair, glitter nail polish to the eyes and lips (makeup!) and rhinestones for jewelry. I did not add a flower to her hair because I felt there was enough activity with the patterns of the various fabrics and it would have looked too busy. I have to part with this quilt next week. :(

 

Quilt number two is for my local quilt guild's next challenge on using someone else's "ugly" fabric! I randomly picked the large paisley print. Not the worst fabric in the world but large! I liked the blue/orange combination and ran with that. I chose the paisley as the dress and had this great hand dyed orange velvet for the hair. I tried to downplay the paisley using value. I purposely selected a background that had low contrast to the paisley while boldly using orange for the hair, lips and belt. I embellished with an orange marker in the hair, rhinestones for jewelry and a felt flower button painted with blue nail polish with a bead in the center in the hair. The challenge isn't due until August but I was in the mood to work on it now. If any of my guild members see it before the reveal oh well!!

 

The two quilts look quite different to me based on fabric chose. I like the red haired woman quilt better because I prefer bright colors with lots of contrast  but I love the velvet hair too! Which one do yu prefer?

Another Color Wheel Obsession

I decided to have a central medallion and a center area of 24" in diameter. I chose a pattern I bought on www.crafty.com for $3.00 called New York Beauty/Curved Flying Geese. I originally saw the pattern on Pinterest. I downloaded the pattern and copied the foundation patterns using Carol Doak foundation paper in my printer. It went pretty fast because there was only four sections to work with.  Each section had 8 "spikes of color which means 32 colors in the color wheel. I found this great colorful plaid with black background which I used in the center of the New York Beauty block and the inner border to create the appropriate size of 24 1/2." I also bound the quilt with this fabric.

 Yes, I love the color wheel! I was doing color wheel themed art back in high school and it continues today. This quilt started in my 12 member block exchange group at Pine Street Quilts in Marinette, WI. Each moth one of us get to pick the block and fabrics and/or colors of the quilt. We have total control of the outcome which is nice sometimes! I chose my favorite block the Ohio Star, and since there is 12 basic colors on the color wheel I designated each one color (two fabrics) plus black for the background. I thought blue violet was the least enjoyable choice so I picked that color.

Then it was how to arrange the 12 Ohio Star blocks. Since yellow dominates over the purples I thought of the placement like the numbers on a clock. I put yellow where "1" would be and followed with the cool colors on the bottom and the warm colors on the top. I equate warm colors as visually lighter and cool colors as visually heavier. I am happy with my choice.

I quilted with black thread with lots of diagonals and stitch in the ditch around the spikes and geese. I did not add any embellishments because my plan for this quilt is a teaching tool for my color theory classes and it's about the color only.

The flying geese foundation piecing was very easy because all the lines are there to follow. Crafty is a pretty interesting websie-I encourage youe to check it out!!

My patterns are available for sale through my website!!

 This is my Line Drawing Portrait technique that was featured on Quilting Arts TV Season 1300 Episode 1303. The quilt in the second photo was also on the show. I decided to create a pattern for this technique and was also influenced by the Modern Quilt Movement. How can I "fit" portraits into the  modern movement? I saw lots of solid fabrics, chevrons, wavy lines paired with straight lines and I used my line drawing pattern and it took off. This pattern has all four versions in the directions. I have a new idea for a future pattern as well!!

Go to www.laurieceesay.com/patterns-for-sale.html to link into my Store. I am eternally grateful to my web designer, Ann Bridges, of ABM Web Solutions, LLC, Appleton WI for adding my store page. I can quilt but I am not a web designer-sometimes we have to surrender some tasks to people who are professionals instead of trying to figure it out which takes away from the fun part of designing quilts and sewing!!I also added my upcoming teaching schedule to my website. Yeah to Ann!!

This is the gray version!

This is the wavy version!

This is the chevron version

Art Quilts Around The World : Art Nouveau Reveal

My online art quilt group called Art Quilts Around the World has a two month challenge and January 31st is reveal day. The subject of this challenge is art nouveau. I googled art nouveau and learned what this type of art was classified as-curved lines, nature themes such as leaves, flowers, branches, women with long flowing hair, warm colors, pastels and lots of golds/browns. Our size requirements is small at 11.5" x 16.5" so lots of detailed curvy flowery stuff seemed too difficult to accomplish. I have been pinning (Pinterest) various images of the letter "L" since it's my initial and had this cute art nouveau version which I interpreted into fabric for my challenge piece.

I drew the design to the challenge size and was thinking positive and negative space. I created a single applique piece with lots of cutting which I fused to the pastel yellow batik background. The only other piece was the small eye/eyebrow. It was time consuming but that was my challenge. I have been using a lot of yellow in my latest quilts and I think it is because of winter and yellow is cheery to me!! I selected burgundy as the applique color because I wanted high contrast, the yellow batik had a hint of pink in it and, even though art nouveau has a lot of nature themes, I rejected forest green because it reminded me too much of my NFL football team the Green Bay Packers!!

I embellished the flowers in the woman's hair with gold rhinestones and the other  flowers had centers with burgundy beads. I kept it simple and I actually like this little quilt and I hung it near my work area at the hair salon where I work.

The blog to see the other artists work is www.aroundtheworldin20quilts.blogspot.com. Our next challenge due March 31st is about song lyrics while borrowing one of the other artist's style. I'm not comfortable with that and may change the rules and just do my thing!! So many songs to chose from!