34. Digital Lilies Journal Quilt

There are times when I don't have trouble making the journal quilts but am slightly mystified myself how it came to be. This one is a good example. It started off with me leafing through a book about the artist Hundertwasser. I have  several books about his art and he is what I describe as a very quilty artist, or in other words his art shouts out that it needs to be turned into a quilt. So far I've resisted specially as he is still well within his copyright having died as recently as 2000. But I love his quirkiness. And of course his use of bright colours. 

The other impetus for this journal quilt came from the class I'm doing online about digital brushes with the Creative Workshops. I was tempted to try these out and downloaded some digital splatter brushes and set to work digitally painting a lily photograph that you can see above. How wonderful to go wild with those brushes without getting covered from head to toe in paint (yes, I'm a very messy artist when I have a brush in my hands)

You can see the finished result above and although you can just about see that it was a lily it has turned into something much more exciting as far as I'm concerned. Then I got to thinking what else I could do with the image and for me that usually means playing with the colour ways using the hue and saturation settings, digitally speaking.

The two additional colour ways shown above were the ones I liked best so I saved those together with the original colour way and then printed all three out onto A4 silk fabric sheets to use as an actual fabric in my journal quilt.

I knew that inspired by Hundertwasser I wanted to combine different sizes of the same shape (in this case a square) and used paper shapes that I could move around till I found the combination I was happiest with, and that you can see above. I altered it slightly in the process but not that much. Hundertwasser also gave me the idea to layer the lily fabric with a border of different colour plain cotton. Bondaweb (WonderUnder if you're in the US) was used to add the lily fabric to the square plain cotton background and in turn that background to the black felt that I used as the base fabric. I also used hand stitching to attach the lily fabric to the plain coloured cotton and machine stitching to attach that to the felt. Hand stitching in the colours of the plain squares was added in between the squares and of course I just had to bead those squares too. The binding was made by using pink cotton for the backing fabric and turning it over to the front. A decorative greek key pattern was machine stitching onto the binding to finish it off.