It is such fun to come to the making of the thing! You may remember when I was carving the Bird Buta motif or the printing of the Bird Buta. If you don’t, head over there and check it out. There is a great video in the first of the two links in this paragraph.
Just this week I steamed and washed a batch of the Bird Buta handprints. Then, I cut and pieced them. Now, I play around with design and placement of blocks.
—->The sneaky thing is, I just joined Gotham Quilts, Quilt Lab-which I love! Each month we explore a topic, go home, make something related to the topic and return to share it with the group. This month’s topic is value. (Technically they asked for polychromatic value exploration. But the polychromatic part dropped out of my mind before I started printing.) So, I have explored value in textile printing and quilt making. <—-
When I print cloth for a quilt, I like to work with value gradation, while also maintaining a modest palette of colors. In the case of these fabrics, I chose three colors-25 (Purple), 15 (Teal) and 3 (Lime) (Playful Fabric Printing page 57).
The line drawing of the bird is printed in 25D, while the bird bodies are overprinted using differing values of colors 3 and 15 in either Pale, Light and Medium. For a total of 20 Bird Buta prints and 20 single color all over prints.
The single color all over prints used up all values mixed in colors 3 and 15 after printing the Bird Buta. In choosing these colors, I hoped for a soft, playful and approachable palette that could also be gender neutral.
I left the background of the Bird Buta print white, in the hope of creating a contrast between the focal print and the single color all over design. I am happy with how this aspect came out.
I think the single color all over prints give the quilt top a patchwork like effect, while maintaining a meaningful color relationship between the blocks. I also think the variation in value and hue is pleasing while lending contrast depth and pop to each of these layouts.
This last photograph seems to be my preferred layout thus far. But, I envision a border… that needs -some- darker value all over single color prints. In 3 and 15 and maybe some beautiful blue? We will see.
In the meantime, I will bring what I have to —->Quilt Lab<—- and see what my gal pals have to say.