I’ve been showing you my work on a quilt commissioned by a man for his wife, who works in a windowless office (Her last name is Larsen, and she works in Larsen Hall – crazy coincidence!). The idea and construction craziness is described here, my color choices and design process blogged here, and yesterday I showed you some close ups of the individual quilts! Here is the final result:

“Larsen Window” (20″ x 24″)

To remind you, my original thoughts about this piece broke down into 4 main points:

• Window = grid
• Outside -> Flowers -> Botanical Sketches
• Incorporate “Lillian’s Fabric” (the forest green with the blue veins)
• Choice, trying out different options – make the sketches moveable

To make these moveable, I fused small bits of fusible veclro to the back of the quilts and the fabric mounted around stretcher bars.

To encourage moving, I made 2 extra (which can be stored on the back with more velcro, or displayed elsewhere).

I finished this on Sunday, and Steve came by Monday to pick it up (which explains the slightly lopsided pix – I didn’t have time to take a close look at the pictures until it was out of my hands). He gave it to Lillian the next day, and heard from him on Wednesday:

Lillian loves it.  Great job! Complete and utter surprise. It is now hanging in our bedroom until she moves into her new office [which is also windowless].  Lillian has already arranged some of the panes to suit.

I am so thankful that this worked so well. I’ve been wanting to figure out another way to display some of these sketches and haven’t had time to focus on it. I’m so grateful that I had triple motivation to make the germ of an idea turn into reality. Thanks Steve & Lillian!

One of my long term goals since the inception of Candied Fabrics 2 and a half years ago has been to have people be so inspired by my work that they ask me to create an art quilt just for them – and I’ve had the honor to complete not 1 but 2 in this month! Here’s hoping this is the start of an awesome trend in this new decade of ours!

And, as always, thanks for dropping by, reading my blather and sending awesome comments my way – they really buoy me up when I get down. It’s great to know I’m connecting with a few souls out there because of the me I pour on cloth and then cut up and rearrange for my visual enjoyment!

This week, I’ve been taking you through my process of creating a window of my botanical sketches for a customer whose wife has a windowless office. I explain the idea and construction craziness here, and show you my color choices and design process here. Time for some glamour close ups! These are all 6″ x 8″, I layer my background fabric on top a layer of batting, then a layer of stiff fusible interfacing called Peltex for stiffness. I start with an idea of what flower I want to sketch in my mind, lower my feed dogs and GO! No marking ahead of time. I’ve got a couple of videos of this here, the ones labelled free motion machine sketching.

Here’s an extra Daisy – I actually made this one 1st to practice:

Friday – the big reveal, how I put it all together!

After all the rigmarole I went through to figure out how I was going to attach the smaller botanical quilts to the larger background - the actual art was a breeze The difference between making several single botanical sketches:

and one group that are meant to be displayed together, is that I wanted to have no repeats, of either sketches or color combinations. I also wanted to have a nice distribution of shapes – not too many vertical long skinnies, for example. So I set myself some rules:

1. 8 different sketches
2. 3 squarish shapes, three verticals and 2 horizontals
3. 8 different colors, one background & one shape/color
4. No reverse combinations (which I usually love to do). This means if I put gold on the plum background, I can’t put plum on the gold background.

The cool thing about this last rule is that it really got my to play around with color combinations, and I LOVE the forest green against the chartreuse (upper left quilt in the picture below)

Tomorrow, I’ll show the completed individual quilts. Yes, I’m dragging this out all week…cut me some slack, I’ve got a day job!