Happy Monday! Today’s theme for Cheryl’s blog challenge is ‘dream project’…and I immediately recalled my favorite project for Windham Fabrics! Mission: interpret a gifted painter’s works using a rainbow of brilliant batiks 😍. Does it get any better? Read on for the story of the project:
This spring/summer [2019], I had the pleasure of creating some very special samples for Windham Fabrics. It all began when the marketing director emailed me about exciting news…they had secured the rights to the images of a painter by the name of Grant Haffner. I was not familiar with his work but it was love at first sight when I saw the paintings. Just to give you an idea…
Wow. I am a color fanatic and Grant’s use of it pretty much bowled me over. So, could I select a few images and recreate them in fabric as part of the launch later in the year? Oh, yes I could ;).
The first step was to pull the images into Procreate and begin to map out the areas which would become sections of fabric. Between my two quilts, I discovered that I would need 75 colors…clearly I needed a collection with a LARGE range.
I had decided to use Lava Solid batiks by Anthology Fabrics, a division of Windham, because I knew that there would be a lot of fray and commercial printed cottons would be more difficult to manage. Besides, Lava Solids come in every color you could possibly imagine! http://anthologyfabrics.com/fabrics/lava-solids/
The color chart arrived and I spent time comparing the images on my iPad with the corresponding perfect shade of fabric:
…and soon the fabric arrived. Oh, so much fabric! And so much fusing to do…I’m not sure how I could live without Mistyfuse! http://mistyfuse.com/
Of course I had to obsessively organize in rainbow order…and make sure I kept the identifying fabric numbers on each piece so that I wouldn’t lose track. For a fusing project this big, I recommend multiple Mistyfuse “Goddess Sheets” and lots of good tunes ;).
On to the construction. I pulled the line-drawing “layer” from Procreate, used GridaPic to separate into lots of panes, printed and taped together to create my traceable patterns.
Using a light fabric, I traced the lines as guidelines…then cut the pattern apart piece by piece to trace onto the corresponding fabric…cut…and fuse into place, much like a (very large) jigsaw puzzle. I would stop every so often, take a picture and compare with the Procreate image to make sure I was on the right track.
About the Procreate app on my iPad…absolutely critical to a project like this. The ability to add “layers” means that you can have separate images of line drawings, fabric style numbers and color names, and anything else you might want to reference. Here’s a screen shot of what my screen looked like with the key:
Fusing finished and ready to quilt! Not surprisingly, this project made use of nearly every shade of Aurifil thread I own…well, almost ;).
The close-up shows areas in which I used two very different shades of thread (thank goodness for Bernina’s second spool pin) to try to replicate Grant’s more complex paint strokes.
Finished! Here is the sunset image, reclining in a deck chair from exhaustion…
I was thrilled to see my quilts in the look book and in Windham’s booth at Quilt Market…and couldn’t wait to see the fabrics Grant had designed! Here they are, ready to inspire a whole new project…
Many many thanks to the team at Windham and to the incredibly talented Grant Haffner for the most inspiring fiber art project ever! https://www.granthaffner.com/
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