[upbeat music]
- Well, welcome to the Great Wisconsin Quilt Show.
We're here live; I am so excited.
I'm sure you're just as excited.
And to be teaching here, again, I have a quilt.
I have two quilts in the show, and all the smiling faces.
This is just such a blessing; so, welcome to my lecture.
My name is Chris Kirsch, and I have been quilting since 1987.
I've been addicted to quilting since 1987,
and I live just in Watertown, so I'm not very far from here.
I'm pretty close, which is nice, but I'm staying at the Clarion
'cause it's just way more fun.
And I've taught at the...
How many of you wanna just keep calling it Expo?
I know, I'm sorry.
And I love that it's the Great Wisconsin Quilt Show,
but I may slip up; I apologize if I do.
But I've been teaching here every year
since it started, from the beginning.
And very grateful that I've had this opportunity.
One of the things though that's involved
when you teach regularly at a quilt show
is you have to come up with different things
to talk about every year.
People don't wanna hear
the same thing over and over, usually.
And so about eight years ago,
it was time to come up with a new lecture.
And so I went through my stash of quilts
and looked at the ones that
hadn't been in a lecture recently and went,
"Okay, give me some inspiration."
And as I did that, I noticed that quite a number of them
had gradation fabrics in them
because I really love to play with gradation fabrics.
And I said to myself,
"Hmm, I wonder if that would make a good lecture?
"I wonder if people would be interested?
Are they really current?"
This is of course, eight years ago.
And so I'm noodling on that.
And about two days later in the mail
came this issue of Nancy's Notions catalog.
And on the cover of it, there it is up there,
is a gradation fabric.
What makes that pretty little bird sitting on the stick
look like he's in water is the gradation.
It's the way the color is going from yellow to orange.
And so it really added a lot of interest to that piece.
A solid piece of fabric wouldn't have had
anywhere near the impact.
And I looked at that and said,
"Well, if Nancy's Notions thinks gradations
"are something worth talking about,
then I think I can do that, also."
And they'll probably have some fabric for sale.
Gradations come and go.
But you can also make gradations out of your stash,
and we're gonna talk about that, too.
So that's why I put this lecture together.
And lo and behold,
when it was time to propose to teach this year,
I went, "It's been a long time since I did that one.
I'm gonna use it again."
I did a little adding, little changing, whatever.
So the fabrics that we have,
you can buy fabrics in gradation,
or as I said, you can choose a gradation.
So we're gonna talk about
a lot of different types of gradation play.
And let's just do a few, oh, I should look at my screen.
I'm not used to all this technology.
A few definitions to start with.
The definition of gradation is the passing from one tint
or shade of color to another by very small degrees.
There's another word that sometimes is used
interchangeably with gradation fabrics.
And that would be ombre.
And ombre is a French word, meaning shade or shadow.
It is also known as dip dyeing,
color bleeding, or gradated dyeing.
It is an effect usually achieved by hand-dipping fabric in dye
so that it gradually goes from light to dark
or sometimes from one color to another.
When I looked up the...
And that's not to be confused with the Spanish word hombre,
which means man.
Totally different meaning. [audience laughs]
But when I read that,
and the reason I gave you that whole definition
is because I looked at that definition and went,
"I made an ombre fabric when I first learned how to quilt
and I didn't even know that's what it was called."
And so let's see what, I gotta see what my next slide is.
Here we go; there we are.
So this is a quilt that I made in 1992.
I learned to quilt in 1987.
I started out making very traditional patterns,
and I would get ideas for art quilts that I wanted to make,
but I have no background in art.
My background's in dental hygiene
and I really liked geometry in school, okay?
So I would get these ideas for art quilts
and go, "No, I can't do that."
But in 1992, Quilter's Newsletter magazine
had a competition where they asked quilters to submit quilts
that were inspired by the 500th anniversary
of Christopher Columbus discovering America.
And my thought immediately, what popped into my head,
was sort of this picture, this image.
But I thought, "What would a quilter have thought
the world look like in 1491?"
And at that time, they thought the world was still flat.
So if you look, Christopher Columbus's ships
are going across the top of the world,
they're falling down and, oh, I should give you the quilt.
This is Carol.
Can we have a round of applause for Carol, please?
[audience applauds] And she's gonna hold up.
So you get to see it in the cloth, also.
So this is the top; there we are.
So there it is in the cloth, there it is up on the screen.
So it's easier for me to point at the quilt.
So I wanted the ships to come across the flat earth.
I had been in a class with Katie Pasquini Masopust,
and she taught us how to draft perspective.
And this is what I drafted.
And I went, "Oh, that'll put depth in my quilt.
"I don't know what it really is,
but it'll put depth in the quilt."
And then in the void underneath the earth
are lamé quilt block stars,
'cause that's what a quilter would see.
Quilted in underneath is a dragon
that was hand quilted in silver thread.
And his tongue is coming up, about to grab that first ship.
Okay?
And I'm sure you all guessed
what that little round thing is down there.
That's the moon in its box.
Because if the earth is flat,
where would the moon go during the daytime,
but in its box?
My mind works in strange and mysterious ways.
So I decided.
Carol Fowler had said in one of her classes,
"You don't know if you can do something unless you try."
And she said, "If you try and it doesn't turn out,
"don't show it to anybody.
And if it turns out, great," right?
So I tried, and I made this quilt for the contest,
and I got her done and entered it,
and it was accepted into the contest,
and it was put in a book with 39 other quilts or 40 quilts,
and it was displayed in The Hauge in Holland
at an international quilt show.
So for my first attempt at art quilt,
I guess I'm creative and I didn't know it.
God has since shown me that.
I'm never saying never to him anymore.
There's a lot of things I say no to or I said,
"I could never do that," and now I'm doing it.
So anyways, the dip dyeing is right here.
Now, here I am, I've been quilting for a couple years.
I got young kids at home,
I'm still working in dental hygiene.
I have no idea how to dye fabric,
except my mother used Rit dye.
So I got some navy blue Rit dye, put it in a bucket,
grabbed a strip of this blue fabric,
put it all down in there.
And for the next 10 minutes,
I very slowly stood up 'cause I wanted that effect
to go from the light to dark.
And when I got it done, the top wasn't quite enough.
So I put some in a spray bottle and I spritzed it
and went, "Yeah, that's gonna work."
It worked for my first try.
So I've made my own ombre fabric, and we'll move on.
The next definition we have is color.
Color is the property possessed by an object
of producing different sensations on the eye
as a result of the way the object reflects or emits light.
I thought that was interesting.
I never really thought of a definition of color before.
And here's my color quilt.
I made this quilt for my granddaughter when she was two.
I wanted to make her a quilt that was
not only colorful and snuggly,
but that it also was educational.
And I looked for books on how to put words on quilts,
and I couldn't find any.
And so I decided, well,
I could use my repliqué technique to put words on quilts
because repliqué is a technique
where you don't have to use fusible,
so it doesn't make the quilt stiff.
And I actually have my books,
I'll be talking about a couple quilts that are in my books.
I have my books with me.
And afterwards, a friend of mine will have them for sale outside.
So anyways, this is the color quilt.
And Hannah had her own version.
I had to make mine for my teaching.
But you'll see that there's a gradation along here
that's actually just going through the spectrum.
It's changing from color to color to color
the way that it naturally occurs.
And so this was a perfect example of a spectrum.
But over the years, I have found fabrics
that do that without having to piece it.
So you can choose fabrics to do a spectrum gradation,
or you can look around for these.
When you see a fabric like this,
get it because you may not see it again,
and you might need it someday, you know?
So keep that in mind.
All right, thank you, ma'am.
Okay, so let's move on to value.
The definition of value is in art,
it's the relative degree of lightness
or darkness of a particular color.
So we can go through colors in gradation,
but we can also go from light to dark.
And the quilt that I have to show you for this,
this was the gradation fabric I had collected
that was just going from dark to light purpley blues,
periwinkles, if you will.
And this is the quilt that I made with it.
It is a Bargello quilt.
And there you are, ma'am.
Thank you so much.
So what I did, in a typical Bargello quilt,
you pick a gradation of color or value,
you sew strips together, you cut them,
and then you shift them to get the design to go up and down.
But if you have gradation fabrics,
you just have to cut the strips and shift them,
and you don't have to go to all that work.
And you never have to match seams across here.
So it's actually an easier way to make a gradation.
But what I found when I do gradations this way
is that oftentimes, they don't have much punch.
There's no focal point in them.
So then you have to add appliqués or something to them.
And for this particular quilt,
I went through my stash and I had a gradation sheer.
Isn't it just so pretty?
And so I cut all my rings out of this to put them across it.
So you can still see the Bargello
going through the sheer.
It's transparent.
And the colors I knew were gonna blend together
as they float across the quilt.
And it was just a whole lot of fun.
So you have to buy these things, too.
[audience laughs]
When you do fusing with sheers,
you also wanna make sure you only use Steam-A-Seam.
If you wanna fuse sheers and you use Heat n Bond
or Wonder-Under or a paperback fusible,
that has to be ironed onto the appliqué first.
And oftentimes, then the glue goes through it
and you don't get a good stick, and it's usually a mess.
So if you use Steam-A-Seam, it's got a tacky side to it.
So you can push the tacky side against your sheer
and not iron it on, but just push it on.
I usually put a ruler on it, a little bit of pressure,
and then you cut out your shape, put it where you want it,
and use parchment paper to iron it onto your quilt.
And the best advice I can give you if you do that
is always use either a Teflon pressing sheet
or parchment paper, and let it cool completely
after you've done the ironing.
Because if you don't, and it's still warm,
the glue will sometimes come through the holes
in the sheer fabrics.
All right, we're good; thank you.
So that's using value, just the one color in the background.
So what if you wanna mix it?
What if you wanna make a quilt
that has a value gradation and a color gradation?
Well, this is a French braid quilt
in which I did just that.
And I'll let you hold that and I'll find the button.
Oh, there's a bunch of fabrics.
You saw them all up here.
And you can put your hands down for just a second.
I forgot that slide was in there, sorry.
If you look across it, there's many types of gradations
you can find if you're gonna buy gradation fabric.
The one on the top is called a color bar,
where it's actually a strip, a bar of each of the colors
going from light to dark in a color.
But then, you already saw my rainbow spectrum.
The one to the right of the rainbow
is a skinnier gradation printed across the yardage,
but it has a gold paisley design on top of it.
So that adds a lot more interest.
The pink one is just a value gradation
going from light to dark.
The black, excuse me, black to gray one,
I use those often.
Anytime I find a black to gray to white gradation,
I buy it because it's amazing
how many neat things you can do with that.
So there's lots of different gradations.
And in fact, I was gonna show you
two more that didn't make the picture.
This one, it's a gradation through the dots.
Isn't that just fun?
And then, where did I put the last one?
This one is a printed foliage, but it's a gradation.
The background is still going from dark to light,
so it would make a beautiful art quilt
or a border of a quilt.
So think about gradation fabrics.
They're very, very useful.
I thought that was the next quilt.
Did I miss something?
Oh, I did.
There we go; sorry about that.
All right, so this quilt that we talked about
using color and value gradation.
In this quilt, there are only two fabrics.
The purple, I'm sorry, there are three,
the dark purple that makes my triangle or my squares,
and then the border fabric.
But all of the strips that you see there
was in a gradation fabric where the colors ran purple
all the way through peach, through yellow.
I cut the strips out with the color.
So I had strips of the purple, I had strips of the peach,
I had strips of the yellow, and all of the colors in between.
Then with when I pieced with them in order,
I knew my gradation was gonna be perfect
because it was printed that way and it looked great.
So you don't always have to cut it
so that the whole gradation shows.
You can cut it to use the gradation to your advantage.
It was a really fun piece to do.
And the little table runner's coming in just a minute.
All right, this quilt, and we're gonna just talk about
or have a number of different things going on here.
This quilt is called "Hope for the Future."
And we're just gonna do a little quizzing right now.
In this quilt, did I use a gradation fabric
or did I choose a gradation?
I used a gradation fabric and it was used in the background,
and look at how it glows
behind the silhouettes of the students
and staff at MATC where I was teaching at the time.
So it really looks like it glows
and it gives some depth to the picture.
But then when it was time to put the border around it,
I thought, I don't want it to take away from the center.
What if I just put a solid or plain black border on,
use the same gradation, which, if you kept going,
turned to red, and then fused the circles on.
And again, I knew it would go well
with what was going on inside
because it's the same fabric that was on the inside.
And the gradation just makes it a little more interesting.
All right, let's see what we get next.
Ah, the quilt that's hanging over here.
I call the quilt "How Beautiful Liberty."
It was made for a challenge
at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah.
And yeah, if you don't mind staying down there,
Carol, that would be great.
Where the...
They picked, every year, they would pick a traditional block
and ask you to do something innovative with it.
And this year, they picked the New York Beauty block.
So if you back up and I go forward,
you can see in my accordion door quilt,
the New York Beauty block, okay?
When you look at it from the front,
it just looks like gobbledygook.
But then when you look at it from the other side.
So I'll have Carol come forward.
You see the true New York beauty,
which is the Statue of Liberty.
[audience oohing] Can you see that?
So I have a lot of fun with these,
and you can come look more closely afterwards.
You can see how I chose a gradation of fabrics.
This is a chosen gradation.
Some of those are Cherrywood hand-dyed fabrics,
but some of them are off-the-bolt fabrics.
But I just needed to go, I needed a solid blue for the sky,
but then I needed to go through the teals, from dark to light
to get all of the folds in the Statue of Liberty's gown.
And this is the quilt from the front.
And then I couldn't resist that.
I just had to put 'em on there.
So that's the part you could see from the back.
And if you couldn't quite see the other edge,
that's the Statue of Liberty when you go from the right.
I've made five accordion door quilts,
just because I think they're fun, they're fun to have seen.
That's why it had to come with me today.
I had a woman say to me one time,
"Would you teach a class on that?"
And I'm like, "You really don't wanna do that."
Because I make three quilts.
I make the Statue of Liberty quilt complete,
I make the New York Beauty quilt complete,
and then I make the background quilt.
Then I slash up the first one,
the first two quilts into equal-size strips,
put them back together again, and by the magic of Velcro,
hang them on the back quilt.
So it's a little labor-intensive, but like I say,
my mind works in strange and mysterious ways,
and then I have a lot of fun with it.
All right, so let's move on.
Ah, "Interchange," that is the next one here.
Good.
So this quilt was made for a challenge
in the Milwaukee Art Quilters, and we were challenged to,
it was called Color Wheel Opposites.
And so you could do anything.
You had to pick two opposite colors on the color wheel
and make a quilt with it.
It didn't have any other, there were no other instructions.
And so I decided that it'd be fun
to mix two value gradations, to take green
and go from the darkest green
to the lightest green from bottom to top,
and then to take the raspberry purpley pink
and go from the darkest at the top
to the lightest at the bottom.
And by doing the checkerboard and interweaving them,
I was very curious to see how it would look
when I got it done.
And actually when I got it done,
I really did think it was intriguing.
It's fun to see the gradations go in the opposite directions,
two different value gradations.
And when I got it done,
because the challenge was called Color Wheel Opposites,
I quilted it all with wheels.
So there's circles all over it.
So I do have a lot of fun when I take challenges.
So there we are, and let's move on.
So we talked about Bargello a little bit.
I talked about Bargello a little bit before,
and you probably, most of you know this,
and this is a very old sample,
but what you do is choose a gradation.
And when you do watercolor quilts or Bargello,
we usually don't use solids.
We use more of a print so that you can have the colors morph
from where it's stronger here to a little less here.
And you can go in your value
or in your color from one to another.
So you can see I went from blue to black to beige,
with a bunch of pink and red thrown in there.
And once you've sewn the strips together into a strata,
you take the two long sides and you sew them together,
and you make a tube, and then you cut that tube apart,
and then take stitches out
where you wanna open it up to get the Bargello effect.
And so this is just a little quilt I made from that sample,
and I believe it's on here; yeah, there it is.
And so you can see it's the same type of Bargello look
as one of the first quilts I showed
that I just did with the blue gradation fabric.
But in this one, I had to match all those intersections,
which is kind of more work, let's put it that way.
All right, so a friend told me after I'd made this one,
and again, this was back in the '90s, she said,
"If you don't wanna match those all up,
put strips of something else in between them."
And so, you can put that down and we'll open up this one.
This is, I call it "Bargello Plus."
And again, really fun playing with the Bargello
and those browns to the yellows and with the oranges thrown in.
But then by putting that strip of teal between it,
I think it makes it even more interesting.
And I didn't have to match up all the intersections again,
which I know quilters should like matching intersections,
but sometimes it's fun not to have to.
So another fun way to use a gradation in a Bargello.
Thank you.
All right, this next quilt,
is it a printed gradation on the fabric,
or did I choose a gradation?
It's obviously a printed gradation.
This background stripe fabric that does the spectrum.
Once again, I wish I had a bolt of it.
I've used it in a number of quilts and I really love it.
It made a great background for all these fused rings.
Once again, I love playing with color and design.
The woman that spoke right before me said
that she always tells teachers that whenever they teach,
they should wear a lot of color.
So if what they're saying is a little boring,
people at least have something to look at.
And I was so pleased I wore colorful today.
So what I also found with this fabric
is that when you have a really gorgeous fabric like this
that has a lot going on, sometimes cutting pieces of it
and laying it on itself is really interesting.
A fabric tends to play well with itself.
And so that made those little streamers work well
when I put that on there.
So this quilt was fun.
It was just a playful design
that used another spectrum gradation or a color gradation.
Thank you, ma'am.
And there we go, all right.
This one, you're gonna have to hear the story.
And some of you may have heard this,
it's been in a few of my other talks,
but I have a friend
who moved to Arizona a number of years ago.
And I went to visit her
and she's giving me the tour of her house.
And we get into the master bedroom,
and that's her studio.
Her master walk-in closet is her stash
and her master bathroom has this huge bathtub
with doors over it.
And I opened the doors and she goes,
"That's where I store my UFOs."
And she says, "I'm not a bath taker,
so I keep my UFOs in my bathtub."
And I'm a bath taker.
So that was kinda like, "Really?"
And you all know what UFO stands for, right?
Ultimately fabulous opportunity, okay?
[audience laughs] Remember that.
It's all attitude, lifestyle, attitude.
So sitting on top of this pile was that circle,
that pieced circle with a hole in the middle of it
and nothing around it, but I love yellows and oranges.
And this whole circle was just there with that hole.
And I said, I pulled it out and I said,
"Evelyn, you need to do something with this."
And I handed it to her and she said,
"Chris, I've been staring at it for two years.
I don't know what to do with it."
And I said, "I don't care; figure it out.
That's too pretty to sit in a bathtub."
And she said, "Oh, okay, your turn."
And she handed it back to me.
So I put the mariner's compass in the middle
and appliquéd it to the brown background,
mailed it back to Arizona.
She added the dragon's tail, sent it back to me.
I did a bunch of quilting.
We did a back and forth.
Play with your friends; it's a lot of fun.
You can see the gradation in here is again,
a value gradation that goes from orange through yellow.
And then in the tail, she did the same thing.
She uses the yellow, going to the orange,
back to the yellow again.
And it causes your eye to really move across the quilt.
But those were all done as fabric gradation.
As she...
I didn't wanna say that.
She had these fabrics that didn't come in a gradation bolt.
She actually put those pieces together.
So when she was putting the binding on down in Arizona,
she called me one day and she said,
"I wanna enter it in the Tucson Quilt Show.
What should we name it?"
And my thought was "Out of the Bathtub."
[audience laughs] She didn't like it.
Her husband named it "Intergalactic Journey."
I dunno, no imagination at all.
So, thank you.
All right, let's see what's next.
Oh, this is a big one and it's a chosen gradation.
I just went through my stash
and picked out browns and greens.
And like with a color wash,
I chose some fabrics with prints,
so it made the transition even easier.
And this is a nice big one; there we go.
So when you choose your fabrics for a quilt like this,
which is called Boston Commons,
I believe it's called Boston Commons.
To do that, to start with the dark
but then go out towards a light,
will make it more interesting than if you
just keep everything the same value.
It moves your eye across the quilt.
And that's about it.
No big story for that one.
You got it; oh, you're so kind.
Thank you, ma'am.
All right, so the next quilt
is another art quilt that I made.
It was for another challenge; I love taking challenges.
And for years, I belonged to the Milwaukee Art Quilter.
Our first big challenge in that group
was called "Windshield Visions."
And so we each had to make a quilt
the size of my Ford Explorer's windshield.
But it could be a view in, a view out,
it could be representational, it could be abstract,
whatever you wanted it to be.
And my son wanted me to do a windshield,
he was in high school at the time,
of cartoon bugs smashing into it
as you're driving down the road. [audience laughs]
And I couldn't figure out how to do that.
So I started praying about it.
And artists are inspired by many things.
And my faith in Jesus Christ is a big part of my inspiration.
So I started praying that I wanted this quilt
to bring the Lord glory.
And the idea that came to me was that
I would make a quilt where I'm driving
down the curvy road of life towards the light of Christ.
And in the rearview mirror is the sinful life
I'm attempting to leave behind.
And so it's a spiritual journey quilt.
And as I'm doing the road going off to the light, it's like,
"Oh, black to gray gradation is gonna be perfect."
So I pieced odd pieces,
but pieced odd pieces together into that.
And then when I got to this,
I used my mariner's compass technique,
which I've also written a book
on how to draft mariner's compasses different shapes
and different sizes with paper folding techniques.
But I thought, "Well, I'll do holographic fabrics."
So that's nice and bright.
But what about the background?
If I just put blue there, it's gonna be kind of stark.
I don't paint or dye fabric much.
I'd rather buy it from people who are good at it.
But for this, I had to find just the right thing.
So I took a piece of white fabric, I got it wet,
I painted yellow and let it wash into the white this way
and blue washed in that way, and cut my pieces,
and it gave me the effect I wanted.
So I was able to create that effect
because I created my own gradation fabric.
Okay, I think that was the second thing I ever did
after the dip-dyed sky in the dragon quilt.
So have fun with it.
All right, so sometimes we find fabrics
that are bigger prints and they're just really pretty
and if I cut it up, I'm gonna lose parts of it.
I don't really wanna cut that up.
What can we do with it?
Well, in a fabric like this,
you can choose colors out of there
and make sure that you link them through gradations
to get them to look nice together.
And then you can sew those strips together
and get pieces that look like this.
So I created my own gradation
by matching up the colors that were in this.
And if you look at the salvages on a fabric like this,
it'll give you the color dots,
and that'll often be very helpful
in how to pick your fabrics for it.
Once I made this strata,
imagine it's very long, I cut it into pieces.
I cut this into bigger pieces,
and I did what's called railroad crossings.
And by using the gradations in here,
it's that same strip repeated over and over.
But because the posts between the squares
of that big fabric I didn't wanna cut up,
because those posts were always light,
where the light hits it, it looks like it's going over.
And where the dark hits it, it looks like it's going under.
So that gradation fabric really created a lot of depth.
So I just think that makes such a pretty effect.
And it really wasn't a lot of difficult piecing.
And if you have a gorgeous fabric
you don't wanna cut up, you don't have to.
So it's a fun pattern for that.
Okay, this quilt I made,
it was another competition at the museum in Paducah,
and the block they had picked that year was Bear's Paw.
And I noodled on what innovative thing
could I do with a Bear's Paw block?
And Natalie Sewell was coming to do a workshop
for my quilt guild on her landscape technique.
And so I made the sample in the workshop
and discovered that making landscapes
is not something that comes very easily to me.
Natalie made it look so easy.
She's a good friend; I miss her.
So I tore it all apart when I got home from class
and decided I wanted to do a campsite
where the bears had come, helped themselves
to some of the food, and then moved on from,
they disrupted the campsite.
And so this is that quilt.
There you are, that corner there.
And I did all of the furniture
and the food that fell out of the bag with photo transfer.
And it's all faded,
so it's not as bright as it was in that picture.
The picture was an older picture of it.
But you can see my little bears' paws
that were the thing that tied the whole quilt together.
I pieced those in and then reverse appliquéd them in.
And then as you go across the quilt,
mama and two bears are walking away
from the campsite they have just disrupted.
When I was putting this together,
I wanted the pond or the lake behind it
to have a little bit of depth.
And I only had a skinny strip of this blue fabric.
And the fabric went, the piece I had
went from the dark to the light.
So I pieced it right here
so that I got the lights to come together in the middle,
and doesn't that give a lot more depth to the quilt?
Because the value changed because of that value gradation.
So kind of fun.
This quilt was accepted into the contest
and displayed at the museum in Paducah,
praise the Lord,
traveled around the country, was put in the book.
That's a really fun contest to be a part of.
So thank you, ma'am.
You can see how all these quilts wanted to get out.
They don't like staying home; they like getting out.
So this quilt, I call "Compass Craze,"
and it's another one of my mariner's compass quilts where
because I draft my compasses with paper folding techniques,
I can make compasses in amoeba shapes or splats.
And I've done a couple of quilts like that.
And in this one I thought,
"What if I made a bunch of those splats?"
Because when you do,
when you draft a compass into a splat or an amoeba,
some of the points are longer than others
and it becomes more of a spiky star
as opposed to a mariner's compass.
And I thought, "What if I would put a bunch of them together
and have the points of the stars meet?"
And so this is what resulted from it.
And here it is in the cloth,
and it doesn't really matter which edge is up.
But when I was trying to pick the colors for this,
I had put it in a program on my computer
because nothing was working for me.
And my husband, who flew airplanes for a living,
and everything in his world
was very checklist, black and white.
And color is not a big thing to him.
He's walking by like, "Why do you keep staring at that?"
And I said,
"'Cause I can't find any colors that are working."
And he went, "Hot pink and chartreuse."
And I went, "Oh."
And he goes, "What's chartreuse?"
He said, "I was just joking.
"I was making that up.
I don't even know what chartreuse is."
I said, "Well, it's a yellowy green and yeah,
yellowy green, they're color wheel opposites."
You know, and so I put the greens in here
and I thought instead of just doing pink in the background,
if I would go from the lighter
all the way to a very dark raspberry purple,
it would give it an effect.
And I'm hoping you can see that it looks convex or concave,
whichever way your eyes are seeing it.
And that's the gradation,
the value gradation that gives the depth to the piece.
So thank you, ma'am.
All right, what's next?
Gradation bundles, oh, I have some with me.
This one is just through the spectrum of color.
So this company, Free Spirit, just put together all the colors
that went through the rainbow,
and we've talked about that before.
And then this one is a hand-dyed.
The hand dyers often do this.
My favorite place to buy gradations is Cherrywood.
They're out of Minnesota
and they make wonderful, wonderful fabrics.
They're probably vending here
and you have to buy their fabric.
It's just wonderful.
So gradation bundles are nice.
They're already picked out for you.
So it's a chosen gradation or it's dyed to be that way.
And they do go through colors, but they also go through value.
They can do it either way.
And this little quilt that I have here was a bundle,
and it was a bundle of only five fabrics.
So it went from color to color pretty starkly.
That's so I remember to take it to my next class.
You can see the ribbon hanging off it.
Pretty starkly.
So everything in here but the navy blue
was in that value packet
that just moved from one color to another.
It was a color gradation.
But one of the fun things I did with this
was to make a Drunkard's Path block.
And by adding that little strip of a batik in there,
it made it even more interesting.
And that's gonna be part of my workshop this afternoon.
The border was another gradation fabric I had in my stash.
If you don't buy them when you see them,
you won't have them when you need them.
So you have to buy them.
And so I put that there
and did a lot of machine quilting over the top of it
to make it look interesting.
And just another fun way to use gradations.
And please leave that off to the side; thank you.
Okay, so next: strategic cutting.
You've heard of fussy cutting.
Strategic cutting is when you have a fabric like this one,
and I look at that and say,
"Well, that's not a gradation fabric."
And it's not, but it has light yellows
going into a darker orange, going into a light pink,
going into a dark purple.
So if I strategically cut that, I can make this quilt.
So here's the fabric, you brought that along.
And here is the little quilt.
And again, this is in my talk today, too.
Or my class this afternoon, so it's on there.
But I think you can see in this little quilt
that the one line of geese is just made out of a batik.
And there's no gradation there and it looks a little flatter.
But by strategically cutting the pinks,
the oranges, and the yellows out of this fabric,
I was able to do the lightest color farther away,
and it looks like the tip
is really going off into the back.
So it's a good example of how a gradation
does give you more depth.
So thank you.
Please set that with the other one.
All right, this is really fun.
This is another type; it's pointillism,
another type of a gradation.
And this is a technique of Neo-Impressionist painting
using tiny dots of various pure colors,
which become blended in the viewer's eye.
It was developed by Georges Seurat
with the aim of producing a greater degree of luminosity
and brilliance of color.
Quite a few years ago,
I bet it was at least 12 years ago now.
Kaufman Fabrics came out
with a line called Pointillist Palette,
and they started black at the top,
white at the bottom.
Then they picked a color in each each bolt,
and the white and the black started mixing,
and the colors started mixing.
So it went from dark all the way through it.
And I have used up everything in that piece
but this little chunk.
But I loved the pointillism.
I think the pointillism was very interesting
and they had it in every color of the rainbow.
And so there's my fabric,
I just showed you the whole piece.
And this is what I've done with it.
So by taking that pointillist fabric,
that was the gradation
that went from dark to light again in one color,
look at how that star just glows.
It just makes, if you just put a muslin back there,
that star would be pretty.
Well, muslin wouldn't look like this,
but a color back there, the star would be pretty.
But by putting that lighter yellow right in those corners,
it just glows from behind.
So use those gradation fabrics.
They really can make your quilts shine.
All righty, how are we doing on time?
Oh, we're doing good.
Phew.
It's the hardest part when you're being timed here.
You know what?
When I'm at a guild, I can go on for a little over an hour.
Nobody says anything.
But here, there's other people waiting.
So, all right, so talking about pointillism.
I made this quilt a few, oh,
this is the other thing I did with that pointillism fabric.
And like with that little bird on the magazine
or on the catalog I showed you at first,
can you see how just by going from the dark to the light
in that same fabric, how it made just the whole quilt pop?
There's only two fabrics in there besides the moon.
And when I first made this quilt,
the black is just silhouetted on top of it.
But where you see the shadows under the far horizon,
that was just the yellow of the water.
And I entered it in a couple shows, it won a couple ribbons.
I had it hanging in my home,
and I'm staring at it one day going, "Something is wrong."
And I finally realized, if the sun was actually going down,
there'd be shadows on the lake.
So I fuss, two years after I made the quilt,
I scribble quilted in the shadows underneath it.
And then it made me happy.
In my searching through all my boxes,
this is the one quilt I couldn't find.
It's there; I just don't know where it is.
So you get to see it up there,
but I don't have it here to show you.
So, all right.
So I decided to put together a class because I had been
collecting black and white fabrics forever.
And so I chose a very simple block with just strips
and used a lot of my black and whites.
The white printed on black and the black printed on white.
But I couldn't just do black and white.
So I added strips of colorful flying geese
every which way throughout it.
And I got the center done.
And this top makes me happy.
Someone told me one time that I should never show quilts
that aren't finished; just show quilt tops.
And I went, "Oh, okay."
And then I went home and went, "No."
Because first of all,
I don't have a need for this quilt to be finished right now.
And secondly, when I travel with my quilts,
do you know how much more space I would need
to have all my quilts finished?
So that's my excuse for showing you
just unfinished tops at this point.
They're ultimately fabulous opportunities, you know.
All right, so I got the center of this quilt done
and I said to myself, "What should I put on as a border?"
And I tried all different fabrics and nothing was working.
And then I pulled this pointillism fabric.
This wasn't one of Kaufman's,
but it was a different pointillism
that went from black to white through black and white.
It didn't have any other color in it.
And I went, "You know, that's it.
That's gonna frame it well."
I have it up there, yep.
So I put the green in there
because I just love that limey green.
And I put the green in there,
and then I put that border on and it was striking.
It was just exactly what I thought the quilt needed,
but I didn't have enough to do the corners.
So I had to add a different polka dot in the corner
with colors to finish it off.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
You know, you make it work.
And I do love this.
I hope someday I find a bed that needs it
because I would like to finish this one.
And I'm giving you all the hard work there.
Thank you; all right.
And, ah, one of the last quilts I'm gonna show you
was made for the competition in Paducah,
again, that the museum had.
That year, they picked Flying Geese
as the block that you had to do something innovative with.
And my first thought is,
"What are you gonna do with flying geese
that hasn't been done?"
And then I got to thinking,
I hadn't made a real modern quilt,
and wouldn't it be fun to make a modern quilt
with flying geese on it, with honking, big flying geese?
I just made that up: honking, big flying geese.
I'm sorry; I kinda like that.
And so I decided, I drafted it out
and decided that I needed to go on the Cherrywood website
and get a gradation of their Cherrywood fabrics
going from red through orange to yellow
so that it all flowed.
But as I kept designing it,
this one goose kept jumping out of the line.
And so I finally decided
I was gonna have to call the quilt "Silly Goose."
And the label reads, "There's one in every crowd.
"She can't seem to follow the leader or the rule.
What a silly goose."
And I had great fun.
There's actually polar fleece in lamé in here
to make her extra silly.
Had great fun, lots of fun quilting to show
that she's not just going in the line.
And this one was accepted into the contest
and hung in the museum and travels, too.
So it's a quilt that just makes me smile.
I love to look at it, and it uses a big gradation.
So that's "Silly Goose."
Yeah, and there's a lot of geese on the back.
And I think this is the one, yeah!
Did you ever quilt a quilt and you turn it over
and on the back, that scrap of fabric got quilted into it?
That's where you put your label.
[audience laughs] Okay?
I wasn't gonna pick that out.
No, there's too much quilting on that quilt.
So, and this one,
I don't know where the picture ended up going,
but this was another chosen gradation
that you just hadn't seen quite yet.
So to make little runners,
and I've done this class here a couple of times
on how to do the French braid with the gradation strips.
And the French braid is fun.
Throwing those little squares in
makes it so much more interesting.
For my last piece, I took a piece of gradation fabric
and I cut it into big triangles.
I cut through it diagonally.
So I had all the darks going along this edge of the salvage
and all the lights going along that edge of salvage.
I took the four darks and put them back together
into this little square.
And it's coming, I think it's coming.
Oh, there it is.
So this is the square that I came up with.
And I can make another square just like it
with the light on the outside and the dark in the middle.
So you can see that I cut this triangle
to get with the gradation that the dark here
and put all four of those together.
Now when you do that, it's not very exciting.
But this would be a great background for an appliqué.
And there was at least one quilt in the show
when I ran through it this morning
that had used a gradation as a background just to add depth.
Again, like behind the heads in my head quilt.
And so it just seemed like the right piece to say, "The end."
So at this point, my suitcase is empty.
I don't have anything more to show you with gradations,
but I'm really hopeful that I've inspired you,
if you own gradation fabric, to use it.
And if you use it, and I've had people say,
"Well, then I don't have it anymore."
Well, then go buy more.
It's okay, you know?
So use your gradation fabrics, buy the gradation fabrics.
And when you're choosing fabrics for a quilt,
if you can make them, not all quilts work this way,
but if you can make them
with a little bit of a gradation so things connect,
the fabrics usually play better
and give a little bit more interest to your quilts.
And with that being said,
I hope you will use some gradations.
I'd love to see pictures.
If you're on my blog and you wanna send me pictures,
it could be a post.
You never know when you can be on my blog.
And I thank you so much for coming; you've been great.
[audience applauds]
So can we do questions? Okay.
Questions and answers.
Any questions?
Yes, ma'am.
- On your Bargello Plus. - Yes.
- Were the teal sashings all the same width?
- Yes.
- And the gradation is what changed width?
- Yes.
Oh, absolutely.
The question was on the Bargello Plus quilt,
which was the Bargello quilt with the teal strips in between.
She asked if the teals were all the same size
because the pieced areas, I changed the width
to make the quilt look more interesting.
And the teal sections were all the same size.
Yeah, which made it a whole lot easier, yeah.
Any other questions?
Yes.
- What is the product that you had stated that you used
in the color quilt that you had black, white, red?
That to make the-- - To fuse the sheers?
- Yeah. - Okay.
- That it's not so stiff.
- Oh, so it's not so stiff, repliqué.
Let me show you that.
I'm so glad you asked and we had time.
So I wrote a quilt on repliqué, or a book on repliqué,
my first book, and it's out of print now.
But it was to take a picture, enlarge it on a copy machine,
and sew directly on the enlargement.
And it worked really well
for recreating pictures without that fusible in there.
'Cause the question was,
"What do we do without the fusible?"
So the second book I wrote
was about that color quilt that I made for my granddaughter.
And I put the words on it,
but I didn't want the stiffness in there.
So in the book or on your computer,
you can do this yourself.
You pick a word, you pick a font,
and then you print it out in reverse.
You flip it.
And then once you have that, you layer your fabrics.
And I have a little sample, but it's in my next class.
You layer your fabrics, you put your background down,
and you put your color fabric on top of it.
Pin it in the corners, flip it over,
put that pattern on the back.
Then you sew on the lines of all the words,
turn it back over, and trim away all the background,
and satin stitch over what's left.
I came up with this technique.
Actually, Carol Fowler shared it with me
back in the early '90s,
and she wasn't doing anything with it.
So I started showing my friends
and I finally asked her if I could teach it to a few people
and she said, "It's yours."
And I've written three books on it now.
And it's just a wonderful technique
that nobody else is really teaching.
I do classes in it.
If you have a guild, I'd be happy to.
And since we have just a few more minutes,
my most recent book that just came out a few months ago
is Modular Memory Quilts.
Because my repliqué book went out of print,
people still ask for it.
And I got permission from Martingale,
that patchwork place, to have the rights to my book.
So the basic steps for recreating pictures are now,
with the same samples and everything,
are now in this new book, plus some new ideas.
Because the idea behind Modular Memory Quilts
is that when I travel,
I wanna make a block as a memory of that quilt.
And I wanna make a quilt of all my travels.
But I go on more trips and I keep wanting to add to it.
And once you make a quilt, it's pretty static.
So what I do in Modular Memory Quilts is
I pick my favorite photo or image from all of my trips,
and then I recreate that as a finished quilt.
I put a border on it and bind it.
And then I put them all together with a joining technique.
And that way, if I go on another trip,
I can just add another block.
Or if you have, it's kind of hard to see on here,
but my pictures of my husband and I,
silhouettes of my husband and I with our grandchildren.
And so I did the same thing.
I did the silhouetting and made four of those,
and then they hang together.
But if we have more grandkids,
we can just add more quilts to the quilt, you know?
So there's a lot of fun ideas.
But the main thrust of the book
is that you learn how to recreate your photos
or your images, anything you can draw
or take a picture of, to make a quilt block from it.
And so my friend Laura is here in the back corner.
She's gonna be just outside the door with my books,
if you're at all interested.
You can, yeah, looking is free.
If you decide you want any of them,
they're $20, and tax is included, so.
So any other questions?
Well, you've been delightful.
Thank you again and enjoy your time here.
[audience applauding]
[upbeat music]