A Not-So-Random App Review (with Quilty Implications)

August 28, 2014

This is random, but not entirely off-topic as I can definitely see quilty (and dye-y) implications from this.

I follow Lyric Kinard's blog, and this morning she posted about an app she'd started playing with, named Waterlogue. I immediately downloaded it and started messing with it myself.

My.

I love this app.

Mind you, I've got several photo-editing apps and most have some sort of watercolor filter effect but I've never seen any of them work as well as this one.

I was posting these images to Twitter and a couple of folks checked out the app and have since downloaded it themselves. Unfortunately, we also discovered it's only available for iPhone/iPad, but not Android*. Sorry about that!

It has 12 different filters with very different effects--my photos here only include three or four of them. It's fascinating to watch how each filter interprets your original photo. You definitely get a lesson in line and color as each filter breaks your photo down into component parts.

Other than just good, clean fun, what are the quilty and hand-dye-y applications? Well, gee, let me count the ways. At the simplest, you could print the resulting image onto fabric and thread-sketch or quilt it up for a nice art quilt. You could use the watercolor image as a guide for an applique version: It breaks complicated colors from a photo down into much simpler color splotches (which is a very technical artistic term) that would make it easier to interpret those colors into fabric. You could use the outlines it creates in some filters as a guide to hand-draw the image onto your fabric. For hand-dyeing/painting, the benefits are pretty obvious: It gives you a clear view of what colors appear in the photo that you could easily use as a guide for creating a project.

*(I stole this photo from one that @sewexcitedquilts tweeted this morning of sunrise on a lake. Thanks, Jackie!)*

The app is $2.99. I'd say I've already had about $3.75 worth of fun and I've only had the app for about four hours. When I start using it as a way to create a quilt design? Priceless.

I'll close this blog out with a gallery of the original photos with their filtered counterparts. I've got it set in autoplay to change images every two seconds, but you have controls on the right and left to move forward and back if you want to see something again. If you can't see the gallery in whatever way you're receiving this blog, just go straight to my website.

*The Waterlogue blog explains that they have no plans to release it on Android. They're a small, independent iOS developer and Android is much harder to program with reliable stability as it's used on such a wide variety of devices. If you want to read the whole blog post, go to their blog. (You may have to scroll down to find the pertinent post.)

One of my favorite quilt books is available again...

May 28, 2014

I don't have time to do a full-on review this week, but I wanted to get the word out that one of my favorite quilt design study books, which had been out of print for a year or so, is now available for sale again. Woohoo!!!

Check out Heather Thomas' A Fiber Artist's Guide to Color and Design. It's available on Amazon (in paperback) or through Landauer Publishing (in print or ebook).

It should suffice as enough of a review to say that my quilt design study group has used Thomas' book for the last year and it has been far and away our favorite book to work with. To whit: we're nearly finished with all the workshops in the book. When we have completed them, we have decided to "wing it" by each member of our group taking a month and choosing a topic to lead the rest of the group through, still using this book as our foundational text. We'll pull in other resources as well based on whatever the challenge is that month, but we all really like this book and feel there's more we can get out of it if we spend even more time with it.

It really is a great book--good content, good layout, good explanations in the workshops (practice sessions)...all around very useful resource. You should definitely check it out!

A Finish! Design Study Group Homework on Analogous Colors

January 28, 2014

My design study group is meeting tonight so I'm scheduling this post to go live after I'm already at the meeting...so thanks to the wonders of technology you'll get the "reveal" at the same time they do.

Our group is currently working with A Fiber Artist's Guide to Color by Heather Thomas, going through one workshop a month. For this month's meeting tonight, we were to do something using analogous colors, while also keeping in mind all the other design principles of balance, unity, repetition, and so forth.

On one of my vacation days in December I took myself on an artist's date to our local art gallery and planned on studying such things as use of light, color, line, texture, and other things I could carry into my quilting.

While in the ancient art section, I fell in love with this guy. I just knew he'd end up in a project somewhere.

His face is just too funny.

He's a "Stirrup spout vessel: frog," from the Moche culture of the north coast of Peru, circa 300-450 CE.

Later, when I was pondering what I might do on analogous colors, I decided to challenge myself to use only 2 1/2" squares already cut in my scrap bin, plus hand-dyes if I chose. Once I made that decision, a design popped into my head.

Yep, Mr. Froggie-Fella was part of the design. Here is the end result.

I also had fun figuring out how to make the 3-D leaves. I've seen a lot of techniques for doing it in magazines, in blogs, and in classes; I've done some similar dimensional work before. I tried out a couple of different methods before finding a technique that worked well for this project. Different techniques apply themselves to different circumstances.

But you've just gotta love that face, don't you?

(If you're curious, Frog Fella is made out of my hand-dyes and a thread that matched amazingly perfectly.)

Although it doesn't have an official name, I've found myself thinking of this as the Frog Fella Project.

By the way, I did also make that chocolate babka from the Artisan Bread class that I'd mentioned. Yum.

No, that's not burnt on the top there. That's all nummy nummy dark chocolate.

Godiva dark chocolate chips.

60% cacao.

Can you tell I'm a fan?

Playing with creating our own fabrics

April 1, 2013

My quilt design study group met last week and I was responsible for leading this week's session (we rotate responsibility, which is the best way to do a group!). We were on the last lesson in Lorraine Torrence's Fearless Design for Every Quilter.

The lesson had to do with creating your own fabrics using a variety of techniques. I talked about this in my most recent podcast episode (Episode 120 In Which We Get Fused) so I won't go into detail here, but will give some pics of the evening.