I have been playing around with it in Photoshop Elements. One of the things I often do is convert the image to black and white. Then I play around with the various filters until I find something I like. I’m by no means an expert user, but you can’t do much damage if you don’t save the changes you’ve made to the original photo. One of the filters I like is posterize. I first learnt about this at a course I took at Quilt University – Realistic Fabric Portraits. You can choose how much you want to simply the image by varying the number of levels. The lower the number the less detail you get and the more simplified the resulting image will be. This is the result of posterizing the original with 4 levels. I’m not sure now if it was black and white and then posterized or the other way round. I suspect that the posterized image was converted to black and white.

Another filter that is sometimes useful is to find the edges – either accented edges or poster edges. This image was created by applying the poster edges filter to the original and then just printing it in black and white. If you don’t want to be bothered converting to black and white, printing is the easy option.

These two images gave me a starting point to get into the studio and start playing with fabric.

Finished once

The offending piece

This morning my eyes were still misbehaving, so I had to bite the bullet and take out the offending piece and add a new one that was less distracting. I can’t understand why I didn’t spot it before, but I suppose the white gaps didn’t help and also, of course, the black was missing. Although the original piece did have some texture to it, it didn’t show up from afar and the colour was too flat as well as too dark.

This shows the new improved quilt top. I know that there are bits around the black, which are a bit jaggedy too, but I didn’t want a completely prefect blend. I felt that would be a bit too bland. I like the slight imperfections. Around the black they are not too distracting and do not draw the eye too far away from the focal point. As they are balanced on each side the eye tends to flit backwards and forwards and so remains in the right area. That’s my theory anyway and I’m sticking to it (for now!).

Finished twice

Problem solved

To attach the black circle I first drew a circle the correct size on some freezer paper and then ironed the cut out template onto the black fabric and cut around with a generous seam allowance. After clipping out little triangles all around the circle in the seam allowance, I pressed the allowance back over the paper template. With the template still attached I centred the circle from the wrong side of the quilt top, with the circle underneath, and pinned it in place. From the right side I hand sewed it in place using stab stitch like in needle-turn appliqué, adjusting where necessary to get the best placement. (Another good reason not to start faffing about getting fussy about the colours near the focal point ) When all was sewn and pressed I removed the freezer paper and voilà an almost perfect circle that I could not have achieved with machine piecing. Sometimes hand sewing is unavoidable.

It is always a surprise to see the sketch at its full size. This time the a-ha effect was to see that the inner ring was going to have some small fiddly pieces to sew together. So I decided that for these pieces I would use foundation piecing. At that size no-one is going the notice the difference between a straight seam and a gently curved seam. And of course you can only make straight seams with foundation piecing. I also remembered that you get a mirror image if you’re not careful with this method so I did a bit of sampling using tissue paper and some scraps of fabric. The obvious place to divide up into larger blocks was along the colour spirals. The next two images show the front and back of my foundation piecing sample.

As you can see I was trying to do too much at once. If I had left the bottom piece on the foundation, when doing the piecing for real, I would have ended up with an inserted corner piece to sew together. That might be fine for one piece, but not when you have 12 such seams to sew later. I had forgotten that you need to divide up into rectangular blocks, when using foundation piecing. Shows the value of sampling. Marie was proud of me!

When I started doing the piecing for the quilt top I used “stitch n tear” as the foundation. It is more robust than tissue paper and has the added advantage that it sticks to my design wall. Also it is much easier to remove than paper, which always leaves lots of tiny scraps behind, even after hours with the tweezers. (The first time I did any foundation piecing was on a wall hanging kit that provided paper foundations. I speak from experience ) After tracing the foundation from my cartoon, I turned it over and retraced over the lines. This prevents your design turning out as a mirror image. The wrong side (second lot of pencil lines) are the sewing lines for the piecing. I have a white table top so that I was able to see the original lines through the “stitch n tear” with no problem to trace over them again.

The other thing you need to plan in advance is how the seams are going to lie. When you come to sew the blocks together you want the seams to lie in alternate directions so that you can butt them together and get accurate joins. I, of course, only realised half way round the first circle that I had failed to take this into consideration. After some reluctance and a boot to my behind from Sqeze – sorry an appeal to my conscience – I ended up resewing half my blocks to reverse the lie of the seams on them. Like all these things it didn’t take nearly as long as I expected, because most of the construction time is actually thinking and making choices and not sewing. I only had to repeat the sewing part.

Here’s the state of play currently displayed on my design wall. Things may well change once I get started on the next ring out. It is quite tricky to get a pleasing transition across the colours and rings. I may be doing a little tweaking yet.

The second ring out is partly constructed using the foundation piecing technique for the smaller blocks. The larger blocks at the bottom of the ring are constructed with normal machine piecing. I’m using tissue paper pattern pieces and a dressmaker’s wheel to mark the fabric as shown in this posting (3rd sampling technique).

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I have almost all the colours I need. While I was sorting I found my transfer printing samples from earlier in the course and realised that this will be the ideal way to get the paler tints of blue and yellow that I might need. I’m not really in the mood for hours among the buckets right now, so I was glad that I shall probably get away with no extra dyeing for this piece.

This was the view on the floor in my studio after I had cleared away the fabric that I won’t be using.

One of the original sources of inspiration was a series of portraits in a magazine article, where the photos faded from colour images to black and white. The idea appealed to me. The lyrics from the Elton John song Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me kept buzzing around my head too:

I can’t light no more of your darkness
All my pictures seem to fade to black and white

I also wanted to use hexagons as the basis of the piece, as I like them as a shape and find there are lots of interesting designs one can make with them. Of course I did a bit of googling for images to get some inspiration too, but I didn’t come up with that many interesting images with hexagons. It would seem others are not so inspired by them

This is the current state of play:

It is still quite a rough sketch, but I have the dimensions sorted out now ready to do a full sized cartoon. The finished piece will be a 30 inch square. I intend using my own hand dyed cotton fabrics again, with the exception of the black, where I will use commercially dyed fabric. They can get the best blacks I think. I’ve not had much success at dyeing black, so why bother when you can get a better colour ready dyed. The colours are arranged in the order of the colours of the rainbow, but I have combined the blue and indigo into one spiral.

Here are some photos:

This one proves that I do own something other than my red cardigan, which seems to feature in a lot of these shots

The quilt top with its added strips. I am pleased with the results.

A closer shot of the strips.