Photoshop Your Quilt into Different Quilts

My big idea was to create a building under construction, based on some of my New York City photos, especially of the building on the left.

To capture the sense of looking directly inside rooms, I drafted a foundation paper piecing patterns. It's constructed in strips. Here are the top portions of two of the strips. 

And here's what it looked like, all sewn up. It didn't give as much of a sense of space as I'd hoped.  

It's very small - most  pieces are an inch or less - so there was no obvious way to slice it apart, to turn it into something else. 

But while doing routine editing of the image in Photoshop, I decided to play with some of the filters. I am not great at Photoshop, but I do know how to click on things, in this case, the menu items under "Filter Gallery".  

First, "glowing edges." To my surprise, this image gave MORE of a sense of a building under construction than the fabric version! It also bears a strong resemblance to my original foundation pattern!

I'm titling the next experiment, "Jaws 1". I see circling sharks. Unfortunately, I didn't write down the command I used. I also have no idea how one could make this in fabric, except maybe through extremely intricate applique. 

Here's what the "pinch" command produced: 

"Polar coordinates":

Here: "Shear" 

This looks like rick-rack.

"Zigzag" command: Jaws 2: The sharks are speeding up.

Jaws 3: The sharks are going so fast that they are exuding global  centrifugal forces, causing tsunamis.

This came from the "stained glass" command. This design could be replicated precisely, with English Paper Piecing, but you'd have to number every paper piece, and add arrows showing which end is up. Cutting and sewing the pieces together would take years. 

However, the program allows you to reduce the number of cells, which creates something very doable.

To that image, I added Glowing Edges. How cool is this? It looks like a modern stained glass quilt.

"Extrude": Looks like a helicopter view of a city of LEGO skyscrapers. 

My favorite - "spherize" - because the results look so real.

Adding "glowing edges," a potential pattern emerges. 

There is one easy way to make any and all of the "impossible" quilts: Print them onto fabric, from your home printer, or through a service like Spoonflower.com, and then quilt it! 

More ways to play with your photos of quilts, and then transfer them to fabric to create a new quilt, is in a 2014 blog post, here . My experience with miniaturizing and printing entire quilts via Spoonflower is here.  

My Newest City Quilt, a Triumph (for the Cat)

Fresh from the photographer! My newest quilt - it's about 70" high. I should have blocked it, look at that top edge, curved like an archery bow, oy!

This quilt started out with a pile of buildings from my earlier city quilts. Playing with leftovers is SO much more fun than starting from scratch. Along with not having to face a blank design wall, trying to redeem flawed fragments makes me feel environmentally noble - like I'm keeping them out of landfill and thereby saving the world! 

The biggest decision I had to make was whether to turn my leftovers into three quilts or one. It did occur to me that the top row could be finished by itself and called Emerald City....

...which would make the middle row Amethyst City....

...and the bottom row, Sapphire City? (Plus, whatever gemstone is orange. Are there any orange gemstones?)

My stash has way too many large-motif prints that can be challenging to use. I decided to use them for the skies. Two of the prints came from well-worn 50s/60s aprons. 

The first apron - from my family - was this groovy rainbow fabric, a weave so coarse it might be linen. There's a stubborn 1/4" bloodstain that probably makes it unshowable; and the apron was small and oddly shaped, so I had to set one strip sideways, down the far right edge. Despite its limitations, I love its happy, Peter Max mood.

The second old apron, from a thrift shop, was the hallucinogenic print below, in colors (beigeish-orange, burgundy & neon green?!) so horrible they were almost good! 

The pyramid in the Amethyst neighborhood - arguably inspired by the Louvre - is set against another vintage fabric sky, a mostly white floral that I'm guessing is from the 70s. 

Because I myself happen to be a vintage quilter (quilting since 1991, breathing since much earlier), I have sadly learned that old fabric - no matter how intoxicating the design, or how good the condition  - is likely to be weaker than new stuff. It rips much more easily. A quilt with old fabric simply won't last as long. 

I considered this, but what the hell, psychedelic rainbows and beige-orange flowers are worth it. If Covid  has taught us anything, it's that we should live for today! I did throw in some new fabric skies; in the purple section, I used this Kaffe Fasset floral print: 

And others, like these light green polka dots. 

In the blue section, below, the half shell was my first draft for two Hollywood Bowls that wound up on two Los Angeles- themed quilts. The mostly black-and-white tower to the left resembles LAX's control tower. The structures are set against a new blue print (by Frou-Frou) with floating triangles on a pale blue background. Initially I thought of the triangle print as the sky; but now I think it looks more like a building with triangular windows, which works, too!

And speaking of triangles, there's another triangle-based building on the far right of the blue city: 

This was based on the Hearst Tower in New York City. Here's my photo of it. (Taken way back in the old days, when people "travelled.")  

And below is a more careful version of it that I made for one of my New York quilts. The points match and there's perspective because it's not improv pieced like the one above; I made a foundation paper piecing pattern.

This quilt itself a sort of landmark. It's my first quilt which was fully embraced by a cat during and after construction. 

Here's the story: My newly-minted college grad daughter, Class of '20, moved back in with us a year ago, when the pandemic broke out. She wanted to adopt a kitten, an idea I'd always resisted because I worried it would endanger itself in my sewing area (which doesn't have a door, and is challenging to block off), not to mention that I didn't want cat fur all over my stash. 

Well, the best laid plans. Cleocatra turned out to be charming, brilliant, and sneaky; she easily moved and slithered past the heavy folding doggie gate that we placed in different configurations at the entryway.

She also outcharmed my emotional resistance to cat fur. So here is Cleo, celebrating her victory, right after I finished the quilt and laid it on the floor.

I surrendered completely.

To see my earlier city quilts, click "Cityscape quilts" in the word cloud on the right. My booklet, with the methods I use to make quilts like these is in my Etsy shop, here. Cat fur removal methods will be gratefully accepted! (I already ordered a Chom Chom roller.)

Quilt Your City on Pillows

Out of wall space? How about making some quilted pillows?

I might not have thought of this, if I hadn't been asked. A neighbor saw my pandemic porch quilt show (the subject of my last several blog posts), and commissioned me to make four 18" pillows, including two with scenes from our town, South Pasadena, which is part of Los Angeles. We negotiated a price and a backing color - grey - and I was off. It took about two weeks, and here they are. 

The first one in the lineup above represents the town's Gold Line MTA Train crossing. For research, I took my family on a masked Christmas Day photo safari. Action photography is not my forte; it was surprisingly challenging to catch a shot of a train in mid-intersection. But I got a few.

I also photographed our town's iconic "walking man" statue, next to the station. My daughter did a little leap for me, and she provides scale for just how tall this guy is.

The photos helped me set the scene. 

I imported a walking man photo into my CorelDraw program, and traced it, to make the statue outline. Just for fun, the client and I decided to add a small person with the same profile striding in the opposite direction.

There are two coffee shops next to the tracks, so I created a blue table with coffee and pie in the corner. The small shiny black circles on the railroad crossing pole are tiny, vintage black plastic buttons. 

On the back flap, there's a departing train. 

The second scene that the clients requested was our town's 19th century watering trough. Most of the time, it looks like this.

But on Thursday afternoons and evenings, it's surrounded by a lively farmer's market. So I circled my trough with goodies. Here's how the piece looked flat. 

The ostrich is our town's mascot - 100 years ago, South Pas. was home to an eccentric tourist-trap ostrich farm. Historians say it put  us on the map. 

(The ostriches were not purple, I just did that for fun. The farm no longer exists, which is sad for our town's economy, but happy for the ostriches, who were forced to schlep the tourists around in large wooden carriages.)

Here's the scene as a pillow. 

And I added some more food fabrics to the back. 

The two other pillows that my clients requested were a swimming pool pillow - here it is before assembly...

...and then after the pillow was inserted. 

The clients got the idea from the swimming pool quilt I blogged about a while back, with a tutorial about how I gave the pools depth with sturdy fusible interfacing and reverse applique, HERE. 

Finally, they wanted a pillow with my tessellating coffee cups design. Before stuffing, it looked like this.

....And after stuffing: 

Showing this pillow on Facebook led to a discussion in which my candid friends agreed that these look less like coffee mugs with handles (my intention), than some kind of bird or alien heads. Whatever you think it looks like, if you want to make your own version, the pattern is in my "Quilts for Coffee Lovers" PDF booklet on etsy, HERE. 

Have you made quilted pillows?