I have a new goddess art quilt in progress! I've created a quick video sharing how this quilt was designed and two timelapse videos of the construction:
Note from Leah: Due to time, space, and length challenges, this quilt did NOT end up being included in the book Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day. The stained glass applique technique I used to create this quilt wasn't a good choice for walking foot quilting.
This beautiful quilt was inspired by the song I Walk The Line, which is a Johnny Cash song, but I knew it from the cover by Halsey.
I loved the line "I keep a close watch out on this heart of mine...Because you're mine....I walk the line."
This hit a chord for me because I've been married eleven years and we've gone through a lot of great times and challenging times, but we've always managed to "walk the line" and stay together. I also like the idea of keeping an eye on your heart - always a good idea!
When I heard this song I saw a curvy goddess figure walking along a black line that recedes into the distance. It wasn't a particularly dramatic image, but it was different from other my other goddess quilt ideas because for the first time the figure was facing away.
So that was the original idea and I let it bounce around my head for a few weeks and got busy working on my new book on walking foot quilting. As I was creating the list of quilt projects to include in the book, I felt strong push to include her. This would be the first goddess art quilt I've broken down into a step-by-step pattern, which would be both challenging and fun to try.
I began with my usual design routine - I sketched the basic idea on plain paper. I got the basic shape of the goddess and the perspective set up on paper, then shot a picture of it and began working in a graphic design program on my computer.
As you can see, I left most of the ground, sky, and mountains out of the original sketch because they would be easier to create using shapes on the computer. Once I created the design, I began playing with color:
Unfortunately this wasn't really looking that great. The colors worked...sort of...but it didn't give me the right feeling. It's hard to describe, but when I know a goddess design is ready, it just feels right.
So I played around with it for a bit and even tried switching out the sun for a moon and different sky design but I didn't like it as well. Sometimes designs are very quick and go from drawing to finished design in a few days, and sometimes it takes a few weeks. I have some goddess quilt designs that have never been finished. Something was always a bit "off" about them.
I hit a lucky break when I found a new app called Prisma which applies an art filter over your images. I began playing with the app and immediately fell in love with the "Paper Art" setting. This image gave me a new perspective on color and design for my goddess art quilt:
Isn't it amazing how much this changes the look and feel of the quilt? I really loved the thick black lines that appeared over the goddess and in the sky area. I decided that I'd actually picked the right colors, but I needed to add a thick black line between each fabric color to make each stand out individually.
The easiest way to do this in quilting is to apply black bias binding to the quilt surface. This is typically called a stained glass quilt because the thick binding on the surface mimics the look of the lead spacers in stained glass.
So that is how I began the quilt! I enlarged the design to create a nice wall hanging sized quilt, printed out the pages on freezer paper and began building it one piece at a time over fusible interfacing.
The construction is quite easy and fast and I love how the bias binding hides a lot of mistakes on the surface.
Learn more about my goddess art quilt series, or make one yourself by clicking the photos below:
