Watercolor to Quilt Workshop

At the end of May I was able to take our first workshop of the year at work with Katie Pasquini Masopust.  Katie had us painting with watercolors and creating a variety of techniques and little 'sketches' using things like bubbles, india ink, straws, resists and color combo ideas.  This was a lot of fun and I would like to try it again with a little more time to experiment with all the different techniques.

straw-blown paint

We then looked through our paintings and found small cropped sections that we liked.  Nothing too big - mine were mostly 2"-3" x 3"-5" in size.  I chose a section of the sketch where I blew the paint around with a straw that had all the colors I had chosen: turquoise, purple, orange and yellowy-gold.  

This was  copied into a line drawing and enlarged to be about 36" in height.  One of my Junior Quilters, E, was also in the class, and we had a blast with the paintings!  We had a silly moment with the india ink and went all Doctor Who graffiti-style on one of our paint sketches.

Day 2 had us creating templates from the enlarged piece, cutting the shapes out of our fabrics and pinning them up to the wall on a copy of our enlarged designs.  Very cool to see the fabrics come together to look like the painting I'd made.  

I got all of my pieces cut that day and worked with fabrics exclusively from my stash - score!  E & I had lunch at Kirchoff's each day, with cookie of course, and ate down by the river.  Gorgeous weather and conversation was filled with quilt talk, Doctor Who, books and old movies.  :D

Day 3 I went about turning and pressing under all the raw edges.  Each piece was set in place and final changes on fabric or prints were made.  I managed to turn all the edges under before class ended.  After everyone else had packed up and headed home, E & I walked over to get ice cream cones to wrap up the workshop.  Yumm!  What a fun class and it was great to share it with E.  Katie is a fantastic teacher and she made each step of the process enjoyable.  She's very encouraging and I would definitely try this technique again in the future.

I managed to get my pieces all stitched down at home the following day so I now have a completed quilt top from this class.  Quilting it will have to wait until next month (or after I finish Swoon) but I'm looking forward to all the fun designs I can quilt into each of the colors and sections.

finished top!