CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
Designing with Bold Blooms
INSPIRATION
In Pursuit of Bold Blooms in Decorative Arts
THE SINGLE BLOSSOM
Stitching Needlepoint Blooms
FABRICS IN BLOOM
Drawing Blossoms for Quilting Cottons
FLOWERS ON RIBBONS
Designing Strips of Abstract Flowers
FLORAL PATCHWORK
Lush Arrangements of Flower Prints
LIVE FLOWERS
Arranging Fresh Blossoms
BOUQUET STILL LIFES
Painting Cut Flowers
PART TWO
Bold Bloom Quilts and Needlepoints
NEUTRALS & SOFT PASTELS
Gray Random Strips Quilt
Gray Blocks Quilt
White Dahlia Needlepoint Pillow
BRIGHT PASTELS
Radiating Bubbles Quilt
Yellow Sunlight Quilt
Basket Quilt
Bouquet Needlepoint Pillow
BRILLIANT HIGHS
Attic Window On-Point Quilt
Seed Packet Quilt
Round and Round Quilt
Carlton Ware Needlepoint Pillow
SMOLDERING DEEP TONES
Hexagon Florets Quilt
Tawny Hatboxes Quilt
Pink Peonies Needlepoint Pillow
LEAFY GREENS & FLOWERS
Leafy Appliqué Quilt
Leafy Medallion Quilt
Lattice with Vases Quilt
Tulip Vase Needlepoint Pillow
RICH, DARK TONES
Blue Ohio Star Quilt
Millefiore Snowball Quilt
String Stripes Quilt
Dark Peony Needlepoint Pillow
HIGH CONTRAST
Floral Octagons Quilt
High-Contrast Squares Quilt
Carnations Needlepoint Pillow
PART THREE
How To
INSTRUCTIONS
Quilting Basics
Needlepoint Basics
TEMPLATES
SOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
For many years I’ve dreamed of doing a book celebrating my passion for flowers in the decorative arts. I’ve been privileged to travel to all corners of the globe to see inspiring uses of flowers in everything from embroidery to wall decoration to architectural details.
My love of live flowers is no less passionate and never far from my color-processing thoughts. Realizing my love of blooms, my great friend photographer Steve Lovi taught me to explore gardens at different seasons and to draw people’s attention to the intense beauty of flower forms and colors. When I was planning my book Glorious Knitting in the 1980s, he encouraged me to have garments of certain color schemes knitted to coincide with the seasons at the gardens and parks where he planned to do our fashion shoots. During the last creative phase of his life, he would hit the flower markets of San Francisco at their dawn opening and be home ready to shoot a beautifully composed still life as the light became strong enough in his studio. I could easily do a whole book on the inspiration I gained from his photographs of flowers, so great is my admiration for his ingenious eye.
While creating this book, I focused on my desire to bring others a little closer to seeing flowers the way I do. Color is the starting point, and I’ve arranged the projects into color moods. Few other objects on this earth capture and reflect color the way flower petals do. From delicate pale subtleties to brilliant saturated primary hues to the smoldering depths of the darkest purples and bronze tones, flowers and foliage have it all.
Shape, of course, is vital to communicating the flower’s powerful beauty. What has always grabbed me are large-scale shapes that create the wow factor in nature. Perhaps it is my theatrical side that prefers florals that “read” from a stage or pop out of a textile design. There are plenty of people in the world who dissolve with delight over lilies of the valley, snowdrops, or tiny forget-me-nots, and I love them, too, but mostly I want to celebrate the extoverts of the plant world. The lacy delicate sprays we can leave aside for now as we plunge into the dramatic, full-blown, bold blooms of this world—blooms that aren’t shy, that stand out with punch and pizzazz, that sing opera not lullabies.
In addition to giving you flower-inspired projects to work on here, I share a behind-the-scenes look into the simple processes I go through when designing and painting bold blooms—from inspiration to color palettes to the final renderings in the forms of fabrics, quilts, needlepoints, ribbons, and live displays. I show you my designs and ideas as they “bloom.”
When designing the quilts included, I had at my disposal so many outspoken blooms in the array of super-large-scale floral prints in the Kaffe Fassett Collective fabric collection and in other knockout floral fabrics I have gathered over the years. “Fussy-cutting” very large flowers and smaller strong ones out of the fabrics allowed me to focus attention on their boldness. It also enabled me to cherry-pick colors from fabrics to create my specific color schemes. With needlepoint, of course, I was able to create any pronounced flower I desired.
While the projects included here feature the crafts of patchwork and needlepoint, the ideas I present translate to any discipline that uses pattern and color, including mosaics, embroidery, beading, knitting, rag rugs, furniture and wall decoration, and the display of live flowers. In producing a study of the bold flower element in the arts and nature, my desire is to inspire makers of many disciplines to use this floral excitement in their own way. By dedicating this book to the bold blooms, I hope to be sending you off on a passion-filled creative journey.
INSPIRATION
In Pursuit of Bold Blooms in Decorative Arts
Flowers have been a focus in my work for nearly as long as I can remember. They are a fragile, ephemeral element that seems born to delight us and help us realize that there is more to life than mere survival. The glow of pure color in flowers is my essential attraction to them. Of course, I am not alone. Flowers have been inspiring artists and craftspeople in nearly all creative media throughout time, in weaving, embroidery, mosaic, painting, jewelry, pottery, and wallpapers. The way flowers are depicted in decorative arts is endlessly fascinating to me.
To be sure, there are many moods and scales to floral depiction, from delicate sprays through riotous wildflower meadows. But my main obsession is with large-scale, articulate blooms with a pronounced shape, such as spiky dahlias, voluptuous peonies, and facelike pansies.
Much of my inspiration comes from East Asia. China and especially Japan are treasure troves when it comes to bold flower forms. From the most realistic flower paintings to the most abstracted simplified forms in unusual colorings, Japanese culture must be the most fertile on earth for flowers in decorative arts. The Japanese have entire festivals dedicated to individual blooms as they come into season, such as morning glories, chrysanthemums, and hydrangeas. As I write this, I’m looking at a gigantic weaving of a flaming orange chrysanthemum on a kimono sash probably made for the kabuki theater. The massive explosion of fiery petals shows half a flower that is the size of a large watermelon. How that must have glowed from the kabuki stage!
My full-on conscious search for floral inspiration started when I arrived in London from California in the 1960s as an aspiring fine artist. The wondrous halls of the Victoria and Albert Museum became my home away from home, a place where I began filling sketchbooks with inspiring florals of all sorts to be depicted later in my paintings. In the grand English houses I visited, I discovered eclectic furnishings that had been collected by world travelers and handed down from one generation to the next. Inlaid marble tables, huge oriental fans, massive printed and woven drapes and tapestries, wallpapers, and porcelains, all decorated with florals, lit up my imagination.
At the same time I found a treasure trove of flea markets and antique shops in London. I began collecting textiles and ceramics laden with floral motifs, pieces that continue to inspire me to this day, some of which appear in this book. After my first few years in England, keen to explore blossoms in media other than painting, I started working on my first needlepoints and fabric designs. To find subjects for my designs, I looked at my collections of objects depicting flowers and searched for books that showed clear, large-scale images of flowers on textiles, pottery, and in classic paintings. Rather than creating detailed, botanically accurate representation of a flower, I wanted to exaggerate and highlight certain shapes and colors, and seeing how other artists had done this was more helpful to me than photographs or even live specimens. In fact, I continue to use this technique in many of my projects today. My collecting isn’t as constant as it was years ago—my shelves are overstuffed—but I still pick up the occasional floral ceramic, beaded piece, or textile when I just can’t resist it.
FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THESE IMAGES, see this page
THE SINGLE BLOSSOM
Stitching Needlepoint Blooms
Once an inspiring bloom sparks my imagination, I am anxious to use it right away in my work. Needlepoint is perfect for this type of quick gratification because I am a fast stitcher and I love creating a bloom using a palette of colored wool threads. And, conveniently, I can easily carry needlepoint around wherever I go. With a lightweight piece of canvas, small skeins of many colors, a blunt-tipped tapestry needle, and a tiny pair of scissors, I am happily busy whenever and wherever, watching a colorful composition unfold at my fingertips.
When I’m dreaming up a needlepoint pillow on a floral theme, I always search for a large, bold rendering of a flower or flowers that I can use for reference. That rendering might be in a painting or on a ceramic piece, wallpaper design, or even a seed packet.
Although I sometimes do large panels, for most of my needlepoints I stick to pillow-size. A pillow is a relatively small object that could get lost or reduced to a bit of texture in a room if too understated, so I design my pillows as bright jewels meant to lift a furnishing scheme. For an even more emphatic statement, I make lots of pillows and place them all together. I have stacks of them in my studio.
With my source material in front of me, I begin by drawing the simple outlines of my bold bloom onto canvas with a waterproof pen. When picking colors I try to focus on hues that are radiant and a bit lighter than you might at first suppose. This is because each stitch on the canvas is surrounded by a slight shadow that tends to deepen whatever tone I have chosen. I also try to limit the number of colors I select—mostly to about fourteen to sixteen per design, or even to as few as ten. If I don’t go crazy with colors, my needlepoint can be made into a kit (or chart) that others can work from. These color boundaries are where creativity comes into play in a big way because they encourage me to figure out how to make fourteen colors feel like twenty-five. It is amazing how this magic happens once you get used to the discipline.
I begin the needlepoint by stitching color inside my drawn outlines, introducing details and highlights stitch by stitch. As the bloom grows, I work little bits of the background color I’ve chosen around it to see how it will affect the shades within the flower. Then I can strengthen or temper the bloom colors if necessary. I don’t slavishly follow the outlines if I see where I can improve them, and I almost never take out any stitches, but instead just keep building on them.
If I have several needlepoints on the go at once, I complete everything until only the background needs finishing, then I hand off the remaining stitching to someone else in the studio while I turn my attention to my next creation.
For me, the joy of needlepointing is not just the end result. I deeply enjoy the process of sitting still—back to the window with the daylight pouring in over my shoulder—dabbing colored stitches like paint onto my canvas while I listen to plays on the radio.
FABRICS IN BLOOM
Drawing Blossoms for Quilting Cottons
Before discovering textiles I saw myself as a fine-art painter. I painted still lifes so I could create indoor “landscapes” and not allow bad weather to deter me from painting every day. In my early years in London these paintings were filled with decorative china on patterned cloth. When I was painting I would wonder how these patterned cloths came about.
Stephen Sheard and Ken Bridgewater, who founded Westminster Fibers (then known as Westminster Patchwork and Quilting), asked me to design my first quilting cottons in the 1990s, so I reached into my imagination for the fabrics I had loved in the past—those chintzy big-scale florals on drapes and bed covers I’d encountered in grand English country houses in the 1990s. Having studied old patchwork and noticed that most of the prints were small-scale, I decided I should start by making some small-scale texture-type prints, like dots, pebbles, artichokes, and smaller flowers. I call them “texture-type” prints because, seen at a distance, the motifs of small-scale prints tend to blur together with their background to create a textured color tone. Stripes and paisleys also became favorite themes because they are great to cut and arrange in patchwork and add sparks of movement within the whole. After these initial explorations, inspired by my memory of quilts made with furnishing fabrics with large-scale motifs, I started designing prints with large-scale flowers and, nearly instantly, I realized I had found my specialty. I loved designing large blooms, and they definitely set my collection apart in the world of quilting fabric, where bitty prints were (and still are) the norm.
When I started designing prints, first I learned the art of the repeat from a textile designer—how to draw only one section of the design, a section that fits together with itself so it can be repeated over and over across yards (meters) of fabric. I also learned how to design with a limited number of colors as each color added makes the fabric more expensive to produce. I realized quickly—and with great joy—that designing floral fabric was bringing back my painting and drawing skills. At the same time, it gave me the chance to design the sort of fabrics that thrilled me in museum collections, antique shops, and old country houses.
My florals got even bigger when I painted a fabric design called Bekah. I was painting the design twice as large as it would be printed in order to get in the detail and so that when printed at a reduced size, it would look sharp. The finished design looked so good large that the manufacturer—to my delight—decided to print it that way. From then on, I never hesitated to paint huge blooms and have them printed at the same size as the artwork.
When designing floral fabrics, first I do my usual search through my own sketchbooks and my collection of decorative art books for inspiration. I usually already have ideas for what I am looking for—things that sparked my imagination in the past that I haven’t yet had a chance to work on. Several different blooms from different sources often find their way into a single design.
Gouache is my preferred medium for fabric designs because it is opaque, making it easy for the fabric printers to reproduce the painted strokes. My paint palette is nothing grand—frosted plastic tops from restaurant takeout containers or a plain white china plate. If the repeat size of the painted design is going to be fairly small, I paint it onto a pad of white watercolor paper about 12" × 17" (30 cm × 43 cm). For really big designs, I cut pieces off a roll of drawing paper that is 5 feet (1.5 m) wide. I tape the paper to a large plywood board that rests on my painting table. My paints in small tubes sit on a card table to the side.
My brushes are generally limited to three sizes: a very fine brush for outlines, dots, and stripes; a slightly larger brush for almost everything else; and a medium-size brush for filling in largish backgrounds. To rinse them, I set up a few empty jam jars with fresh water. The most important ingredients of all while I am painting fabric designs are lots of daylight and BBC Radio 4 as company in the background, churning out interesting interviews, news on current events, and plays.
As I draw out my repeat and paint in the colors, I register each new color in a grid outside the artwork. When the original is complete I photocopy it and paint my different colorways for the design on top of the printed photocopy in grids that match the original colorway grid. The printer can then see what color to substitute for each color in the original when making each new colorway of the design.
I mail off my completed designs and colorway information directly to the printer and wait for a month or two for fabric samples, called strike-offs, to arrive back in the studio for approval. If there are changes to be made, I make careful note of them and return the strike-offs to the printer for the changes. It’s an exciting day when the fabric is finally delivered and placed on my shelves, ready to become my next quilts.
FLOWERS ON RIBBONS
Designing Strips of Abstract Flowers
In 2004 Renaissance Ribbons asked me to design for them. I think I may have turned them down three times before—convinced I didn’t have the time—until I finally succumbed to the tempation. Their jacquard ribbons are so exquisite and woven in such stunning detail that I couldn’t resist having a go at them. That first season they gave me free rein to design five ribbons in any pattern or color palette without having to create a “collection” per se. Not surprisingly, I was quickly hooked, and since then I have designed about ten sets (and counting) of four to seven ribbons in all sorts of patterns, including stripes, circles, squares, dots, florals, and abstract designs.
I approach ribbon design similarly to fabric design and paint the designs in gouache. But in this case, I’m limited to six or seven colors per ribbon and a repeat width of about 1–4" (2.5–10 cm), which are interesting challenges. Sometimes I hit on designs when looking through my decorative arts books and other times Renaissance Ribbons will ask me to adapt a design from one of my fabrics.
For floral ribbons, the blooms have to stand out from a distance and, at the same time, be detailed enough to look superb when viewed up close. After I send my designs to Renaissance, they make up samples for me to color-correct. They go to great pains to reproduce my artwork with amazing accuracy, sometimes going through several proofs, which I appreciate immensely. I have used my ribbons on cushions and on the button bands and cuffs of my shirts. Spools of all my ribbons are displayed in a colorful array on a shelf at eye level in the office in my studio, where they catch my eye every time I pass by.
FLORAL PATCHWORK
Lush Arrangements of Flower Prints
It’s always hard for me to analyze the process I go through when I am designing a quilt because it is totally instinctive. But, since I’m often asked about my process, I will try.
It all starts off with a request for a quilt from a craft magazine or from a private client for a unique piece. Or I may have just begun a collection of quilts for a book. The reason it’s hard for me to explain what happens next is because from the time I think, oh, I need to design a quilt, my imagination is a whirl of activity. Sometimes I recall a vintage quilt from memory that I have been longing to reinterpret. Or, if that isn’t the case, I might look through my books of vintage quilts to see if something there draws my attention. Or I might refer to my newest fabrics, which are always begging to find their way into an assemblage of patchworked shapes.
When designing for a magazine or book, I work within certain boundaries. I try to limit myself to twenty fabrics per quilt. This is difficult sometimes because I produce scraplike quilts that need to have a lot of variety. I also try to do layouts that are easy for the instruction writer to break down into manageable steps and for quilters to sew.
Of course, designing a quilt for a private client is always a joy—I can use any fabrics I want, from those in my own extensive collections of stripes, prints, and solids to any scraps I have collected over the years of other designers’ work, including pieces of vintage fabric. Anything that suits my chosen palette can find its way into a quilt when there are no constraints at all. But the challenge of having to use only the fabrics from my latest collections doesn’t dim my enthusiasm—they are bursting with colors and motifs I love.
Deciding on a palette for a quilt just comes to me as I look over my newest prints and my classics. I start to pile up fabric pieces on the floor—all in either soft neutrals, brilliant jewel tones, or something in between. I arrange the pieces next to each other so they enhance or harmonize with each other. Seeing the fabrics spread out can lead my palette in a slightly different direction as I find out how the prints and colors react with and against each other. Having chosen some starting fabrics, I can begin to cut my patches. If it’s a format I’ve used before, such as a Tumbling Blocks or Snowball quilt, I can look it up in one of my previous books and use the templates or measurements there. If the format is new to me, I’ll ask my collaborator, Liza Prior Lucy, to send me the templates I need.
As I cut my fabric pieces I stick them up on my gray cotton flannel design wall so I can stand back and view from a distance. I used to try to guess what fabrics would look like combined by simply folding and arranging them on the floor, then standing on tiptoes on a bed or chair to view. When I realized that cut pieces of cotton would stick (without even a single pin) to a piece of flannel hung on my studio wall, my entire workflow changed. With the design wall, I can stand back as far as needed to really see the composition. Instead of making my best guess of what I want and then sending instructions to a sewer to test, I can now make my choices with much more certainty that the end result will be successful. Many hours of unpicking stitches and revising are saved.
When I look at a design on a wall, I can clearly see how the fabrics are interacting. The gray color of the flannel is very important; it enhances colors and makes them easier to work with. In constrast, using a white flannel ground would be like looking at colors against a snow bank, which is very hard on the eyes and distracts from the colors’ innate hue and intensity. Sometimes colors I thought would work stop my eye from moving pleasantly around the whole arrangement. Quickly I take them down and replace them with fabrics that have a level of color more in keeping with the rest of the work.
At this point, usually I sit down and knit a few rows or stitch on a project on the go next to my chair, which is across the room from my work wall. From there I can quietly study the new composition I’m creating. If I’m not quite satisfied, I’ll wait until the next day to come into my studio after a good night’s sleep and catch it afresh. That is the point when I can usually see what is amiss and correct it.