Design Concept

Scribble #1

Where There’s Smoke began with a free-form scribble, hand-drawn with a stylus directly on the touch screen of my Surface Design computer. Using a trace program, I turned the spaces between the lines into closed shapes and filled them with parts of a photograph of a 60” x 96” fabric I hand painted with dye twenty years ago. I moved the images around within the shapes, rotating, mirror-imaging, stretching and shrinking, until I liked the way the whole thing looked. This is the second quilt made from the same design. After making Scribble #1, the first, in mostly cool colors, I changed the shape from a rectangle to a square and altered all the colors to hues from the warm half of the color wheel. I designed binding strips to blend along the edges and sent a bitmap of the whole composition to Spoonflower to be printed. The free motion quilting was done with many different colors of polyester and acrylic thread.