Workshop: Inspired By Art

 

The workshop I took last month with David Owen Hastings was really excellent. It was titled "Inspired By Art" which sounded very intriguing to me. SBAMQG had him speak at our retreat last year so we got a little preview of the idea. We were supposed to choose a piece of art that we liked and to be ready for class, to pull some fabrics based on the colors in the art. Here's most of the fabric I pulled to work with.

This is the piece of art that I chose, a Dali print we have had hanging up in our house ever since we saw a Dali exhibit in Venice in 1988. My goodness, that was so long ago! The Berlin Wall fell the year afterwards! Anyway...time marches on, and I continue to take classes.

After a great presentation by David on what to look for when being inspired by art for this process, we got  down to work. 

First, we folded up pieces of paper to make a nice infinitely adjustable view finder and then sketched out basic lines for potential block designs in a small quick study.

Then we enlarged the designs to the size of blocks we wanted to make and it was time for fabric. The sizes were all very loosey-goosey and improv-y which worked for me. No exactitude required, as this is all "inspired by" not  "making an exact copy of" kind of process.

One of my intended to be a square blocks turned into quite a rectangle, but I got the curves in that I wanted to make and it worked out.

I surprised myself how well I did on the curve sewing, but David had great advice on the sewing of improv cut curves which worked for me. Sometimes a teacher says something in a certain way that finally gets through to me and I have that wonderful lightbulb moment.

Then it was time to "square up" into blocks. There was quite a lot of fabric wastage with using this technique, but if I'd been sewing more exactly and measuring it would be reduced.

At the end of class I had three blocks done, and I'm very pleased with how they look together.

The colors and lines really capture the painting for me, and they're such interesting blocks especially all together. David showed us all sorts of ways to continue from this point to set the blocks into a quilt top design and I plan to make at least ten blocks and go from there. This workshop was so fun and challenging. It was truly awesome to see what everyone else in class made as we went along. 

I really recommend taking a workshop or lecture from David if you ever get a chance.