I have recently bought Lyric Kinard’s book, Art + Quilt, Design Principles and Creative Activity Exercises. It is based on the principle that design can start from your stash of fabrics.  So I did!

First, one has to photocopy in black and white some of one’s fabrics, cut them up and make paper designs.  These are “visual texture”.  It was a brilliant way of designing a number or pieces.  Here is one of my designs with added text.

I made one of the designs up into a journal quilt.  There are plenty more that could be used either in black and white or colour.  The fabrics in this quilt are discharged with formosul.

The next exercise is called “actual texture”.  I made two journal quilts.  The aim was to use neutrals, so I did one using walnut dyed fabrics and another using fabric dyed with cochineal.

The pink one is not to my taste at all but was sort of rescued by adding raspberry text!

Yesterday, I moved onto the “shape and meaning” exercise.  I am really pleased with the quilting – not perfect by any means but a good start to overcoming the procarastination that happens prior to quilting – I can spend ages trying to decide how to quilt and then not liking what I have done.  I like this and just got on with it.