“Ghost” in the blocks – This one may require a little ruler work unless you can freehand some perfectly straight lines.When you’re finished, you will find some really interesting texture has emerged. Then move to the next shape, outline, and repeat. Then fill the center with tiny meanders, loops, or whatever you like. For instance, if you’ve divided your background into rectangles, stitch around the outline of the rectangles once or twice. Mark the spaces with a water-soluble pen (or your preferred marking tool) and then quilt the outline of the shape. Before you put the quilt on the long arm or sandwich it up for your domestic machine, divide the negative spaces into shapes. Break the background into shapes and quilt each shape – This one is a lot of fun.It really doesn’t matter, chose one and cover the quilt with it. Wavy lines can also be used, as well as grids. “Wallpaper” the quilt – Simply use horizontal or vertical rows of straight line quilting to cover the quilt.Then use some filler loops, meanders, or swirls to move to the next block. Echo the shape of the block – After the inside of the block is quilted, outline outside of the block a few times, with each line of quilting about ¼-inch away from the other.My list is by no means exhaustive, but these are generally my “go-to” quilting formulas for large areas of blank space. So now that you may have decided to construct a quilt with lots of negative space, how are you planning to quilt it? I have a few favorite techniques I use. Generally they help the quilt form a secondary pattern, but they also tend to have more negative space than the primary blocks, giving your eyes a place to rest. Which use “joiner” blocks instead of sashing to separate the blocks. The Snowball block is the joiner block for this quilt. Quilters who are accustomed to working with lots of negative space often already have the quilting planned in their minds before they start piecing because the negative space works in tandem with the piecing for an overall effect. When you chose a pattern and piece the quilt, at what point do you consider the actual quilting? You may be careful with the piecing process so that the quilting process is easy, but when do you actually think about the quilting design? Once the quilt is finished and you must consider how to quilt it? When you talk with your long arm artist to decide if an edge-to-edge or some custom quilting will enhance the quilt? Or do you consider how you will quilt the quilt before you make the first cut into the fabric? Skeptical about this? Okay, think about your own quilting. Modern quilts use the quilting as part of the overall quilt design. Traditional quilts use quilting to enhance the pieced blocks and fill in the negative areas. The aspect I find so different between modern quilts and traditional quilts is the actual quilting. The background can be solid, a micro-print, tone-on-tone, etc. It doesn’t matter what color the background is – ecru, gray, black, red, pink, purple or any other color – the negative space is the background fabric. With a traditional quilt, the background is considered the negative. There are lots of articles and books on this subject by artists who have studied negative and positive space a lot more thoroughly than I have.įirst, let’s take a look at a “traditional quilt” and its use of negative space. I just hope it proves to be a “jumping off” place to spark your interest and get you thinking. This blog is by no means the definitive work on either. What I want to try to do with this blog is define both spaces in the realms of traditional quilts and modern quilters. However, for quilters the terms negative and positive can be broken down into two simple ideas: The word negative is the key to a lot of ideas – those black and white images produced on a strip of film way back in the day when the camera was a separate piece of technology not on your phone, a bad attitude, or a bank account in serious trouble. However, in one aspect all of us fall into the artist category because we deal with both positive and negative space. Some consider quilting a hobby and others quilt along with sewing garments or other crafty things. Some definitely consider fabric their medium for creating works of art. When you ask a quilter if they are an artist, a hobbyist, or a sewer, generally you’ll find a good chunk of us will fall into all three categories.
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