Many art quilts start with a photo, and today's episode provides you with techniques and tips for that process.

Using photographs of my homes over the years.

I'll show you how I create appliqué portraits featuring lots of rich architectural detail.

Next, you'll learn how Nanette Zeller's attempt to preserve a friend's photo resulted in a whole new path in her art quilting journey.

Join us on today's episode of Quilting Arts.

Quilting Arts TV is brought to you by.

The Bernina 990.

If it can be imagined, it can be created.

Gentle fuse.

Fusible web.

Made for quilters from Maywood Studio.

[Upbeat music] I recently decided it would be really fun to do a series of little portraits of the houses that my husband and I have lived in, and I started out with this first one, which is an old, old house, 1790s, the house we lived in in Charlottesville, Virginia.

We rented this house.

But it's so fun to have these little memories in fabric.

The first one that I did was this one, and I'm going to show you a few of the steps.

I had some photos, but they weren't of the whole house, and they weren't great because this was way back in the 90s.

So I had done a drawing and I thought, okay, well, at least this way gives me the whole house.

So my first step is to take a piece of tracing paper, put it on top of the photo, or in this case, the drawing, and to trace the elements with a permanent marker onto the tracing paper.

And then from there I enlarge it.

I take this to my scanner at home, I scan it in and I enlarge it to the size that I want the finished quilt to be.

So this shows my my enlarged drawing that I can work from to create all of the fabric pieces.

I'm going to demonstrate that in a little bit, but let me show you another one.

So this piece is the house I live in currently.

This is a 1970 modernist house in Chapel Hill.

I looked at a bunch of photos of the house.

I have it in winter.

I have it in all different seasons, and eventually decided that this was the photo that I liked the best.

It has the whole house shown.

I like that there were trees in the foreground.

So you want to think about what you want to include and try to find the right photo.

Sometimes you can work from several photos and incorporate elements from one or the other.

So again, I traced it and I enlarged it to the size that I wanted it to be.

And then I put plastic on top and created an overlay and created this piece.

So let's get into a few more details of specifically how to do one of these.

So this is the house where we lived near Charlotte, North Carolina, the house where we reared our children.

And I had good, some good pictures of it.

And I decided again, I wanted a photo that showed the whole house.

I kind of like this shot better because it shows more of the trees.

So there's a better sense of the setting of the house, but I wasn't.

I really liked the American flag in this one.

So when I did this piece, I used this photo.

But I brought the American flag from this one in.

And you can do that.

You can work from two photos and incorporate elements.

When you trace it, you can just move the tracing paper onto the other photo and incorporate elements as you want.

So this is the photo I worked from.

Here's my tracing paper on top.

Sometimes when I trace, I change things a little bit.

But again you take the tracing paper, scan it in, enlarge it so that you have something that's the size of the piece you want to make.

You will see here too.

I've got some marks on here that I was, I did when I was working on this piece to get the pieces cut correctly.

And if I change my mind or I want to change it, I make different marks on here, a note over here to myself to extend everything out a little bit, just to give the house a little bit more breathing space, make the composition a little bit different.

And the next step that I kept talking about before, I'm going to actually show you now is this is clear upholstery vinyl.

So it comes in different weights.

This is the medium weight.

You don't want the lightweight because it's like that plastic food wrap.

It's too flimsy.

You don't want it to be really thick and crunchy.

This is very easy to work with.

So I put this on top of my pattern or my printed out pattern and I traced it.

I traced everything on there using a black permanent marker.

You want to check and make sure that the marker you use is permanent on plastic.

Some permanent pens are permanent on paper, but not on plastic, and they'll smear.

So draw a little bit and tested again if you want to adjust things, change things a little bit.

Now is the time.

And then I always mark it with up.

Can you see that?

Write your name.

Put a word.

You want to be able to know which side is facing up, because we're going to be flipping this back and forth a lot.

And it's very easy to get confused.

So here is the composition that is kind of all built.

And I'll position.

This is my positioning overlay.

So when I do this I tape everything down.

And I use the positioning overlay to I pick it up and I slide individual pieces of the of the composition underneath there and make sure they're in exactly the right place.

It's not as important for the trees and things like that, but for the windows and the columns and the roof, you want those to be where they're supposed to be, or else it's going to start to look wrong.

Always looking at the photo.

So let me show you a little bit about how to create the fabric pieces.

This one is completely ready to go, but I decided I needed to add a little bit of shadowing along the edge here.

So I'm going to create one more piece.

I work with my positioning overlay, but I need to flip it upside down right?

I'm flipping it upside down.

And then I'm going to look at my this is this is the fusible adhesive.

This one has two paper sides.

The glue is attached to one of those sides.

And I'm going to be drawing on that side.

So I want to make sure I get this little bit of dark green that is the the edge of the shadow of the monkey.

It's called monkey grass on here.

I make sure it goes if it goes under any elements I need to do that.

I make sure that it's going off the edge far enough, because that's going to be my seam allowance.

Right?

And then this gets cut out.

Just cut out roughly.

Because you don't want to, you know, waste your your fabric or your fusible.

Really.

All right I'll pull the cutting mat in.

And you would want to iron this onto the wrong side of the fabric.

I'm using a batik fabric, so it's not as big of a deal, but I'm going to put it down here.

Follow the directions on your fusible.

Iron it down, and now you can cut it out exactly on the lines.

Okay.

So you would cut it like this I always find it's easier to move the fabric under the scissors for little wiggly marks like that.

And I would cut that whole thing off out so that I've got a piece that looks like I put it in here so it wouldn't slide away.

A piece that looks like this.

Okay, from here I'm going to take the back paper fusible off so you can see the glue there.

And we'll position this very last piece on here and iron it into place.

I'm going to put it right there.

And this shadow is really important because without it it just doesn't look as dimensional.

Get it right up there against the flower pot that's already on there.

And I'm going to iron it down.

All right.

We got it on there.

Make sure it's make sure everything's pressed down really well.

And now you can see that I've also got I've got everything down and I've pinned it.

I haven't pinned it a lot.

I probably would pin it a little bit more if I were doing this at home.

But now we're ready to sit down and get back to stitching.

And pull this in here.

And I also want to grab my photo of the house.

That's important.

See it under here?

I think it's under here.

There we go.

I always have the photo near me while I'm stitching, because I'm referring to it constantly to make sure that I get the details right.

So here you can see I'm going to work a little bit on the trees.

I've got green thread in both the top and the bobbin, and I like to use like a 50 weight, a very lightweight, sometimes sold as embroidery thread.

I like the lightweight thread because I can add those fine details without building up too much.

So I'm going to lower the presser foot, and I always bring my bobbin thread up by taking one stitch in and bringing that bobbin thread up to the top.

Pull those threads out of the way at about 10 or 11:00 on the clock dial, and I use the hand wheel to go back in exactly where I came out, lower my presser foot, and now I'm ready to stitch.

And I'm using a system in this machine that helps helps regulate the the stitches so that they're all about the same length.

Sometimes I work in this mode, and sometimes I work just the way I would normally on other on older machines that don't even have this feature.

So you can see I'm kind of going, I'm making sure that all of those pieces get stitched down, but I'm also going out into this other area.

Sometimes when you're doing little fiddly things, I work, I go more to like the manual and work so I can go a little bit faster.

It's all just what you're comfortable with.

As far as free motion quilting.

I'm going to go in here and I'm thinking about leaves and trying to add some shapes that look a little bit like the foliage, and I'm moving my hands pretty slowly.

So the trick with free motion quilting is to try to move your hands at a constant speed and keep your needle going at a constant speed so that you have a really nice, even stitch.

But on this, I'm going to need to get everything stitched down.

And I'm going to talk just a little bit here.

I'll stop stitching.

I love doing this so much I can't stop.

But on on something like this, you can see that I've added some things with these markers that are permanent on fabric and it gives me a nice fine line.

Fine crisp line.

and you can see I've added some of the details that I'm going to go in with stitch and get very light pencil marks to show me where all the boards on the siding are going to be.

But I'll stitch all of that and it adds really wonderful texture and details.

Let me go back for just a second.

I think we have a little bit of time left and show these again, because I wanted to talk about, for example, on this one, I paid a lot of attention to the details in the trunk, adding a lot of a lot of extra details here on the foliage to give texture.

Anything that's important.

This is all the trees in the background, I think, add so much to this piece because it creates the setting for the portrait.

So this is a great way to document your house and have those nice memories.

And it's also a wonderful project to practice your free motion quilting.

So I hope you enjoy.

This technique is really fun!

Mixed media textile artist Nanette Zeller makes beautiful art quilts and you start with a photo, right?

I do, I. Take photos all the time around my house, birds and trees and I started this technique.

I call it photo to whole cloth art quilt.

And I started this because a friend of mine went to New Zealand and she came back with these beautiful photographs and she said, I want to commission you to do a quilt for me based on my photograph.

And I looked at this beautiful photograph and I went, I could appliqué, I could whatever, do all sorts of different things to it, but it's going to take away from her memory of that place.

Oh right.

- So this is her memory, her photo.

And so I took it and I printed the image on fabric using a print on demand company.

There's all sorts of print on demand companies out there that you can choose from, and they all basically do the same thing.

They print yardage, they might print sheets, lots of different options for these things.

And so I printed it into a fat quarter size piece of fabric and I just embellished it.

And a lot of this is just the photograph itself.

But if you look in detail, you can see where I've done the moss with thread painting.

And then I've also enhanced the water with some more dense stitching in there, and then used a holographic thread to kind of make the water shimmer.

So - Oh that's great.

And then once it was all embellished, then I put the batting and backing on it, and I quilted it to make the dimension on it.

And it's finished super easy.

- I bet she loves it.

She loves it.

- Yeah.

She thankfully she allowed me to bring it here today so that I can show everybody.

Oh it's beautiful.

Well, let's talk briefly about these also.

Yes.

- So here's a couple more.

These are ones from my photographs.

It's a Queen Anne's lace flower that was grown in my yard.

And I just love this flower so much.

And I took an angle of it up from the bottom and just wanted to embellish the flower parts of it.

And you can see how the background, I just added quilting to it to kind of add texture, but it doesn't really take away from the flower itself.

Yeah.

And there's so much beautiful texture in here.

And then - And then this one is a photograph from a marsh near my aunt where my aunt lived.

And I love this.

It's a special memory for me.

And I started sent the photograph to the Print on demand company, got the photograph back on the fabric, and I started just doing some thread painting on the foreground and the background and on the egret itself.

And I decided at this point that, you know, it needed a little pop.

So I started doing hand stitching on it to add different levels of character, And that helps so much.

helps pull it up, and I put a little bit of hand stitching along the back of the egret to really make the light kind of shine back on it.

So I started doing both, whether I'm using machine stitching or hand quilting to enhance these photographs that I've created, and then do the quilting to kind of pull it all together, - Yeah.

Great.

Okay.

So now we're going to you're going to show me how.

So I start by you can buy a different size fabrics.

When you go onto these companies and different types of fabrics I like to choose a cotton fabric that's 54in wide.

- Okay.

And I like to start with a fat quarter.

So half of 54 is 27.

So I start with a 27 by 18 inch block in a photo editing software.

And there's all sorts of photo editing software out there.

I can And there's free ones, - There's free ones, there's prices that are reasonable, and then there's some that are really expensive.

So you just choose what you have.

Basically, we want something that will do layers in in the the system itself.

So if I go to The image size of this one, you can see that it's 27 by 18.

So that's the fat quarter size.

And then it also has a resolution which is pixels per inch.

So it's the number of dots that create the image itself.

Right.

- And it's 150.

- Okay.

I didn't come up with that number on my own.

The company that I went through said this is the best way for our company.

So you need to check with the print on demand company what resolution that they want you to import images.

Okay.

So then what I did is I want the quilt that I'm going to demo today is ten by 16.

So I go in and I place that image on there.

Well a ten by 16 doesn't quite fill the whole fat quarter.

So I'm going to use the rest of that real estate.

Okay.

- And in this case you're paying for it.

I'm paying for it.

So why pay for white fabric.

So I'll lay another ten by 16 on there.

Or you could use another image completely.

Right?

I could use another image completely.

Or if I wanted a whole fat quarter, I would just make sure that it would fit in the fat quarter.

Now, one of the things that I want to do is make sure that there's enough white space around there so that in case there's distortion when it's printed, in case when I'm binding it, I need extra seam allowance around it for the binding or squaring it up.

I have that space around the images to do that.

And so for this purpose I had the 210 by 16 is enough space to take them out individually.

And then I uploaded them to the print on demand company.

And I then went to that company and pulled up that image that I uploaded, and I selected the fabric that I wanted.

And you could see here that it says a fat quarter is 27 by 18in.

And you can see it's printing out, giving me a little demo that's exactly like the graphic that I had.

So you can double check and make sure it's right.

- Right.

Double check.

And if I decide, well, you know what, I want a whole yard of this.

It'll give me a quick review and show me.

So you could get eight of them.

Eight of them.

So fat quarters, a fourth of a yard.

So it gives me four times over of that image.

And so what I have here is.

This one.

This one is the fat quarter that came back from the company on the fabric that I selected.

And it gave me two, ten by 16 images so that I can use today.

Nice.

The next thing that I do is in this particular case, this image itself, like I really liked it.

And primarily why I liked it, is that this one flower in the center was really the focal point, and I wanted to embellish it, to kind of make it look more interesting, three dimensional.

And so I don't need to worry about the rest of the quilt.

I just need to worry about this, this.

And so I need to put a when I'm doing thread painting, I need to put a interfacing on the back to stabilize the fabric.

Otherwise you get too much draw up and.

Draw up or could pucker.

And so in this case, because I know that the flower is right in here, I use a medium weight interfacing that's fusible.

And if you look at it you may see the little shimmer that's in there.

If it was, if I was doing the whole quilt, I would put a piece for the whole backing.

But this one, I'm just going to put it behind that flower, iron it in place based on the manufacturer's requirements.

Okay.

- And then from there we'll go to the sewing machine.

It's already stabilized.

I've already started this one, but we'll go to the sewing machine and I'll show you how I start doing the quilting.

Okay.

Great.

So I've already started on this particular piece and I've laid two different colors.

I like to use at least three values of color to blend things together and make it look more natural.

And so I've added a darker and a medium weight medium color thread pink thread in here.

Now I'm going to go with a lighter thread and I'll drop the needle down.

Pull it up, bring up that bobbin thread.

So your neat and tidy.

Neat and tidy go down into the same hole.

And start stitching.

I do this thing that I call a zigzag free motion zigzag, where I just go up and back and I do go over the threads that were previously laid down.

So they blend.

So it blends.

I want those colors to blend.

And I'm also following a step and get those out of the way.

And I'm also following the colors that are in the image itself as a guide.

So it's like a color by number.

I don't have to think about Yeah.

- too much of where I'm going with it, and I just continue to fill in.

And it looks like you're using are you using a 30 weight or 40 weight thread?

This is a 50 weight.

50 weight.

Okay.

- 50 weight cotton.

- So pretty fine.

Okay.

And so you also use an 80 12 top stitch needle in order that the thread goes through the needle.

- Okay.

Well, let's take it back to the table.

- Okay.

And about the next step.

Let's cut the thread.

Okay.

Okay.

So from here once you've got all your stitching done.

Then the next.

Right.

- Okay.

Yeah.

So this is the finished results of all the thread work that I did.

So I did the stem and the flower and did all the blending here.

I also did some hand embroidery Beautiful.

- on the back to make it really pop.

I thought it needed that.

- Yeah.

And then so now I look at the interfacing on the back and you can see my stitches, and I want to remove anything that's not around the stitching itself.

So I frequently use either a chopstick or knitting needle and go in there and, and get in those tight spaces to loosen it up.

- Oh pop the glue off.

- Pop the glue off of it, whoops And then just come in there with a curved, neat scissors and make sure I'm not cutting the front and just go along the stitching line in there to release it.

And then I can peel it away or cut it away.

Okay, great.

- And so.

The next we're going to layer right.

We're already layered.

So we're layering it.

And I'm going to do you show you the before and after.

So this is the photograph printed on fabric.

And then you can see it after it's been.

And it just looks like that flower is in focus now.

And then the quilt itself I went in afterwards doing the stitch work, and I made the quilt sandwich and did some additional quilting on there that enhance the quilt, but didn't take away from.

Because your eye is immediately drawn right - Right.

to where all the detail is and this flower is in focus.

So was it.

And it was it was more in focus there.

But it looks even more - Right.

- Now.

It's popping from the background.

It's really the focal point of this image.

- Yeah.

Beautiful.

Okay.

So you have some other images here that these are one these are candidates.

Right?

- Right.

These are works in progress.

So I've taken the image and uploaded it on a fat quarter to the print on demand company.

And this one is a really good one to look at for potential.

I look at this and I see, well, I could hand embroider the flowers that are in here to really make them pop.

This was taken on a very shadowy day.

So the image itself is kind of dark and.

But you can brighten everything, brighten it.

Up with the stitching.

I can do some extra layers of batting behind there to make sort of a trapunto effect.

So the face is 3D back here.

I could easily see doing stitches back there to push that backwards, but also make it look more grassy.

Terrific.

Let's look at this next one we have about 30s.

So this one is a little bit it's questionable I really love this image.

It's on fabric - It's great.

- and I'm debating about like what do I do with it?

I really like that it's just black and white.

So I may just enhance the birds a little bit.

Yeah.

And I may do the bark just to kind of push the bark backwards.

And - You could do the birds and maybe some of the pine.

Some of the pine needles in like a darker green.

So it really steps out.

- It'll be great.

Yeah.

- Terrific technique.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

We'll be back in just a minute.

From applied design theory to innovative technique.

Learn what fellow artists are up to within the art quilting community.

Join us for finishing touches.

Hi, Marcia.

Hey, Susan.

These are both kind of nature flower related little art quilts.

- They sure are.

And this first one has the subject holding up these flowers up into the sky, I think.

I believe the title is something like From Sea to Sky.

Yeah.

- So here's the definitely the sea.

I love how these little pleats in this water fabric are kind of or tucks are moving.

- They're giving us waves.

Yes.

- Yes.

The lot of motion there.

Look at the tiny word on the fabric here.

- Amore.

And this look at this quilting I didn't even see originally.

So bumpy.

- Amazing, right?

- Yeah.

It's crazy what the quilting can add so much dimension.

And then this one.

So cute.

Nature on my mind is the title.

It's so funny.

Yeah.

I mean, it just makes you laugh to look at her the way her little bifocals are down on her nose.

I tell you what, I wish I knew this lady.

She seems like a really fun person.

Look at the tiny little blue like.

- Yes.

Like beetle on the leaves.

There's so much to look at here.

The eggs.

And most of all, this great nest on top.

Yes.

It's wonderful.

Thanks.

Remember, make time for contemporary quilting every day.

Visit our website QuiltingArts-TV.com for access to selected project instructions, ideas, tips and techniques from this season of Quilting Arts TV.

If you enjoyed today's episode and want to see more contemporary quilting techniques and inspiring guests, a digital download of the entire Quilting Arts TV series is available for $29.99.

Or receive both the digital download and a subscription to the magazine for $59.95.

Available at QuiltingArts-TV.com Quilting Arts TV is brought to you by.

The Bernina 990.

If it can be imagined, it can be created.

Gentle fuse fusible web made for quilters from Maywood Studio.

[Upbeat music]