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Lava quilt blocks from Spoonflower - part one



I told you awhile back that I was looking into making another quilt using the lava photos that I took in Hawai'i.  Well, I got sidetracked for a short while, because it turned out that the best plan I could come up with called for the blocks to be printed out by Spoonflower rather than being printed out on my inkjet printer.  So here's what was going on over the last few weeks!


1. I chose 16 different shots of lava and turned each into a line drawing.  You can refer to my tutorial on digital line art in order to print out your own line drawings for a quilt or other project.

2. I moved the blocks around many times on a Photoshop template I made until I liked the arrangement.  Then I made a higher resolution final pattern to upload to Spoonflower.  I set my final pattern to be 14" x 14" so that it would fit onto a fat quarter.


3. While I am waiting for the fabric to be printed and shipped to me, I've been messing around with colors on my Photoshop template.  I tried lots of different ideas, including coloring individual blocks, rows, columns, etc.  It's really convenient to do a different color treatment on separate layers in Photoshop, because you can "turn" off all but one in order to rapidly view the possibilities.


4. The idea I ended up liking best was to have an upward rising sweep of color, sort of mimicking the traditional Hawai'ian rainbow.  I plan to have the colors run into each other when the fabric arrives and I get to paint it.  The final step will be to add brighter accents using my Inktense pencils.

So, we'll pick this up again next week when I'll have something more to show you! 

Part one
Part two
Part three
Part four

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Copyright 2012 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.

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Comments

Cherie said…
Spoonflower is so awesome. Can't wait to see the rest.
I've never used Spoonflower. Not sure I understand. Will they print the 14-inch blocks in color? Elsewhere, you mentioned that then you would color them.
Cyndi L said…
Oh sure! They'll print them in color if you upload it that way, but I uploaded mine in black and white so that I could add the color myself later. I've had them print colored blocks before, and their colors are quite rich and saturated, but that's just not what I wanted this time.