As always, I have a quilt design in my head, but several actually found their way onto paper this week. I have always been intrigued with the designs of ancient mosaic tiles, so I decided to use some of the motifs to design a quilt. The small tiles are so like patches in patchwork that I couldn't help seeing the similarities. In the illustration below, from the book Ancient Mosaics by Roger Ling (p 66) I was stunned to see the six-pointed stars made of diamonds and the hexagon between them filled with an amazing six-petaled flowers. If it weren't for the intricate rope borders around the larger hexagons you would think you were looking at a quilt. And to think some artist sat there placing each of those tiny tiles into some kind of cement which managed to last all of these thousands of years. I only hope the quilt that this mosaic inspires is as time-worthy.
Look at these incredible motifs in this tilework. It just blows me away. I do a program on the Hexagon shape in quilting, and now I can see I am going to have to add a few more slides to my powerpoint!! LOL
When I saw the Stonehenge line of fabrics from Northcott being advertised I knew I had found a great combination. I downloaded all the Stonehenge fabrics from the Northcott website so I could play with the designs and the actual fabrics on EQ6. Don't you just love EQ?? I played on EQ6 and came up with a lot of different designs. Here is one of them:
I love how the design looks like marble and stone -- even in the computer generated drawing -- using the Stonehenge fabrics. Of course I had to go shopping and order a huge pile of the fabrics to play with.
Here is another tile design that intrigued me. This one was from a book called The Tile Book: Decorating with Fired Earth by Elizabeth Hilliard, page 141. I loved the colors in this tile and the wild floral motifs in the central four-patch. Did you ever see a tile design that looked more like a quilt??? I thought this one would be easy to adapt to a quilt design. It took a bit more ingenuity than I first thought, especially to design the sashing and choose fabrics, but I think I am on the right track. I need to play a bit more with fabrics, but I am liking the direction it is going in. And here is the quilt design I have so far in EQ6:
Can't you just see this covering a huge floor in a church baptistry?
This is the sort of thing that is going to keep me jazzed for a long time. Now I have to get away from the computer and go to my studio and sew!! As always, thanks for visiting.
I have posted the next Free Block of the Month in the Tulip Tiles series. This block is actually a setting triangle. You will need to make four of these. They are large triangles with a tulip motif appliqued on them. The Instructions and placement guide can be downloaded by going to the 2010 Block of the Month page or by clicking here.
