landscapelady: a class with david taylor day 1

I just finished a two day work shop with applique artist david taylor. If you aren't familiar with his work go here and check it out - it is amazing! His class was only 15 people so he gave us lots of one on one help (which we all needed lot of) and he was very entertaining - a really nice guy and quite a character.

He takes 3 to 6 months to complete one of his quilts, only working on that one quilt for all that time and I can see why. His is very meticulous (admitting that he is very OCD) which makes him so good at what he does.

I'll share a few photos I took in the class

this is one of his quilts that he brought for us to "pet"

he says he wants his quilts to make people say "oh look at that cute little hummingbird" and want to go over and pet it, which he encourages and when drawing such a quilt to keep that in mind.

this is the back of the hummingbird quilt

after the whole applique process he quilts very heavily and carefully, changing thread color through each color change, taking the time after each thread change to go to the back of the quilt, tie the end of the thread and thread it into a needle then hiding it into the quilt. This would totally drive me insane but is one reason why he wins so many prizes in quilt shows.

first we trace our image onto tracing paper but not the way I am used to dividing the pieces into different shades or colors in the piece. He does that with the fabric. He says to think of how the image flows and try to do lines depicting that. The body of things in nature have continuous lines from your head to your toes with curves and rounded shapes. Let the drawing just happen organically. Now this is easier said than done, especially the first time. I think he helped most of us in class by doing most of the drawing but I took photos of a few of the drawings.