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Apr. 99: Claudia Wade writes about how she
is using Creative Impulse and Repligator and Electric Quilt designs
to create innovative new quilts. She has included great examples!
Part 2
PLAYING WITH QUILT DESIGN TOYS
By Claudia Wade
Repligator
*Editor's Note: Repligator
was voted 1999 Winner of the Best Graphic Shareware Industry Award.
To download your preview shareware copy after reading the article, visit
the review page by clicking on any underlined Repligator in article or go to
 .
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Repligator
is another exciting graphics program I've been playing with recently.
It is an entirely different kettle of fish from Creative Impulse.
It contains no design elements of its own; you must import your original
design from elsewhere. You can use a scanned photograph or drawing,
a sketch from a drawing or paint program or a quilt or block design
from a quilt program as your starting point.
Repligator works by
taking your original design and mutating it using one of its filters
into something entirely different. Like Creative
Impulse, it takes practice to control and predict the effects. It's
so effortless and fun! Not every resulting design is beautiful or worthy
of making into a quilt, but I use it as an idea generator.
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I've found that it is a good idea to start with a
very simple design, because Repligator
will quickly make it more complex. If I want to end up with a
design that is even remotely possible to sew, I need to make it simple
in the beginning.
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Here is an example of something I might start with---
a very simple applique quilt designed in Electric Quilt 4.
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Figure 8
Once this design is imported into Repligator, I can choose to let
the built-in Wizard choose design transformations for me or I can
choose which transformation I want directly. There are 28 possible
transformations available, with many variations possible within
each transformation.
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The transformations have interesting names, like:
Wood, Bubbles, Clouds, Explode, Mad Painter, Relief Map, Primitive
Art, and Mosaic. Repligator has humorous aspects. For example, when
choosing the Mad Painter effect, one can adjust a sliding bar in a
dialog box for how many brush stokes one wants in the picture, how
wide and long the brush strokes are, and how mad the painter is!
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One of my favorite transformations in Repligator
is called Marilyn Warhol. One of the possible looks for the Marilyn
Warhol transformation to the above quilt is shown here:
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Figure 9
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This would be fun to try to accomplish in fabric.
I might try a combination of sewing techniques including piecing,
applique, fabric painting or stenciling and embroidery. I would not
use the Repligator
image as a final pattern, but rather as an inspiration for free form
cutting, piecing and applique; or, I would interpret this design more
conventionally into Electric Quilt 4.
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Each effect in Repligator
can be adjusted to a certain extent by user-controlled settings, which
are fun to play with. The resulting transformed images can also be
combined with the original image in various ways. This is called vignetting
or mixing. These effects allow the original image to appear to be
layered above or below the transformed image, as in Figure 9 above.
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If you don't mix or vignette the image, your original
image can be transformed into something completely unrecognizable.
For example, the following is a simple pieced quilt designed in Electric
Quilt 4.
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Figure 10
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Repligator's
StarDust effect mixed with the original image produces the following
design:
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Figure 11
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But, if I choose the Mosaic effect and don't mix it
with the original image at all, I'll get a much more abstract effect:
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Figure: 12
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As you can see, Repligator
has a great deal of potential for creating interesting artistic designs
for patchwork, applique, and many other crafts. Here are some other
examples of designs I've created using Repligator.
All of these designs were originally created in Electric Quilt and
then manipulated further using Repligator.
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Figure 13
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Figure 14
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Figure 15
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OTHER GRAPHICS SOFTWARE
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Sometimes I use a paint program to finish or adjust
my final designs. I may decide I only want part of a design made in
Creative Impulse or Repligator.
In that case, I will open the saved image in a paint program and crop
it to just the part I want. I also sometimes use a paint program to
draw freeform machine quilting lines on a quilt image, which was created,
with Electric Quilt 4, Creative
Impulse, or Repligator.
I can then use the drawn lines like a map when I'm actually quilting
my quilt.
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It seems to me that I've barely scratched the surface
of computer quilt design. With these wonderful programs, including
Electric Quilt 4, Creative
Impulse, and Repligator,
on my computer, the big challenge is to find the time to make them.
Finding interesting designs is not a problem!
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Repligator and Creative Impulse each have a
Introducing Claudia Wade
If you have any questions for Claudia Wade, you can contact her at
cwade@kiwi.dep.anl.gov For
more information about Claudia, continue below.
To view a wedding
quilt that Claudia made, click here!
I asked Claudia to tell us a little about herself and this is what
she wrote:
When did you start quilting?
How long have you been quilting?
I started quilting in 1978 or 1979, about 20 years ago. What got me
started
was a major how-to article on patchwork on the front page of the women's
section of the Chicago Tribune. It included a pattern with instructions.
As
much as the quilt biz has grown enormously since then, I can't imagine
an article like that appearing in a regular newspaper now! I went out
and bought all these solid color cotton/poly blends at JC Penney because
there were no quilt shops, and I bought CORDUROY for the backing. It
never was finished and, believe you me, it's just as well!
Do you teach or is this just for yourself -- or anything else
in this vain.
I taught one sampler quilt class 16 years ago and decided that teaching
wasn't what I wanted to do. I have benefitted from taking classes over
the years from some wonderful teachers: Jinny Beyer, Trudie Hughes,
Caryl B Fallert, Ellen Eddy, Ginny Avery. A very pivotal class for me
at the time was Jinny Beyer's Quilt Symposium at the Smithsonian Institution
in April 1982. We saw lots of wonderful old quilts from the Smithsonian
and DAR Museum collections. But the gist of it was a drafting class.
That was where I learned how to categorize blocks by grid pattern and
pretty much draw any pattern I saw.
A rotary cutting class I took with Trudie Hughes about 1986 or so enabled
me to start making quilts with accuracy faster, although I'm still really
slow, because I work full time and I like to work slowly because it's
more relaxing for me that way. I've also started dying some fabric.
I quilt just for myself and family. I really enjoy the process. I'm
inspired by places, often places I've never even been to. I like to
read about cities, states and countries and get a feel for the mood
of a place. I also am inspired by movies. My next major quilt, for example,
was inspired by the movie, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and
Evil."
What is your Style (it obvious contemporary but do you have
a special name you like to call it)
I guess you'd call my style Contemporary. I used to make mostly
multi-fabric scrap-type quilts from aditional patterns. Thanks to EQ,
I'd design the settings and borders for myself so I wasn't dependent
on patterns or books. As much as I love the graphic impact of the old
two-color quilts, it bores me to use a limited number of fabrics in
a quilt. I like to be making decisions about design or fabric up until
the end of a project.
I work strictly by machine, both for piecing and quilting. In the last
year or so, my style is becoming freer and more non-traditional. I love
the fact that EQ4 lets you add assymetrical borders. That is going to
help me a lot.
Where do you live?
I live in a far northern suburb of Chicago, almost in Wisconsin.
Any other personal details like other hobbies and interests.
I work as a Teacher's Aide in a computer lab in a large public suburban
high school. I help students and teachers with computer tasks that they
might not know how to do, such as graphs in MS Excel, file conversions,
or whatever. Our school was one of the first in the area to offer Internet
access to students, so I've learned a fair amount about how to do Internet
research.
Anything you want to say about your family.
I've been married to Bob Wade for almost 29 years, since just a few
months after I graduated from college. The rest of our family consists
of our daughter Jessica who is 25 and a newly married to our son-in-law
Thomas Morris. They live in Columbus, OH, and they're both graduates
of Miami University, Oxford, OH. Our younger daughter, Bridget, is 22
and a student at the University of Illinois/Chicago. They are all really
supportive of my quilting. They give me quilt fabric for Christmas and
birthdays, etc. I love it when people choose quilt fabric to give me....I
feel it really enriches my stash to have someone else do some of the
choosing!
Anything else you want to say?
Just that I feel that computer quilting is going to be even bigger
and better in the future than it is now, as people get more experienced
with their computers and the programs get better and better!
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