Kaffe Fassett's Bold Blooms: Quilts and Other Works Celebrating Flowers

By Kaffe Fassett and Liza Prior Lucy

A stunning guide and vibrant pattern collection of twenty-five new patchwork and needlepoint projects, from the renowned color expert and quilt & fabric designer.

Drawing inspiration from the natural beauty of flowers, Kaffe Fassett’s Bold Blooms invites crafters to explore the behind-the-scenes process and fascinating design methods used to create Kaffe’s bold fabrics and modern color palettes—from “sketching” with fabric swatches to creating mood boards and renderings to sewing visually striking quilts. Featured throughout are 18 new quilt patterns and seven new needlepoints.

Ideas bloom on each page as eye-catching artwork, inventive quilt designs, needlepoint canvases, and bold ribbon patterns grow from concept to completion. Renowned for his use of color, Kaffe creates unique palettes from nature and his surroundings to create color “moods”—from neutrals and soft pastels to rich, dark tones—and he shares his design ideas, practical quilting advice, and needlepoint techniques useful to both novice and seasoned crafters throughout these colorful projects.

With an emphasis on patchwork and needlework, the inventive designs and fresh color palettes translate to many creative disciplines ranging from mosaic, beading, fiber arts, embroidery, floral arrangements, and home décor. Accessible to quilting and sewing beginners and experts alike, the lively floral designs on each page are sure to inspire and send readers off on a color-filled creative journey, offering something for makers of all skill levels. 

“[A] gorgeous coffee-table book for crafters. . . . Patterson’s photographs enhance the artistic aspect, making the book not just a craft guide but a beautiful keepsake of its own. The whole book is just smashing.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781613122549

Book preview

Some of the many source books that inform my floral designs.

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INSPIRATION

In Pursuit of Bold Blooms in Decorative Arts

Flowers have been a focus in my work for nearly as long as I can remember. They are a fragile, ephemeral element that seems born to delight us and help us realize that there is more to life than mere survival. The glow of pure color in flowers is my essential attraction to them. Of course, I am not alone. Flowers have been inspiring artists and craftspeople in nearly all creative media throughout time, in weaving, embroidery, mosaic, painting, jewelry, pottery, and wallpapers. The way flowers are depicted in decorative arts is endlessly fascinating to me.

To be sure, there are many moods and scales to floral depiction, from delicate sprays through riotous wildflower meadows. But my main obsession is with large-scale, articulate blooms with a pronounced shape, such as spiky dahlias, voluptuous peonies, and facelike pansies.

Much of my inspiration comes from East Asia. China and especially Japan are treasure troves when it comes to bold flower forms. From the most realistic flower paintings to the most abstracted simplified forms in unusual colorings, Japanese culture must be the most fertile on earth for flowers in decorative arts. The Japanese have entire festivals dedicated to individual blooms as they come into season, such as morning glories, chrysanthemums, and hydrangeas. As I write this, I’m looking at a gigantic weaving of a flaming orange chrysanthemum on a kimono sash probably made for the kabuki theater. The massive explosion of fiery petals shows half a flower that is the size of a large watermelon. How that must have glowed from the kabuki stage!

My full-on conscious search for floral inspiration started when I arrived in London from California in the 1960s as an aspiring fine artist. The wondrous halls of the Victoria and Albert Museum became my home away from home, a place where I began filling sketchbooks with inspiring florals of all sorts to be depicted later in my paintings. In the grand English houses I visited, I discovered eclectic furnishings that had been collected by world travelers and handed down from one generation to the next. Inlaid marble tables, huge oriental fans, massive printed and woven drapes and tapestries, wallpapers, and porcelains, all decorated with florals, lit up my imagination.

Collecting decorative china has been my passion since arriving in England in the 1960s. The Chinese ginger jar in the center at right is one of my all-time favorites.

At the same time I found a treasure trove of flea markets and antique shops in London. I began collecting textiles and ceramics laden with floral motifs, pieces that continue to inspire me to this day, some of which appear in this book. After my first few years in England, keen to explore blossoms in media other than painting, I started working on my first needlepoints and fabric designs. To find subjects for my designs, I looked at my collections of objects depicting flowers and searched for books that showed clear, large-scale images of flowers on textiles, pottery, and in classic paintings. Rather than creating detailed, botanically accurate representation of a flower, I wanted to exaggerate and highlight certain shapes and colors, and seeing how other artists had done this was more helpful to me than photographs or even live specimens. In fact, I continue to use this technique in many of my projects today. My collecting isn’t as constant as it was years ago—my shelves are overstuffed—but I still pick up the occasional floral ceramic, beaded piece, or textile when I just can’t resist it.

FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THESE IMAGES, see this page

In a typically crowded corner of my studio, I stitch on the white dahlia needlepoint for this book.

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THE SINGLE BLOSSOM

Stitching Needlepoint Blooms

Once an inspiring bloom sparks my imagination, I am anxious to use it right away in my work. Needlepoint is perfect for this type of quick gratification because I am a fast stitcher and I love creating a bloom using a palette of colored wool threads. And, conveniently, I can easily carry needlepoint around wherever I go. With a lightweight piece of canvas, small skeins of many colors, a blunt-tipped tapestry needle, and a tiny pair of scissors, I am happily busy whenever and wherever, watching a colorful composition unfold at my fingertips.

When I’m dreaming up a needlepoint pillow on a floral theme, I always search for a large, bold rendering of a flower or flowers that I can use for reference. That rendering might be in a painting or on a ceramic piece, wallpaper design, or even a seed packet.

Although I sometimes do large panels, for most of my needlepoints I stick to pillow-size. A pillow is a relatively small object that could get lost or reduced to a bit of texture in a room if too understated, so I design my pillows as bright jewels meant to lift a furnishing scheme. For an even more emphatic statement, I make lots of pillows and place them all together. I have stacks of them in my studio.

With my source material in front of me, I begin by drawing the simple outlines of my bold bloom onto canvas with a waterproof pen. When picking colors I try to focus on hues that are radiant and a bit lighter than you might at first suppose. This is because each stitch on the canvas is surrounded by a slight shadow that tends to deepen whatever tone I have chosen. I also try to limit the number of colors I select—mostly to about fourteen to sixteen per design, or even to as few as ten. If I don’t go crazy with colors, my needlepoint can be made into a kit (or chart) that others can work from. These color boundaries are where creativity comes into play in a big way because they encourage me to figure out how to make fourteen colors feel like twenty-five. It is amazing how this magic happens once you get used to the discipline.

I begin the needlepoint by stitching color inside my drawn outlines, introducing details and highlights stitch by stitch. As the bloom grows, I work little bits of the background color I’ve chosen around it to see how it will affect the shades within the flower. Then I can strengthen or temper the bloom colors if necessary. I don’t slavishly follow the outlines if I see where I can improve them, and I almost never take out any stitches, but instead just keep building on them.

If I have several needlepoints on the go at once, I complete everything until only the background needs finishing, then I hand off the remaining stitching to someone else in the studio while I turn my attention to my next creation.

For me, the joy of needlepointing is not just the end result. I deeply enjoy the process of sitting still—back to the window with the daylight pouring in over my shoulder—dabbing colored stitches like paint onto my canvas while I listen to plays on the radio.

A single line drawing of the white dahlia from a seed catalog. This was later traced onto canvas for stitching.

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FABRICS IN BLOOM

Drawing Blossoms for Quilting Cottons

Before discovering textiles I saw myself as a fine-art painter. I painted still lifes so I could create indoor landscapes and not allow bad weather to deter me from painting every day. In my early years in London these paintings were filled with decorative china on patterned cloth. When I was painting I would wonder how these patterned cloths came about.

Stephen Sheard and Ken Bridgewater, who founded Westminster Fibers (then known as Westminster Patchwork and Quilting), asked me to design my first quilting cottons in the 1990s, so I reached into my imagination for the fabrics I had loved in the past—those chintzy big-scale florals on drapes and bed covers I’d encountered in grand English country houses in the 1990s. Having studied old patchwork and noticed that most of the prints were small-scale, I decided I should start by making some small-scale texture-type prints, like dots, pebbles, artichokes, and smaller flowers. I call them texture-type prints because, seen at a distance, the motifs of small-scale prints tend to blur together with their background to create a textured color tone. Stripes and paisleys also became favorite themes because they are great to cut and arrange in patchwork and add sparks of movement within the whole. After these initial explorations, inspired by my memory of quilts made with furnishing fabrics with large-scale motifs, I started designing prints with large-scale flowers and, nearly instantly, I realized I had found my specialty. I loved designing large blooms, and they definitely set my collection apart in the world of quilting fabric, where bitty prints were (and still are) the norm.

When I started designing prints, first I learned the art of the repeat from a textile designer—how to draw only one section of the design, a section that fits together with itself so it can be repeated over and over across yards (meters) of fabric. I also learned how to design with a limited number of colors as each color added makes the fabric more expensive to produce. I realized quickly—and with great joy—that designing floral fabric was bringing back my painting and drawing skills. At the same time, it gave me the chance to design the sort of fabrics that thrilled me in museum collections, antique shops, and old country houses.

My florals got even bigger when I painted a fabric design called Bekah. I was painting the design twice as large as it would be printed in order to get in the detail and so that when printed at a reduced size, it would look sharp. The finished design looked so good large that the manufacturer—to my delight—decided to print it that way. From then on, I never hesitated to paint huge blooms and have them printed at the same size as the artwork.

When designing floral fabrics, first I do my usual search through my own sketchbooks and my collection of decorative art books for inspiration. I usually already have ideas for what I am looking for—things that sparked my imagination in the past that I haven’t yet had a chance to work on. Several different blooms from different sources often find their way into a single design.

Gouache is my preferred medium for fabric designs because it is opaque, making it easy for the fabric printers to reproduce the painted strokes. My paint palette is nothing grand—frosted plastic tops from restaurant takeout containers or a plain white china plate. If the repeat size of the painted design is going to be fairly small, I paint it onto a pad of white watercolor paper about 12 × 17 (30 cm × 43 cm). For really big designs, I cut pieces off a roll of drawing paper that is 5 feet (1.5 m) wide. I tape the paper to a large plywood board that rests on my painting table. My paints in small tubes sit on a card table to the side.

My brushes are generally limited to three sizes: a very fine brush for outlines, dots, and stripes; a slightly larger brush for almost everything else; and a medium-size brush for filling in largish backgrounds. To rinse them, I set up a few empty jam jars with fresh water. The most important ingredients of all while I am painting fabric designs are lots of daylight and BBC Radio 4 as company in the background, churning out interesting interviews, news on current events, and plays.

Fabric prints from the Kaffe Fassett Collective (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT ): Kirman, Japanese Chrysanthemum, Bekah, Lake Blossoms, and Zinnias.

More floral fabric prints from the Kaffe Fassett Collective (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT ): Lake Blossoms, Big Blooms, Lake Blossoms, Tree Peony, and Gloxinia.

As I draw out my repeat and paint in the colors, I register each new color in a grid outside the artwork. When the original is complete I photocopy it and paint my different colorways for the design on top of the printed photocopy in grids that match the original colorway grid. The printer can then see what color to substitute for each color in the original when making each new colorway of the design.

I mail off my completed designs and colorway information directly to the printer and wait for a month or two for fabric samples, called strike-offs, to arrive back in the studio for approval. If there are changes to be made, I make careful note of them and return the strike-offs to the printer for the changes. It’s an exciting day when the fabric is finally delivered and placed on my shelves, ready to become my next quilts.

Painting a new fabric design called Corsage and a page from my archive.

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FLOWERS ON RIBBONS

Designing Strips of Abstract Flowers

In 2004 Renaissance Ribbons asked me to design for them. I think I may have turned them down three times before—convinced I didn’t have the time—until I finally succumbed to the tempation. Their jacquard