Lately I've been checking in more regularly with the Quilt Design A Day (QDAD) Facebook page. My contributions are still slim, but I'm making more of an effort to stay connected with what is going on there, which helps keep me more connected with design creation in general.
A few weeks ago the admins hooked me in with a one-day (or one day's album) challenge contest. The way the group is set up, an admin creates a photo album every day starting with a stock photo (or a photo taken by the artist) with a color palette drawn from the photo, usually using the exceptional tool PaletteBuilder from Play Crafts (who happens to be one of the original administrators for the QDAD group). From there, the membership is invited to create a quilt design inspired by the photo composition, subject matter and/or palette and post their electronic design in that day's album.
This particular challenge asked members to choose one of their own photos to use as inspiration, with a follow-up describing how one might go about making the quilt based on that design. What fun!
I started going through photos from recent trips and uploading to PaletteBuilder, amassing nearly half a dozen different options on my desktop, including the following:
Taken while on a camping trip last August near the Nehalem River in Oregon - our first group camping trip with kids and animals (not our kids ;) )
From a family gathering at J's folks' home in Montana. His dad set up for a stellar raku-firing party.
I eventually landed on the photo below for my inspiration, also from the raku party last summer:
When working on these computer-generated quilt designs (many of which are likely never going to become actual quilts) I use one of two design softwares, EQ7 for Mac or Affinity Designer, which I use for more free-form designs. The above photo somehow lent itself to a more regular block structure for me, in which case EQ7 is the better software, and this is what I ultimately came up with:
Something in the satisfaction I felt completing this assignment, so to speak, has brought me back to the group more actively again. And this week the inspiration "seeds" are of a whole new ilk - which I will touch upon in an upcoming post... ;)