Doodle Quilting - having fun with quilt texture!

Apologies for the late post!  We had stomach flu in the house this week and I am much delayed in everything.  Here is my take on the challenge of Texture:

My friend Paula first showed me the Art Therapy range of adult colouring books and straight away I loved the patterns and saw how similar, and how well, they could translate to quilting.  I thought this could be a fun way to explore texture that is created by varying quilt pattern and density.

These three are my favourite of these types of books.  I have not once coloured any of the gorgeous images in!  I take them out, admire them, feel inspired and somehow they end up back in the bookcase but this time I took out my A3 sketch board and had fun doodling shapes inspired by the books!

I found out that I liked dense bits with echo lines creating space around the doodles to let them breather a bit!

Thinking of that echo line I remembered a drawing I did for the Pictorial Ticker Tape Quilts I teach in a 1/2 day to full day workshops.  This cow was a quick sketch using my finger (couldn't find the pen) on an app on the iPad.  This is why the line is so thick.  I thought quilting on either side of this line would give me the echo outline and a frame work to have fun with some fillers and doodles.

Using an app for the Slate 2 tablet I got for Christmas, I had fun playing with fillers.  The app made a 15 second video of the drawing so I thought it might be fun to share it with you here.  If you want to find out more about the app see my blog Charly & Ben's Crafty Corner or visit ISKN-the Slate 2 here.

Then it was onto fabric with a bit of sketch stitching in black thread.  And some free motion quilting.

And some straight line background quilting.  Things I learned: use a darker background or thicker white thread to make the white bit pop more,  Thread sketching is fun, Fill in doodle quilting is lots of fun,  Spirals make for great texture and pebbles make for for a great animal nose filler!

I hope this light hearted take on the challenge is ok.  I'm so glad I got the opportunity to have a play and finally get some use out of those books!