I used to be a chef in an earlier life. Creating art in a different medium but definitely still art. These days I still love my food but can just appreciate the work of others. My kitchen at home is now the domain of my husband who loves pottering around and creating his own masterpieces.

But I still love the colours and shapes of a kitchen and nothing gives me more pleasure than seeing a wonderful collection of pots such as these found in a historical shop in Japan.

I played with my image in Photoshop to break it down into simpler shapes or lines or textures. Once you start playing in Photoshop you can get lost for days.

 Once I finally settled on an image I printed it to size and started playing with the shapes on a set of gradated hand dyed fabric which had all been fused with Mistyfuse.

 I needed to keep them labelled and in order or I would have got myself in a mess

Each pot was created as a separate unit with the plan being to fuse it all onto a dark blue background.

However once the individual pots were put on the background it looked bland and needed something. I decided it needed patterning and the perfect pattern was text. I had recently been given my mother’s old hand written recipe books so used some pages to create a thermofax screen and printed it over the background piece. Perfect!

I have recently invested in a new Bernina Q20 and this quilt was my first project to be quilted on it. I have always liked the free form outline style but never really do pictorial quilts so this was a great opportunity to try it out. The machine was a dream to use and I am really happy with my Blue Pots.

Blue Pots

30″ x 20″

Hand dyed and screen printed cotton