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

CONTENTS

PART ONE
Designing with Bold Blooms

In Pursuit of Bold Blooms in Decorative Arts

Stitching Needlepoint Blooms

Drawing Blossoms for Quilting Cottons

Designing Strips of Abstract Flowers

Lush Arrangements of Flower Prints

Arranging Fresh Blossoms

Painting Cut Flowers

PART TWO
Bold Bloom Quilts and Needlepoints

PART THREE
How To

INTRODUCTION

For many years Ive dreamed of doing a book celebrating my passion for flowers in the decorative arts. Ive been privileged to travel to all corners of the globe to see inspiring uses of flowers in everything from embroidery to wall decoration to architectural details.

My love of live flowers is no less passionate and never far from my color-processing thoughts. Realizing my love of blooms, my great friend photographer Steve Lovi taught me to explore gardens at different seasons and to draw peoples attention to the intense beauty of flower forms and colors. When I was planning my book Glorious Knitting in the 1980s, he encouraged me to have garments of certain color schemes knitted to coincide with the seasons at the gardens and parks where he planned to do our fashion shoots. During the last creative phase of his life, he would hit the flower markets of San Francisco at their dawn opening and be home ready to shoot a beautifully composed still life as the light became strong enough in his studio. I could easily do a whole book on the inspiration I gained from his photographs of flowers, so great is my admiration for his ingenious eye.

While creating this book, I focused on my desire to bring others a little closer to seeing flowers the way I do. Color is the starting point, and Ive arranged the projects into color moods. Few other objects on this earth capture and reflect color the way flower petals do. From delicate pale subtleties to brilliant saturated primary hues to the smoldering depths of the darkest purples and bronze tones, flowers and foliage have it all.

Shape, of course, is vital to communicating the flowers powerful beauty. What has always grabbed me are large-scale shapes that create the wow factor in nature. Perhaps it is my theatrical side that prefers florals that read from a stage or pop out of a textile design. There are plenty of people in the world who dissolve with delight over lilies of the valley, snowdrops, or tiny forget-me-nots, and I love them, too, but mostly I want to celebrate the extoverts of the plant world. The lacy delicate sprays we can leave aside for now as we plunge into the dramatic, full-blown, bold blooms of this worldblooms that arent shy, that stand out with punch and pizzazz, that sing opera not lullabies.

In addition to giving you flower-inspired projects to work on here, I share a behind-the-scenes look into the simple processes I go through when designing and painting bold bloomsfrom inspiration to color palettes to the final renderings in the forms of fabrics, quilts, needlepoints, ribbons, and live displays. I show you my designs and ideas as they bloom.

When designing the quilts included, I had at my disposal so many outspoken blooms in the array of super-large-scale floral prints in the Kaffe Fassett Collective fabric collection and in other knockout floral fabrics I have gathered over the years. Fussy-cutting very large flowers and smaller strong ones out of the fabrics allowed me to focus attention on their boldness. It also enabled me to cherry-pick colors from fabrics to create my specific color schemes. With needlepoint, of course, I was able to create any pronounced flower I desired.

While the projects included here feature the crafts of patchwork and needlepoint, the ideas I present translate to any discipline that uses pattern and color, including mosaics, embroidery, beading, knitting, rag rugs, furniture and wall decoration, and the display of live flowers. In producing a study of the bold flower element in the arts and nature, my desire is to inspire makers of many disciplines to use this floral excitement in their own way. By dedicating this book to the bold blooms, I hope to be sending you off on a passion-filled creative journey.

I design fabrics as part of the Kaffe Fassett Collective along with Brandon Mably and Philip Jacobs. The large florals on the table are two of Philips designs Japanese Chyrsanthemum and Gloxinia . Philip beautifully paints his designs based on classic vintage florals and other archival materials. I choose all of the colors for his fabrics, and it is one of my joyous tasks.

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

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.