Zentangle® for quilters
Monday, October 19th, 2020
This small quilt began as a drawing of a woman with an umbrella on paper. I drew the Zentangle® patterns around her with a pigment liner pen. I printed the drawing onto cotton with my inkjet printer, added the color wash, and used scraps from quilting to frame the drawing.
The colorway for this quilt comes from the cyan-magenta-chartreuse set of transparent primary colors. It takes transparent color to allow the drawing to come through. This type of print-and-paint gives me the opportunity to make a series of quilts from the same labor-intensive drawing. I have been in galleries with easel artists who sell their painting numerous times by making prints. My method provides a unique composition, but allows me to work quickly on multiples.
The primary benefit of the discipline of Zentangle® drawing comes from a relaxed approach to infilling a background. In order to do free-motion quilting in a truly freehand way, I need a repertoire of patterns that are adaptable to different sizes and shapes of quilted areas. It is also necessary to learn to divide the quilted surface into sub-sections, and Zentangle® provides practice making these divisions (called ‘strings’ by the founders).
I have also enlarged the patterns significantly in order to provide a more interesting style of background quilting. This black matrix quilt started with a rubbing of an elm stump. The machine quilting is straightforward right up to the edge of the stump. For the background, I used simple ‘string’ divisions and then drew upon Zentangle® patterns to fill the black background area. It takes excellent lighting to see the patterns in the background, which adds a bit of a surprise to the artwork.
Even though we may no longer be interested in covering every available surface with Zentangle® drawings, practice with this drawing system is uniquely helpful to any quilter developing freemotion patterns.