A fair exchange

So what do you do to repay Grandma for babysitting? You teach her Photoshop of course! Today Linda and I have given ourselves square eyes sat in front of the computer creating digital collages for quilts. You'll have seen Linda's previous post of her sketchbook pages. They've been tweaked on Photoshop, we've modified the colour and erased the ugly line that is the spine of the book from the centre. It's all printed to fabric and ready to be quilted now. I'll make sure Linda takes photos and posts them for you to see.

Today's aim was to make use of more pages from Linda's sketchbook, but there wasn't another spread that was perfect to be printed just as it was. She liked elements from one, motifs from another and so on. We've scanned, cropped, layered, pinched bits from one page and merged them with another to make a whole new design. It's so exciting to be able to use sketchbook pages in this way. Between us we have enough sketchbooks to keep us going in this vein for several lifetimes.

And here are the two designs. These'll be printed on the fabric full width making them about 1.5 metres wide each. The heron was a gouache painting on one page. He'd been worked onto a metallic gold background, but that doesn't scan well, it just reads as boring brown, so that was zapped and replaced with a much more painterly background. You'll spot the pattern elements that were from the previous sketchbook page and we've also used other collaged shapes from other pages. It's such fun to play with layering all of these and of course there's nothing to lose, if it's wrong, just Undo!

These quilts will be hung to face each other and in the second version you'll see that Linda chose to flip the original design and adjust the colouring.

This heron is a funny character and you may well be wondering what he's squawking at. Well like me, you'll just have to wait and see what she comes up with!