How it started
A quilty friend told me that Heidi Parkes was hosting a sew-along, where lots of people work on the same idea at the same time. That’s how I came to buy the pattern. What a booklet it is, in the best way: Heidi wrote most of it by hand, and that makes it so charming.
I printed it, put it in a little folder, read it through and learned about the 7 elements of art, the 10 postmodern principles of art and the 8 principles of design. To be honest, I still struggle with the terms at times, because they combine in the vignettes and get mixed up in my head.
What a vignette is
Vignettes are like quilt blocks you make up yourself, to fit the theme and in whatever size you like. In this project, the idea was to just make them and then see how the whole thing evolved.
The first seven vignettes belong to the seven elements of art: line, shape, form, value, space, texture and color. Then come vignettes on the postmodern principles, such as appropriation, juxtaposition, layering, text, gazing, representation, obsessiveness and economy. And at the end it is all about how everything comes together: balance, symmetry, contrast, emphasis, pattern, movement, rhythm and unity.
Fabrics from all over the house
I wanted to start right away. I gathered fabrics from all over the house: from my stash of purchased fabrics, from my “mend someday, maybe” pile, plus a few precious fabrics that were given to me or that I had collected over the years. I keep those in a big old 19th-century cabinet.
Making the vignettes was so much fun.
On the wall at the Kunstpavillon
In July 2025, my Vignettes Quilt hung in the Kunstpavillon in Wetter.
