One obvious way to get a top-quality photograph of your quilt is to hire a professional photographer.  In fact, if you are thinking about entering your quilt into an exhibit or competition, I highly recommend this approach.  Professional photographers have better cameras, lighting and set-up equipment than most quilters would have themselves.

A good set-up includes hanging the quilt in front of a black backdrop.  I often pin a temporary sleeve along the bottom edge of the quilt and insert metal yard sticks.  They weigh down the quilt and smooth out any natural waves created by hanging.  (Wondering about that quilt?  It will be revealed in two weeks!)

Side lighting brings the quilted texture into high relief.  A professional photographer has external flash lighting that can be positioned for the best effect.

Too much light can create “hot spots”, so a sheet can be set up as a reflector.

For your own personal use, you probably won’t need the services of a professional photographer.  You can take good quilt photographs yourself if you set up the shot well and follow a few basic guidelines.

First, you might want to invest in a photographer’s backdrop stand.  This will allow you to photograph the quilt hanging.  A good quality stand can be purchased from a photography store for around $200.  It includes two telescoping tripod-based stands with a crossbar in two or three sections.  Mine also includes a carrying case, which comes in very handy for transporting it to guild meetings or photography studios.

I pin a black sheet to the archway between my kitchen and family room because I don’t have a blank wall large enough anywhere else in the house.  The backdrop stand is set up in front of the sheet.

The quilt is hung from the crossbar.

The camera should be positioned so that it points at the very center of the quilt.

You don’t want to photograph your quilts lying in the floor.  This creates an effect known as parallax, where the shape of the quilt appears skewed because of the perspective.

There are many great articles about quilt photography available and I will be sharing links throughout the week.  Check my Facebook Page and Twitter for more information.

There are many ways to go about tracing from a photograph, but I would like to show you how EQ7 – the popular quilt design software from The Electric Quilt Company – can help.

Let’s start with this picture of a daylily.  It can be found in the EQ7 photo library.

EQ7 has a feature that allows us to change the color depth in a photo.  Color depth is expressed in bits per pixel.  The more bits per pixel, the more colors that can be displayed.  This photo, at 24 bits per pixel, can represent 16,777,216 different colors!  But if we reduced the color depth to 4 bits per pixel, only 16 different colours would be displayed.  This would certainly make the photograph much easier to trace.

From the Image worktable in EQ7, choose “Increase/Decrease Color Depth…” from the IMAGE menu.  Decrease the bits per pixel to 4 and click OK.  The daylily photo now looks like this.  Can you see how much easier it would be to trace each individual shade of color in this altered photograph?

We can trace using EQ7 as well.  Save the altered daylily photo to your Sketchbook and then edit on the Block worktable.  It will appear on the “Tracing Image” tab, where you can adjust how light or dark you would like it to be.

Begin by tracing all the elements of one color that appear furthest away in the photo – in this case, the bright red flower petals.  Notice how three of the petals appear to overlap the other three.  Tracing the underneath petals first makes the process easier.

Here are the six flower petals colored.  Can you see now the importance of overlapping the petals in the correct order?

What’s next?  I would say the second darker shade of red.

Here is the colored version.

Continue tracing one color at a time, working from back to front, until the entire photo has been traced.

Here’s how it could look in a quilt!

EQ7 can also help with constructing your pictorial quilt.  Print the block as an appliqué pattern to any size, tiling over multiple pages if necessary.

You can also print templates for each patch.

Not comfortable with drawing on your computer?  It does take a little practice – and a graphics tablet doesn’t hurt either!  You can still use EQ7 to help you design your pictorial quilt.  Just print the photo after reducing the color depth and trace it by hand.

Crayon
Good old Crayola crayons work wonderfully for embellishing – or creating – quilts.  I have a fair bit of experience with this medium and even offer a workshop on the subject.  Crayon can be applied directly to fabric and then heat set, melting the crayon right into the fibers.  To heat set, protect your ironing board cover with a layer of paper towel and iron from the wrong side of the fabric.  Layers of color can be built up for greater intensity or combined to create shading or highlights.

While crayon is a great medium for shading and highlighting appliqué motifs, I have used it for the primary elements in my quilts.  In this grapevine wreath quilt, the grapes, leaves, and stems were colored with crayon.  The edges of these elements, the leaf veins, and grapevine tendrils were machine embroidered.

This quilt combines crayon with thread painting to create the scene of a garden gate. 

This urn of fruit is another crayon creation.  Rubbing crayon over a textured surface can create some great special effects.  Crumpled aluminum foil created the crackle on the vase; a plastic onion bag was used for the pineapple; salt formed the strawberry seeds.

Photographic Images
Not only can photographs be printed onto fabric and used to embellish quilts, pretty much anything can be scanned, printed, or otherwise transferred to fabric.  I won’t go into a lot of detail here because I wrote a whole series on the subject last March (see Making the Quilt “Trinity”, Printing Fabric Part 1: Dyeing Fabric, Part 2: Photo Transfer, Part 3: Scanning & Printing, Part 4: Scanning & Printing Continued).  Here are some of the highlights:

Scanned and printed calendar photo, thread painted

Scanned and printed wallpaper, quilted table runner

Image edited kaleidoscope block

"Trinity", constructed with inkjet printed hexagon patches

The first thing you’ll probably notice when you open EQ7 is a new worktable.  In EQ6, we had two worktables:  one for working on blocks and one for working on quilts.  In EQ7, there is now a third worktable for working on images.

EQ6 Two Worktables

EQ7 Three Worktables

What can you do on the image worktable?  Tons of stuff!  EQ7 offers the kind of image editing capabilities you find in programs such as Corel Photo-Paint and Adobe Photoshop Elements.  (See my previous articles on Printing Fabric, Part 2 and Part 4.)  You can crop, resize, and rotate.  You can adjust the colors, automatically or using the many color tools.  You can apply a wide variety of special effects. 

You can also create fabulous kaleidoscopes from your images using the circular or square symmetry tools.  This reminds me of the Kaleidoscope Kreator software I mentioned in a previous article.  All your image editing can be done within EQ7 and saved to your Sketchbook, ready to use in a quilt design.  So let’s try it.  Here’s a photo of a morning glory:

Let’s apply a square symmetry…

and change the photo into this:

Next, we’ll set the image in a quilt…

and start adding borders.  Now here’s something really neat:  the Eyedropper tool can find a matching color or a matching fabric from a color in the photo!  Isn’t that cool?

Here are a few quilt designs:

There’s one more amazing thing I have to show you.  It’s a new quilt layout called Photo Patchwork.  Here’s the morning glory photo overlaid with a square patchwork grid.

The grid doesn’t show up very well in the illustration, but watch this.  EQ7 will fill in each square with solid colors…

or with matching fabrics!

How cool is that?!  There are still more great new features in EQ7 I’d like to tell you about, but I guess they’ll have to wait until next week.  If you haven’t ordered EQ7 or your EQ7 upgrade yet, what are you waiting for?

Check out this image of a barn in a field of sunflowers:

Here are just a few examples of ways the photograph can be manipulated.  I used CorelDraw to create these special effects.

And here’s a Flying Geese block done with fabric printed with this last special effect.

These next effects were created using software called Kaleidoscope Kreator.  This software has many applications, but once again, with the ability to print to fabric, these extraordinary kaleidoscopes would make amazing quilt blocks.

Here’s an eight-pointed star kaleidoscope, printed to fabric and appliquéd onto a background fabric.