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I recently did a short talk on photo transfer for Jean Wells' Intuitive Design class, which got me thinking about how to incorporate her style of piecing into a small photo quilt. I started with an 8" x 8" Photoshop collaged "background" and inserted the dark strip in the sample above. I finished it off with two prints on painted Lutradur and couched embellishment ribbon around the central image.
A week or so after I finished the little quilt, I came across an article in the Sept./Oct. 2009 issue of Cloth Paper Scissors called "Spontaneous Combustion" by Robin Olsen. She takes my thought process a step further and selects from a variety of "prompts" to direct the construction of her art quilts. A prompt might be "add rectangles," "add a strong horizontal," "add something ugly," etc.
I'm not the most spontaneous quilter in the world, so I'm going to develop my own list of prompts and give this a try.