A landscape quilt is a special type of collage that uses fabric to create a view of a realistic or stylized natural scene. The fabrics you choose for your landscape set the mood of the piece and give it its distinctive look. Read this article to learn about fabrics that work well for making landscape quilts.
Use Muslin or Old Sheets for Landscape Quilt Foundation Fabric
A landscape quilt needs a base fabric on which you build the rest of the landscape collage. Since the foundation fabric will be covered by the landscape fabrics, an inexpensive muslin or even a scrap of an old sheet works well as a foundation fabric. Use a light-colored fabric so it doesn’t show through the fabrics you layer on top.
Use Fusible Interfacing or Batting Inside the Landscape Quilt Sandwich
Most landscape quilts are made to be hung on the wall and displayed. This makes a stiff fusible interfacing such as fast2fuse® worth using in place of traditional batting. The stiffness of the interfacing helps the quilt keep its shape when hung on the wall, and its fusibility means you don’t have to pre-fuse the fabrics you use for the first layer of the landscape collage. They can be arranged on top of the interfacing and fused all at one time. This can save considerable time and effort.
Fusible interfacings are synthetic, so they are not terribly eco-friendly. They are also stiff enough that they need to be stored flat and can’t be rolled up like a traditional quilt. If you prefer to use regular quilt batting or wadding, use a thin batting without much loft, so the quilt will hang properly on the wall.
Landscape Quilt Fabrics Mimic Nature’s Colors
Nature’s landscapes are full of variations, colors, textures, and patterns. The best fabrics for quilted landscapes mimic the endless variety of nature’s own color schemes. Here are some fabrics that quilters use to make beautiful landscape quilts:
- Batiks come in a rainbow of rich, variegated colors and a huge variety of geometric patterns that make them a favorite choice for landscape quilts.
- Hand-painted or hand-dyed fabrics are expensive, but they are wonderful for skies, sunsets, oceans, and backgrounds.
- Textured prints. Small-scale prints are great for creating rocks, tree bark, hills, or the roofs and walls of buildings.
- Large-scale prints. Large motifs like flowers or animals can be cut out of the print and placed as single elements on the landscape quilt. Large motifs like flowers or rocks can be cut down to make them smaller, if needed. You can also alter the color of flowers, leaves, or other elements whose shape you like with fabric markers or inks.
- Nature prints. Fabrics that already depict trees, leaves, grasses, rocks, or water can be cut up quickly and placed on the quilt.
- Tulle. Use this to create an almost-invisible unifying layer over sections that have lots of little pieces. The single layer is much easier to stitch in place than dozens of tiny pieces. Colored tulle can create a barely-there mist of color over an area you select.
- Organza, like tulle, creates a mist of color over a selected area and can be used to secure sections with lots of little pieces. Both organza and tulle have a softening effect on the spots where you use them.
- Wool roving comes in dozens of rich colors. Use roving to create drifts of clouds, mists, grass, moss, or water.
- Angelina fibers. These sparkly polyester or metallic fibers add a hint of glittery color wherever you place them. Some Angelina fibers are fusible.
- Cheesecloth. Use this to create the impression of fast-moving water or snow on mountain tops. The open weave in cheesecloth has an interesting texture that isn’t found in other fabrics.
Use Fabric Color and Scale to Indicate Distance
Darker colors and larger patterns make elements like trees, rocks, and mountains look closer. Paler colors and smaller-scale patterns make objects look farther away.
If you like a fabric but think its colors are too strong, try turning it over and using the back side instead.
Alter Landscape Quilt Fabrics With Stamps, Paints and Inks
If a fabric you otherwise like is the wrong color or just lacks a certain something, you can often make it work by altering it with fabric markers, Shiva paint sticks, stamps, or fabric inks. It’s easy to change the color of a flower or leaf, ink knotholes into trees, add reflections of rocks on the shoreline of a lake, or put ripples in the water going over a waterfall.
Collect Fabrics for Landscape Quilting
Once you start looking for fabrics that will work in landscape quilts, you’ll find them everywhere. It isn’t necessary to spend a fortune to build a stash of landscape quilt fabrics; landscape quilts are usually smaller than the kind of quilt made to keep you warm, so you can get plenty of mileage from fat quarters or half-yard pieces.
Christine Mann - Christine Mann writes about quilting, home decor sewing, and creativity in daily life.
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