Today’s featured designer is Jan DiCintio (@DaisyJanie), fabric designer and owner of Daisy Janie organic fabrics.  We recently featured Jan here on the Fat Quarterly blog and were excited to see how she would approach this challenge.  We sent Jan the Laurel sampler and told her to let her inspiration be her guide.  We hope you’re equally inspired by the beautiful pieces that she created!

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The inspiration for my canvas sampler came from these little fabric Shades of Grey posies I created for Quilt Market last year. I ran out of time to find a use for them in my booth, and they’ve been bouncing around my studio ever since… waiting for me to have time and an opportunity to play with them! The Fat Quarterly Designer’s Challenge with the sampler was perfect!

For the centers of the posies, I went on a vintage button-hunting trip to Adamstown, PA (an antique-shopping mecca) to search for vibrant, opaque buttons that would add a nice burst of color on the neutral backdrop. I added the solid grey organic canvas circles behind each flower to ensure the fabric posy stood out from the canvas and to add more color dimension overall. I painted little grey & white circles all around the perimeter of the canvas to break up the large field of cream and also to minimize the effect of the vine design printed on the canvas. The final piece has a nice variation in tone, texture and balance.

I incorporated the small fabric-covered embroidery hoops so I could hang a montage of related ideas together, which allows the canvas to function as a much larger art piece when they’re together. I also wanted to play-up the circle shape used so heavily throughout the project.

Creating this canvas sampler was a fun & much-needed way to stretch myself a little bit: out of my comfort zone with small handwork and away from beloved computer. The embellishment ideas are infinite! Thank you, Fat Quarterly!!