We’ve long been enamored of quilter Denise Schmidt, who has turned the age-old craft of quilting into modernist art. Her minimalist work is rich with color, geometry, presence, and tends to be hung on wall as art works rather than put on beds.

Schmidt teaches workshops periodically. We love this picture of her method: pinning fabric rectangles to a pinboard to figure out a pattern.

…

…her plottings of patterns on walls yielded this…

…and this…

It is something that anyone can do, not just in figuring out the pieces of a quilt, but in forging a graphic design of any kind, whether it be a pattern for a painted floor or wall, or a pieced tablecloth. When a friend was trying to figure out which tiles to use for a kitchen wall, we recommended she make true-to-size color copies of the different tiles so she could tape different arrangements on the actual wall and visualize what they would look like in “real life”.

Check out more photos of Denyse Schmidt’s pattern-plotting method at Amy a la Mode.

With thanks to Pamela Hovland who first alerted us to Denyse Schmidt’s work.