The Paris collaboration I’ve been writing about is at a stage where I just need to keep going. The blocks are all quilted, sections are being stitched together, and borders added. So I thought I’d tell you about another Paris quilt project. While we were in Paris, we visited Le Rouvray quilt shop, near Notre Dame. I copy a copy of the book That Patchwork Place did about the shop (in French, which adds to the challenge), and on the cover was a quilt from one of her staff, a hexagon made with toile fabrics. I thought it would be fun to make, but with the hexagons featuring some of our photographs.
- But then I had the bright idea of making my own toile fabrics from the photos. I used a couple of different techniques in Photoshop to first turn the photos into what looked like sketches. The first technique, from Photoshop Tips & Tricks, started with using a New Adjustment Layer to desaturate the photo the photo and turn it into black and white. That layer was duplicated, then inverted to make it look like a negative. The blend mode of that layer was then changed to Color Dodge, resulting in a white image. By applying Gaussian Blur to that layer, the sketch appears.
The second method I used came from Web Design Library. The photo layer was duplicated, then desaturated. A filter from the Stylize group, Glowing Edges, was then applied to that layer (Edge Width - 1; Edge Brightness - 11; Smoothness -5). You can experiment with the settings to get the best lines. Then invert that layer. With both of these methods, I adjusted the contrast to eliminate as much grey as possible. The images below show a photo I started with, and the completed sketch. Next time, I’ll describe my breakthrough method (for me, at least) for printing the final images in red, blue, and green, as well as black and white. 
