I truly believe that inspiration can come from anywhere. While inspiration often comes from nature, landscapes, or architecture for me, I also try to keep my eyes open and my curiosity active when looking at the world around me.
Within the last few months, while living in South Korea, I have taken a few weekend trips to the capital and largest city in the country, Seoul. Seoul has an amazing subway system, it is very expansive and easy to use. I noticed fairly quickly the steps to and from the train platforms all had metal tread pieces on them. I also noticed that these treads varied some from station to station, so I started snapping pictures of them as I passed. And that is where I found unexpected inspiration for a quilt design.
My photos were hastily taken, but they did the job. I just needed a quick snapshot to jog my memory of the details. Here is how I translated these stair treads into quilt block design.
I then took these blocks and turned them into rows. This created long skinny sections similar to how the tread on the front of each step looked.
These blocks are fairly busy, so I wanted something to breakup the different rows, and to make them each a statement of their own. I decided to use the concrete brick pattern from the photos of my stair treads, which led me to my completed design.
I actually started designing this quilt and greys and pastels because that felt more true to life of my images, since the stairs and stair treads were mainly concrete and metal. Here is my first color mock up of this design.
While I like this first generation of the design, I tend to prefer to work with more saturated colors, which is how I ended up with the bolder second generation.
Do you prefer to work with pastels or saturated colors? Where is somewhere you found unexcepted inspiration?