Kaleidoscopes and quilting designs
I’ve been having too much fun with Kaleidoscope Kreator 3 this week. I’ve wanted this program for years and finally bought it. Basically, you drop any photo onto the workspace, choose a template to make the kaleidoscope with and move the photo around under the template. A kaleidoscope of the chosen part of the photo appears on the right hand side of the screen. You can create so many completely different kaleidoscopes from that one picture. So far I’ve made over 800 kaleidoscopes using my photos of buildings, walls, tree trunks, underground caves, wrought iron work, sunsets, statues, stairwells and my photoshopped photos.
It’s very easy to set up and use. It’s also a lot of fun! Quilters can create fantastic quilt designs from the kaleidoscopes. I’ve mainly been working with the 16 part square so it’s making a lot of octagonal and 8 point star designs from my images. These can translate into great quilting designs for these shapes. Here are just a few I created.
This was a church. Imagine the fun you could have with trapunto with this design.
This is a part of a Buddhist temple in Busan, South Korea. I love the alternating design around the star points.
This might have been woodwork.
This was one of the many from my Dystopia final assessment for Photoshop class. The red, orange and yellow used to be a picture of my fireplace when lit and the brown was an underground cave in New South Wales, Australia.
Finally, this used to be a wrought iron design in the heart of Melbourne, Australia on a building. If you look closely, you can see the word coffee printed around it. There were adverts and other things behind the iron.
With this type of program you’ll never run out of ideas for designs. The oddest photo can make the best design. You can create kaleidoscopes in Photoshop, but this does it instantly and you can get dozens of kaleidoscopes from one photo. These would also make great allover designs. This is the kind of out of the box thinking I like when it comes to design. They are unique. Give yourself a design challenge today! What can you come up with?
Happy designing and quilting,
Fiona
Fiona Schiffl 
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