Milie Funk morphs anatomical diagrams into quilts

The stark black and white biological diagrams of “Gray’s Anatomy,” drawn by Henry Vandyke Carter, might not give off the same fuzzy feelings you get from your favorite homemade quilt, but they’re a surprising source of inspiration for artist and quilt crafter Milie Funk.

“It’s kind of morbid, but really cool,” Funk said.

Funk’s quilts are impressive and have a wide range of elaborately detailed designs. One might display an intricate illustration of a skeleton, while another might feature a honeybee. No matter the direction, the effort is apparent on first glance. Funk’s work will be on display at this weekend’s Arts Night Out at the Old Town General Store, and later this year at the East Lansing Art Festival.

Funk, 28, who spent her childhood in Okemos and Olivet, comes from a family of artists. Her grandfather, Roger Funk, was chairman of the art department at MSU and her mother, Andrea Funk, has an art degree herself and owns her quilt company, Too Cool T-Shirt Quilts.

“At first, I tried to stay from art,” Milie Funk said. “’What are you going to do with an art degree? Is it even worth anything?’ That’s what everyone would ask me. But it’s what I love to do.”

Funk worked at her mother’s quilt shop through her time at Olivet College, where she obtained a fine arts degree in biological illustration. She began quilting on a Christmas morning, where she sat down with a quilting machine, treating the sewing process with needle and thread as if it was pen and paper.

“I spent a lot of time learning to draw something exactly as I saw it — measuring what I was drawing, working with different textures and shading techniques,” Funk said. “It was figuring out how to transfer something from the three-dimensional to a two-dimensional piece of paper — that’s the foundation I got at Olivet. I do the same thing with quilting.”

When Funk is working on one of her quilts, she has several aesthetic considerations to calculate. She scrutinizes the form to determine how she can use color, texture and shape to make a flat pattern appear round.

“It’s a bunch of random things,” Funk laughs.

Another quirk in Funk’s process is her insistence of using cheap lined-notebook paper when developing a rough sketch for the design of her next quilt.

“It can’t be nice paper,” Funk declared.

She takes the sketch and picks out a background color for the fabric. Funk prefers darker shades of late. Like toned paper, dark shades can display a wide blend of colors. After drawing the sketch onto the fabric with chalk, she loads her long arm sewing machine and goes to work following her outline precisely. But nothing is permanent in this process.

“I kind of make it up every time I do one. I pick the colors as I’m working on it, and sometimes I rework the drawing; sometimes I do a completely different stitching pattern,” Funk said. “Sometimes I’ll do a lot of straight lines, a lot of cross-hatching, or sometimes I’ll use squiggles.”

Funk has a relatively endless supply of fabric, thanks to her mother’s quilt shop. Oddly shaped pieces and remnants of larger blankets that have no use for a typical quilt are recycled into a canvas for Funk.

“The fabric continues living, as opposed to being thrown away,” Funk said.

Arts Night Out with Milie Funk

Friday, March 6, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Old Town General Store

408 E. Cesar E. Chavez Ave., Lansing

facebook.com/oldtowngeneralstore, (517) 487-6847