Process

Eventually, you'll hear more about this photo and why I chose it for my April Mighty Lucky Quilting Club challenge, Using a Personal Photo as Inspiration for Piecing. But for now - I have had a few inquiries about my process as I've been posting progress photos over on Instagram, so will share a bit of that today. 

Honestly, I'm still new enough at improv that I rarely know exactly where I'm going with it. But with this piece, it at least made sense to start with what seemed the trickiest part - the dome of that Duomo - a cathedral in Florence, Italy. Often when I work in improv, several 'sections' are created, then they are puzzled together, so that was my starting plan here.

I used a technique I learned in this basic tutorial for free-hand curves, an 'overlap' technique to cut and join the two pieces indicated below. There's really no specifics - I just glanced at the photo, then cut a similar curve. I stitched, pressed, cut a new piece, and continued on to finish the dome. If things needed trimmed and reshaped as I went, that's what I did. Next were several strips of blue 'sky,' each with a bit of detail from the top of the dome.

Once I got the dome and sky pieced, I worked on the base as well as the surrounding buildings, keeping them pretty simple. Piecing like this isn't straight-forward for me. There's always fiddling to see what will give me the look I'm after. So I keep my seam-ripper handy, to tweak things as needed, sometimes it's as little as opening a seam end to add another element.

I realized pretty quickly that my scale was larger than I'd intended, considering I'm doing all of the Mighty Lucky challenge pieces at 17" square. So I decided to 'crop' my photo, knowing that would eliminate some of the detail I might otherwise have included. It was at that point that I decided adding more detail with the quilting was the way to go - maybe not quite the original challenge, but it's improv, and that's the way it happens sometimes.

So now the top is done, and I'll be quilting for a while now. . . first time free-motion quilting on my Juki! Hopefully in a few days I'll have a finished work to show you! Meanwhile, if you have any questions about what I've done so far, feel free to ask!