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Wednesday, April 20, 2016

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!

6 comments:

  1. Improv with intent like this can be very tricky, and I really like the way you ended up with a cropped in view of your inspiration image. I find describing the trial and error and seam ripping process of improv quite challenging, and I can definitely relate and follow along with your process here. Sometimes diving in and trying something is the only way to go.

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  2. It's been fun watching this evolve!

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  3. I love the level of detail and scale you settled on. I think it will end up being an even more pleasing composition to the eye than the if you had kept closer to the inspiration photo. Thanks for sharing your process.

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  4. I think it is coming along fantastically! Love that you are quilting details and not necessarily feeling the need to piece all those bits!

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  5. I love this - not only because it's one of my fave places in the world but I love the look of the less detailed pricing and what your quilting is bringing! Great work!

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  6. Thank goodness for a seam ripper! Debbie, this is wonderful...I am so excited to see it finished. Good luck with the FMQ! Go with it, have fun and relax!

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