A Painting Inspires an Art Quilt Cityscape

9 Patch Scrappy Village is finished. November 2014, Karen Gillis Taylor. 58″ x 61″. Click all photos for larger view.

Have you ever wondered if you will make it to the finish line in a race? I gave myself a month to create this city quilt, and I needed every bit of that time. Reason? Mainly, it is BIG, as my own art quilts go, anyway. That’s a real grand piano in the photo, if it helps provide some scale.

October Night City 2013, KGT, 8″ x 10″, acrylic

This is the small painting that inspired the art quilt. One of 2 choices, I put the question to some Facebook friends as to which painting might make a good quilt, and this won the opinion poll. Fun to see the choices and reasons people offered. Thanks, friends!

I made many changes but basically, the design was enlarged by multiplying by 8 to get me in the ball park for size. Oh, how I love math. Lotsa math.

New 9 Patch Village quilt- a selection of some fabrics among many

Choosing fabric is exciting, colors exhilarating. But with a project this size, a person gets overwhelmed easily, so I found myself sorting and cleaning every night to keep the fabrics from getting out of hand.

2 9-Patch blocks inhabit this part of the quilt.

I was following a theme incorporating traditional 9-patch blocks into my otherwise contemporary quilt. A 9-patch unit can look like a tic-tac-toe game of 3 x 3 squares, but it can also be 9 rectangles of varying shapes and sizes. Can you spot the 2 9-patch blocks here?

After I pieced the entire top, I began fusing the remaining tree, cloud and window shapes for the details and accent colors. See the garden detail below.

Garden detail

Another 9-patch unit is in this section in the lower right area.

I took some photos before I finished my quilting. I made the top in 2 large sections, quilted each section and then sewed them together with an invisible seam to the back. It’s a “quilt-as-you-go” method. Final touches and quilting came at the end.

A large section of the quilt top before finishing.

At last it was time to finish the edges of the quilt with a striped binding. My husband finally saw me surface from the sewing room to hand-sew the binding during the football game beside him on the sofa. Whew! What a project!

Binding my quilt created with raw-edge fused applique

Sadly, I didn’t finish this quilt in time to enter it into an exhibit competition. Missed the deadline by a week. I realized I wasn’t going to finish in time toward the end, but also knew I had invested too much effort to sacrifice adding my finishing details the way I’d hoped. C’est la vie! That’s life in a month of give and take. Job done, happy me.

I listened to 4 books on CD, nicked my fingers twice with a rotary cutter and scissors, and just missed melting my little area rug when I forgot to put a towel under a part of the quilt top I was fusing. (“What’s that smell?”) It was all worth it. Time to go back to painting now. Your comments are truly appreciated!

A few more detail photos…

 

Tags: abstract cityscape, art quilt, cityscapes, cityscapes by Karen Gillis Taylor, night paintings, quilting