Italy Through Window Blinds

I made this one for an art quilt swap -- my first. You can read more about it on my Dorinda Blog at: this Dorinda page, and this Dorinda page.
This page tells about how I designed it.




This is the original photo I used as a guide for my project. I love Italy, and this photo was taken there. I am always careful to only use free photo images on-line and to document its source. If you zoom in you will see the source.

Here are some close-ups.




My plan was to try a "convergence" quilt. This is a style of art created by Ricky Tims, and I wanted to take a swing at my virsion of it. The idea is to sew a project and then slice it up horizontally or vertically (or both)and place plain strips between the original project. Ricky actually prefers to use wild hand-dyes fabrics that have various colors in them for his "between" strips. It really adds variation to his quilts.

I traced and sliced the pattern first vertically thinking I would prefer it this way.



I felt like the tall buiding really shrunk with this effect, and so I tried horizontal strips. Wala! It was just what I was looking for. I liked how it really exaggerated the tall building.

My next step was to create a paper pieced pattern. Here is my base pattern with a numbering and code system that I'm certain only I could ever interpret. I'm not even certain I could follow my code to make another one in the future.

Next I copied the sections onto transparency sheets. All you have to do is flip the transparency over and you have a perfectly reversed image for paper piecing.