Boston Collage

 I know it’s been a while since I posted. I have been taking another class with Natalya Khorover over the last month on making an architectural composition. It is certainly different than anything I’ve done in the past in terms of a composition. 

In this case you print out several photos that you like. I had about 15 photos of buildings in Boston. Then you trace what ever elements you like in each photo on tracing paper. So you have a collection of tracing paper pieces with buildings on them. Here’s my stack of pieces.

 

Then you arrange these tracing paper pieces in a collage. Since you can see through the tracing paper you can flip the pieces if you need to. I did lots of arrangements and reached this one as my best option. I had to change the scale of some of the elements and make them larger.  The grid is my cutting board.

 

Now I had to decide on the size of my collage composition. I decided to go large at 46 inches wide by 70 inches long. 

I created my final pattern on my iPad with all the details. Some of these details will be fabric and some of them will be stitching.

 

I had to decide on the color scheme and I picked teal, blues, and plum purples with some orange and yellow. I pulled out the only sky fabric that I had that was big enough. It has purple, yellow and orange in it. Of course picking a desired color scheme and finding the appropriate fabrics to fit that scheme are 2 different things. You can tell what my mind felt like from this photo of my sewing room. During this whole process I was reaching the desperation stage.  At one point I thought of doing this in grayscale or greens. I was all over the place.

The fabric pieces are so large that they just looked like big blobs of fabric to me. Once the details are added they will look much better. At least I hope so.

I drew in some lines on a photo on my iPad to see if it helped.

Here’s a close up of the little progress I have made on this quilt. At this point the building pieces are cut larger than they will be just to audition fabrics.

 

 I finally decided after feedback on my progress from Natalya to begin at the top and cut things down to size, add fusible to the back of the pieces and begin to add details. I did not get to far yet, but will work on it more today. I think I will take the same approach as my canal house quilt and do one building or section at a time. Then I will move onto the next one.

Here’s a few buildings cut to size sitting on my pattern.

 

Linking to Nina-Marie.

Thanks for reading.

Chris