"Longing for Travel in the Time of the Virus"

This is "Longing for Travel in the Time of the Virus,"a 24 x 34" piece of original fiber art that I've been working on April 2019!  It was inspired by a photograph I took of Bellagio, Italy, a scenic town on Lake Como which we visited in June 2013. 

My interest in making landscape/cityscape images in fabric started a few years ago when I designed and made several small 8x10" practice pieces, like this beach scene....

...and this snow scene.

 In 2018 I made a more elaborate work, this night view of Times Square. 

I felt ready to do a larger piece and decided to use my Bellagio photograph as inspiration.  Here is that photo.  

From my study of techniques, I knew the first thing to do I should do was to blow up the photograph and trace a full size drawing of the building shapes onto paper.  This did not come easy to me but with some perseverance, and a great deal of simplifying the image as I worked on it, I did make a satisfactory drawing on paper.  Then I copied it onto a vinyl overlay that I would use as I placed the fabric pieces that would make up the actual quilt.

Making that drawing was so much work that I took a break and painted a nice blue sky on some white fabric.  That was a lot of fun.  

Then back to the hard work, using the vinyl as a placement guide as I gradually added the fabric shapes of the buildings.  This was not fun, partly because I had to fuse an adhesive to the back of each shape which meant working in reverse.  "Working backwards" about drove me crazy but in the end I managed to come up with my own way of getting the job done, which I won't try to explain here. I built each section of the town on nonstick parchment paper and then pulled up the section and placed it on the fabric background using the vinyl drawing as my guide. Then I ironed it to activate the fusible glue the section onto the fabric.  Whew!  That's a lot of steps to do over and over again. 

It was slow and painstaking work.  I often set it aside for days, even weeks, to relax or work on other projects and regain my creative energy for the problem solving this step required.  In the photo below you can see some notes I made about what to do next and you can also see the for a long time I didn't decide on the fabric for the water. 

   

But slowly the town began to emerge and one great day I found the perfect fabric for the water.  It was a multi-colored blue wavy batik from which I cut long wavy slices.  I arranged these so the lighter blues were at the top and the darker ones at the bottom.  I loved it and was so jazzed that I really wanted to move ahead faster and see what would happen next.  It was a great day when all the components were finally in place.  Not in perfect places, but at least everything was in a place.  

But then came several months of reworking those components to come up with placements and design that I really liked.  For example, compare the steeple in the above image with the one below.  In the end I made a whole new steeple, drawing it thicker and with more dimension.   If you look at the orange building in the center of the above image and try to find it below, you won't.  As I reworked the waterfront to something I liked better, that building completely disappeared.   

By this phase of the process I wasn't looking at my original travel photograph or at my drawing anymore but just at the piece itself to see what I wanted to change.  As we moved into the quarantine period I began to feel that this quilt wasn't about Bellagio at all, but simply a celebration of the very idea of travel itself, something that we had lost as the virus took over our lives.   More and more I begin to see that I wanted this to be a type of travel postcard, the sort that makes you smile as you remember or anticipate a journey to a new and wonderful place.    

It was slow and challenging work to add enough detail but not too much.  I wanted viewers to recognize that they were seeing a lakeside town but not see a faithful rendition of a specific place. 

If you compare this detail with the photo below it you can see how the details evolved.   The little white dots are the heads of pins holding fabric pieces in place as I decided what to add and what to change.  

The grey porch on the gold building was deleted, the pink building got some balconies, and some painting was added to the beachfront.  

As I worked I often consulted with my art quilter friends and they were generous and helpful with their feedback.  They gave me ideas on how to differentiate the big stone wall on the left side of the beach from the smaller stone wall running in front of the town.  They had the good idea to rework the backs of the motor boats parked at the end of the big stone wall (that look like grey blobs in the above photo) into big boulders and they helped me figure out how to make the wood pier on the right look, well, more like a pier!  I'm so fortunate to have quilter friends that will give me not only encouraging support but useful critiques and ideas.  

And then came the stitching.  Each fused shape had to be stitched down to hold them in place and then the whole piece quilted to hold the quilt backing, batting, and top in place and to add intereting texture, color, and line.  All that stitching seemed daunting and at one point I even thought about not doing much of it but keeping the surface very simple.  But my art quilter friends gently pushed me towards adding more stitching and so I began.  Well, I was sure surprised when I realized that I was having a ball stitching all those pieces down and when I started quilting it was just pure joy.  It's true that quilting the sky was nerve wracking, but doing the mountain and water made up for it as I zipped along enjoying seeing the threads bring the fabric to life.  

After all that machine work I added quite a bit of shading with Inktense pencils to give the buildings more definition and dimension.  You can see some of this in the details below.  Look closely and you'll also spot the little Italian flag that Ben suggested.  That was fun to make and I think it's pretty cool.  

Then I added what is called an "artist facing," fabric that covers the four edges of the quilt to finish it off nicely.  I was so happy with the piece that I did one last thing.  I practiced and practiced machine stitching my name and then added my signature to the bottom right corner. 

Linking to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Fridays