New York Quilt ? What New York Quilt?

Some has just asked me about the New York Quilt well (this blog will be quite heavily photo laden). I had started a quilting course with Ineke Berlyn earlier this year but had to give up after only the first day because I can't drive too far with my bad knee. However the New York quilt idea was brewing before I went and was encouraged a little there.... The exercise we did (filling in the gap) which I showed you before and the dyed fabric - I had not shown were reminding me that I wanted to do something following my visit to NY last year. The fabric dyeing using the colours of the first exercise consisted of 10 squares in grey - just making the dye lot more and more watered down until the colours became paler and then a larger piece trying to get the grey/greens and reflections of the original picture as a background.... close up of the middle greens. I have no idea what Ineke was going to teach us to do with these pieces but I have put them to one side and looked at them regularly. The other evening I took lots of my photos of New York landscapes and traced the outlines of the skylines overlapping 4 completely different skyline pictures and came up with... this one was of the same building but from different photos. The next step was to colour the pictures in using my new Koh-i-nor water colour paints.. this was too dull, this too bright, next grey only but I think I got the tones in the wrong places so then this blue is just right - when viewed using greyscale printing it looked good so this is the chosen design.... At the same time I also coloured the other design.. too dark, using oil pastels - boring, too dull

- final one is great and may one day also become a textile piece. Today's task was to enlarge my first design - so I sent a copy of the drawing to my printer asking the machine to print it using 16 pages (4 x 4) well this has come out rather too large!! Tomorrow I will try again slightly smaller - still not sure how I will translate the fabrics into the design but I will have fun trying. There are several other photos that I keep looking at and have several other ideas too!