Friday, May 01, 2009

Colorful Amsterdam

For the Dutch sistergroup of the Challenge Quilts the present theme was: Treasure of a city / Wonderful city (it can be translated into both). Not an easy one for me as I am not very fond of cities. I prefer the rural areas more. Well after some thinking I ended up with Amsterdam. It is the city I work in - I commute 4 days a week to it. Not for the traditional tourist attractions, but I decided to pick this town as it is very multi-cultural. Since 2007 it is leading the list of cities in which the most nationalities are present (177). As comparison New York has (only) 150. I could have chosen 177 different pieces of fabric, but that would be very time consuming. As usual I am working on several projects at the same time. Instead of that I decided to pick a different batik for every district of Amsterdam. First I cut out every template from freezer paper, ironed this to the front of the fabric and ironed Misty Fuse to the other side of the fabric. When I had placed them on my fabric it looked like this:
The batiks were picked at random. Would it still look good when the freezer paper was removed??? Well luckily I was not disappointed. The final result looks like this:

The districts are stitched to the background using raw edge applique. As quilting design I used a simple line following the shape of the districts.

1 comment:

Susan said...

Interesting thing to pick as a subject and turn it into fabric piece. I see I need to get back out of the box, again.