15 Mins Architecture Challenge: Begun....

Victoria Findlay Wolfe, fast becoming my favorite quilter/quilt blogger, runs a separate website from her regular blog, where she posts challenges and inspiration and invites readers to play along. I am so glad I  popped over there in time to get in on this challenge! So fun! Go check it out -- 15 Minutes Play.

I just received her book as a mother's day gift, and I am loving the freedom of playing with fabric in this reinventy sort of way, taking scraps and turning them into something lovely. Nice! It's been a very good creative outlet for me in between big projects dictated by my young sons.

The challenge is to find an inspiration photo, something architectural, and then turn it into a quilt (24" x 30", oriented either direction). 

I scrolled through folders and folders of photos, only to realize one thing: I am way more inspired by nature than by architecture. And a second thing: even using scraps, I can't bear to make something that won't mean something to me when done.

In the end, I chose this photo, using the term inspiration to here mean "starting off point", and ran with an idea that somewhat related.

blurry, because we were driving
'tis the angles of the SP that I love so much, and the city against nature juxtaposition

This is a sign/statue along the highway as you enter Sao Paulo city, and it has always intrigued me. The angles are just eye catching, and this street-side statue is a perfect symbol to me of all that is Sao Paulo -- funky, gritty, edgy, stark, sterile, creative.....yes, all of that at the same time.

That led me to thoughts about the city itself, cut into an area that used to be rain forest. And then a photo from a different folder, of a scar left behind after a mudslide, merged in my mind with this photo.....what if, instead of a scar of dirt and mud cutting into a hastily built area of dwellings, what if the city were the scar?

I first built the water/ocean right onto the batting, moving dark to light, edge to edge, to loosely represent the coast. Then I built a strip of green hills/mountains, the swath of rain forest that remains, cutting off the city from the Atlantic coast.  I left the top edge of the green loose until I built the city & road, then tucked those behind, folded the green up & over, and sewed it in place with a straight stitch, leaving the raw edge on purpose so as to have a more organic feel.

building the green

Atlantic Rain Forest -- the coast 

with the city & street tucked in, and sky behind

Still quite a bit of tweaking to go; I see already that I didn't get the SP quite right, in shape or placement, so will take that off and go again, as well as add details to the rain forest and the buildings, possibly bringing the forest in higher as well......luckily the deadline isn't until July! Plenty of time to work on this between bigger projects.