After you have mastered making landscapes with horizontal strips, it is time to move on to bigger and better things and try sewing on vertical strips.You are probably scratching your head wondering what I am talking about. If you look back, you will see Starry Night and the mixed media house picture are actually made this way. The starry background in Starry Night is made from vertical strips of fabric that I made by sewing strips of fabric together so that each strip included sky and snow and shadow.
For my latest landscape, which is a maple bush scene, I made the background fabric at left. I horizontally pieced fabrics together to make a snow scene, with yellow shadows, trees in the distance and sunset sky at the top. This is simply fabrics sewn together, no quilt batting or backing yet. At my latest workshop, Lori followed my example to do the same. See her example on the right. I make this piece of pieced fabric the same size or slightly bigger than my quilt batting and backing that I have ready for my quilt as you go landscape.
Once your background fabric is made, the next step is to slice off the first vertical strip. Both Lori and I were making a forest scene and so tall fabric trees would be going between the sliced pieces of background. You can cut the background strips with scissors but a rotary cutter works well too. Each tree gets sewn onto the background fabric using the same quilt as you go method where you sew through the batting and backing.
You will need to spend time thinking about the size of each vertical strip and the placement of trees. When it is all made you can add some branches using Heat and Bond light or Steam a Seam.
Quilting these vertical quilts is a bit more challenging....think about how you would do it. Lori's finished piece is below on the left. I think it turned out better than mine! Learning from each other is where it is at.
Thursday's quilting group with their gorgeous creations. Well done.
Stay tuned, another workshop is coming soon. We have a list of interested people. Let Mary or I know if you want to be added to that list.
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