23. An Uphill Struggle Journal Quilt

For the first time in the Sketchbook Challenge my heart dropped when reading about the new theme for this month. It was: Urban Sketching. Living in the back of beyond doesn't offer any opportunities for urban sketching and West Linton can hardly be described as an urban environment. I wouldn't ever want to take my sketchbook to Edinburgh and draw in situ. Way too much attention, it would really put me off.

So I started thinking about alternatives and somehow my mind drifted to small Italian hill towns such as can be found in Tuscany. It might not be truly urban but after all they are towns and were once independent states. I remembered the curious juxtaposition in one street of farm buildings, small cottages, town houses and defensive towers with of course also at least one church. An idea came and as the first hing that came to hand (despite the fact I have a veritable wealth of sketchbooks!)was my diary. I scribbled it down in there. You can see the sketch here

Then I graduated to drawing my town plan to scale i.e. 10" square as I've made all the quilts for the Sketchbook Challenge. I had fun colouring in the drawing using Promarkers and you can see the finished drawing   here

I used this as the template for making the fabric Journal Quilt for this week with the assistance of lots of Bondaweb. As background I chose to use a black/white squared fabric that brought to my mind the tiled floors you find in many Italian houses and churches. I used a selection of brightly coloured Chinese cottons as well as my hand-dyed ones to bring the houses to life. And you can see the end product here. It's another of my weekly journal quilts I'm making as part of my 52 Journals project. If you want to see all the previous ones you can click on the 52 Journals label below this post and there is also a slideshow of the ones finished so far in the sidebar.

I've tried to describe how this piece came to be but in reality even I don't fully understand my mind's process. I just try to get out of the way and let it happen. And in this case I'm very happy with the results. It might not be all that urban compared to sketching in say New York but it's a lot more urban than our rustic location and what's more important, it works well as a design and I thoroughly enjoyed the hectic day that led from scribble to drawing to fabric.