The Land Before

This week’s Project Quilting prompt was “In Another Era.” My first thought, especially knowing I’d be going out of town for QuiltCon and away from my sewing machine, was to do some sort of hand piecing project. But everything I turned over in my mind in that direction didn’t really call to me. Then I happened to be looking at a piece of print fabric, and held it up to the light, and the pattern shining through reminded me of urban planning and cities, and I thought - would be interesting to make a quilt based on that “era” of my life when I was involved with urban planning!

My first thought was a map quilt of my town, but showing historical ecological features rather than just the current city grid. But in my search, I wasn’t able to find much in the way of historical ecological mapping at the city scale (like the Welekia Project for New York City!) What I did find, though, is the EnviroAtlas, that has a layer of data for Ecoregions. When I zoomed in to my area, this is what I found:

I was immediately enchanted by the shapes and colors of the ecoregions represented in my area, and set out to make a quilt of this idea. I was quite pressed for time, getting ready for departure, but I pressed on and scaled up the image, printed four letter-sized sheets of paper, and traced each section using a corresponding fabric color. The cut-out pieces looked amazing!!! But I didn’t use a fusible because I knew I wanted to hand quilt, and I wanted the pieces to be floppy and easy to quilt through. Let me just say without sharing an embarrassing image that this method was NOT successful!!!

So now I was really down to the wire, and still wanted to participate, but was running out of time and options. Looking at what I wanted to achieve, I decided my best option would be to scale it down, and if I did, I might be able to use my inktense pencils to give a watercolor effect, then hand quilt the piece on the go.

So I reprinted my map image much smaller, traced the shapes using my inktense pencils onto unwashed muslin fabric, and colored them in. Here is what the shapes looked like before and after adding water with a paint brush:

If I were to do it again, I would paint each section slowly and let each part dry before beginning the next, but this was not a slow unfolding project, this was a get-it-done-now-because-the-train-is-leaving kind of moment!!

Had I had access to my sewing machine, my original idea was to matchstick quilt lines with electric yellow thread, and I liked the idea of exploring matchstick quilting by hand. So I packed the same thread (50wt) and used the same method I use to matchstick quilt by machine - continually subdividing the quilt with increasingly more dense lines of stitching. The process and experience went very well, it doesn’t have the exact same effect as matchstick quilting by machine, but it was very fun to do and something I’d like to explore more.

Since I was on the road, I actually ended up facing the quilt by hand for the first time, which was much easier and more successful than I expected!

Overall, I’m really happy with how this little piece came together. For me, it reminds me that the land I live on has had many lives, and will have many more.