It's Done!! My Scrapbook of Europe (Europe 10)

     I completely finished the Europe quilt on the weekend. I have even managed to clip all loose threads (I think) but, it turns out my camera does not want to cooperate.  My daughter came by to take photos.
     Although the maps lay flat on the fabric in the beginning, the extra stitching / quilting of the background fabric caused the maps to pucker loosely in the middle. I ended up having to go over every orange thread highway I had created, as well as some of the outlines of the pictures

Haarlem, Netherlands

centre of town, Rothenberg, Germany

     I thread-sketched the tulips on the background instead of making a separate picture: two reasons ... didn't want the wall-hanging to look cluttered and I really liked the background fabric & didn't want to cover it up.

Rothenberg, Germany --- one of the gates in the town wall

Florence, Italy

     It was so hard to create the awesomeness of this cathedral. There was so much detail --- I gave up on trying to make all the statues in all the little alcoves; the picture was too tiny to add them.

Colosseum, Rome, Italy

     I have seen pictures of the Colosseum everywhere but did not expect it to be so HUGE!  It amazes me how some of the buildings were created all around this site without the cranes and backhoes and equipment that we have today.

Cinque Terre, Italy

     Here is a place that I need to return to ... and perhaps walk the mountain path that connects the village along the coast. My tour friends and I took a boat to visit 4 of the villages.

Beaune, France

     The Burgundy region .... even though many of the places we visited were not that far apart (compared to traveling in Canada), I was amazed at the differences in architecture between one country and the next.

Paris, France

     And last, but not least, Paris .... a few too many people in all the 'touristy' spots, but I enjoyed walking the several kilometres from the cathedral to our hotel on my own, stopping into little shops and taking many photographs of buildings.
 
 The additional thread-sketching that I did on the background fabric: 1. the tulips (top, mid-right), 2. Amsterdam (top left), 3. the gondola in the Alps, Switzerland (middle right), 4. the gondola in Venice (bottom right) and 5. a cathedral top Rome (bottom mid-left).

     13 pictures in raw-edge applique or thread-sketched and six maps to represent 3+ weeks of travel.  Not sure what I will do with the rest of my photographs (close to 400!) ... there are a couple that I would like to do as stand-alone larger pictures. We shall see....
    

King Sized

     Years ago my daughter picked out various green fabrics and asked me to make her a quilt. She wanted a stripy quilt ... I showed her a variety of designs that would look good with her greens, but still she wanted a stripy quilt. That's what she got.
     She has since married and I made them a beautiful queen-sized quilt, thick and warm for the winter months.
     However, this summer, she and her husband (who is 6'5") decided to buy a king-sized bed, which, of course, meant they needed a larger quilt.
     Out came the stripy quilt ... I added 35 cm (14") panels to the sides and the bottom. There wasn't any of the original fabric left but with strips in the same tones, it was easy to find enough fabric to match (most of the fabric came from my stash and I only bought a few fat quarters to compliment the original).

     Working each panel was easy to machine quilt and I practiced swirls, circles  and random stipple ... the difficulty came with attaching the panels to the main quilt .... king-sized quilts are HEAVY!!
I checked out a few Youtube videos ... this one made the most sense for what I was doing although 
 the presenter was working with 9" blocks and I was attempting to add panels that were the full length of the quilt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji8BLS2rNHA
"How to Join Up Quilt as you Go Blocks" by Gourmet Quilter

Europe top (Europe 9)

The top is now done ... I had originally planned on doing more pictures but two things changed that plan.
     One ... I found some really pretty background fabric and I didn't want to cover it all and
     Two ... the blue-grey fabric that I had for doing the frames of the pictures was only a fat quarter and I was unable to find more of the same fabric.  Several other fabric colours were auditioned but I liked my original choice the best; without more fabric, there was no need to do more pictures!
     I used a brown fabric to frame the maps.

     This was hung on the clothesline on a slightly windy day (well, where I live, everyday is at least slightly windy with most days being very windy) ... hard to keep the fabric to stop moving long enough to take a picture.
     Since I didn't want to cover all of the background fabric, I chose to outline several more Europe scenes. Top centre has red tulips; top left has buildings in Amsterdam along a canal -- hard to see in the shadow; centre right has a mountain gondola from Switzerland; bottom right has a Venice gondola going along a canal and to the left of Italy is a church dome.
     Once I finish quilting the top, I will do some close-ups so the outline pictures can be seen better.  
     The piece currently measures 38" X 43" and has taken 88 hours to get this far. :-)