The other day, I decided to make a landscape / art quilt. I had seen several landscape quilts which were breathtaking and thought I'd try my hand at it.
Being impulsive, as I can sometimes be, I launched right into it without any idea of the way one should make a landscape quilt. I found several beautiful landscape photos of the Great Smokey Mountains and created a template:
My first step was to print this design onto muslin. Since I didn't know the usual process for landscape quilts, I figured that would give me a good guide in building the landscape.
The next step was to reverse the template, print it on paper, and number each each piece. I then traced it onto fusible web, numbering each piece on the fusible web. I knew I'd need to overlap the pieces and thought I'd left a large enough margin at the bottom of each piece. In this I miscalculated. Oops. But that's jumping ahead.
I pawed through my stash (some of which is courtesy of my sister) and came up with fabrics I thought would work out. Here is the "rough draft" of the fabrics.
I was pretty pleased with the variety of colors until I got to the greens. I'm still not sure I chose the best colors to represent the foreground mountains. The trees in the bottom third seem to disappear into the hills. As it's my first attempt, I decided to go ahead and try it with these colors.
As mentioned earlier, some of the pieces didn't turn out large enough to cover the entire muslin template. I can't figure out how the pieces ended up too small since they should have been plenty big. Maybe not researching the technique in advance was a mistake? I managed to get the muslin covered and fused the pieces in place.
After starting this project, I checked YouTube for landscape videos. It was there I discovered I need to make the entire quilt sandwich before I sew down the landscape pieces. That makes perfect sense but I hadn't actually thought that far ahead. So the next step is make the two borders I'm planning to add, and cut the batting and backing. Then I can start sewing it. I'll post pictures when that process is started.
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