Alice's Canyon: Sunrise Over the Urban Canyon

I had many canyon photos of my own, but none seemed just right.  So I turned to the Internet and found many lovely images.  One in particular I was eager to try to render in fabric, a “slot canyon” that was spectacular, but I knew that to use another’s copyrighted image as the basis of my quilt, I needed to ask permission.  Alas, my favorite picture’s photographer didn’t reply to my email! 

But then the phrase “urban canyon” popped into my mind!  Yes!  I sketched several make-believe cityscapes.  When I came up with one I liked, I drew it more carefully using a ruler on 12"x12” graph paper.  This I traced onto freezer paper, and I used those shapes as templates for my quilt.

At first I used fabrics printed with window-like squares for the buildings.  After I laid out the first version of this quit, I asked my husband, “Can you tell what this is supposed to be?”  He studied it, and then said ruefully, “I’m sorry; I really can’t!”

It was a classic case of his not seeing the forest for the trees!  Yes, those “trees”—those colorful buildings with their fanciful “windows”—were ideal, but just not for a quilt this small.  I then applied Wonder Under to solid-look fabrics of black, gray, brown, and blue.  These I cut using my templates and assembled version #2.

I called Bob in again—Eureka!  He knew immediately that what I was picturing was a cityscape, in fact, an “urban canyon.”  I fused all the buildings and the street to some fabric that reminded me of a sunrise.  Then I fused the front to some all-cotton batting.  Appliqué stitches served as the chief method of quilting, both buttonhole and zigzag stitching. I couched several lines of black and brown Perle cotton thread down on three of the buildings, to delineate the fronts and the sides of these structures.  I then added some random machine quilting in the sky.

I finished the edges with a technique I learned at the Sue Benner workshop last fall—multiple zigzag stitches in several different colors.  As Sue does, I left dangling threads at the four corners.  The back is a cityscape print that I’ve treasured since 1999; it depicts Seattle (the part I used); Washington, D.C.; and New York City.  The NYC portion includes the Twin Towers, and thus this fabric is precious to me.

Here's the back showing the skyline of Seattle.

I wanted to show you how the quilt looks when I pull back a bit, to show
the dangling threads at each corner.