Urban Planning using quilts.

I'm sure you can all relate.  I've got to sew labels and sleeves on to two quilts by tomorrow morning.  I need to sandwich and quilt 3 quilts in the next week/ week and a half.  I'm drawing up two more creations that I've been pulling fabric for...  Yet.... I was compelled to finish this quilt (which has no deadline nor purpose other than to satisfy my creativity sweet tooth).  

So I found a photo of a city in Sweden from which I could not pry my eyes away.  The colors grabbed me first but then the shapes and patterns completely drug me into the rabbit hole.  It's from IG and t's a site called Daily Overview (here's the link:  Daily Overview).  I am obsessed now.  Seriously - I have so many ideas flowing...I've got to throttle myself back to keep from overdosing on marker fumes.

I felt like this lent itself so well to a quilt...I got out my trusty graph paper and went to town.  Not finding my markers....I had to settle for a highlighter and a pencil and just labeled where I wanted each color.  I decided it use 1.5 inch raw edges to make gridding this out a bit easier.   While it somewhat follows this photo - I took artistic license with it to make it doable for me.

That's right - I own a pen that is... an eraser.  And I use it A LOT...

Of course, as soon as I finished this process, I nearly tripped over my markers.  But I wasn't going back and redoing this - it works fine the way I colored and labeled it.  I used that eraser marker a lot in this process before I colored in the blocks.

Once I got to putting it all together, I was glad I selected the 1.5 inch size.  It made putting everything together much more simple and clean.  I don't usually sweat matching points but this needed that precision.  Once I kept adding to it - I realized I would make some bigger changes to the bottom left quadrant.  I just wasn't feeling the layout on my paper.  Laziness?  Maybe.  I am just dying to get it sandwiched up and quilt it...  I think I will add a border of the darker gray around the quilt to finish it off.  It's approximately 42 inches by 30 inches before anything else.

This was before I used the grid work.  I thought I could improv it but when these went together, I felt the more rigid grid would look better and give it more uniformity.

Building streets and buildings...

I'm really pleased with the results so far....  But...now back to the sweat shop.  Those sleeves are sewing themselves on!!

I'm going to link up to several Linky parties this week - look at my side bar to join in.  Here are some posts from some of those Linky parties that I especially loved:

Rainbow mini swap progress

A gift for a 90 year old

Winning!!!

7200 Hexies

Elna Supermatic

Spell it with Moda

Brown sofa

Gorgeous Eye Quilt

Quilted Lanyard Tutorial