Mosaic Circles

Amy over at Amy’s Creative Side is working her wonders again. She is now hosting the 4th Blogger’s Quilt Festival, and as of today you can go to her site and enjoy links to all the wonderful works presented at the different blogs.

This time I thought I would show you my latest creation, along with some of the history that led up to this quilt.

I have been writing up a few posts from Murmansk, Russia, lately. When we visited there the first time in 2007, I was intrigued by a mosaic covered sculpture standing outside one of the cafes we visited.

I loved the look of it, and took quite a few photos. Sadly, I do not know the name of the artist.

After we got home my youngest sister wanted a memory quilt from our tour for her birthday. I then grabbed a detail photo of this sculpture and filled lots of the “tiles” with photos from our trip, before I printed everything on fabric and quilted it.

There are more photos of this quilt on my website.

While I was working on this quilt, I decided that one day I would like to make my own “tiled” quilt, – with “real” fabrics.

My chance came this summer after I had finished the last of my commissions, and I set about playing with ideas and designs. I deliberately avoided to look up my old photos, as I did not want to make a “copy” of the mosaic.

What I had in mind, was to explore interlocking, or overlapping circles, and, – with another piece of art in mind, that I saw last year, – how to achieve a sort of transparency at the same time.

I wrote about the installation above last year, in this post.

My own experimental piece ended up looking like this:

It is quite small, only 19 x 19 inches including the borders.

My starting point was to have one circle of each primary colour overlap each other, but then I threw in a pink circle in one of the corners, and liked the effect.

Most of the surface consists of two or more circles overlapping, so I had to find lots of in-between colours.

Since I love rummaging through my stash looking for just the “right”  shade of fabric, I really got to enjoy myself while working on this one.

I got side tracked a few times, so worked on the quilt on and off until recently. There were som trials and errors as I worked things out along the way, but everything came together in the end.  I dreaded most sewing all those small fabric pieces, but in the end, it went quite smoothly.

I took notes as I worked since I anticipated that I will be doing this again, with another design. I have since collected my write-ups and drawings in two pdf-files, which are available as a download pattern from my website.

Have fun browsing through all the eye-candy at the Blogger’s Quilt Festival.

Eldrid