I received the fabric printouts of the two pictures that I wanted to use like I used the image in the Tracy Arm quilt, and now I’m rethinking my strategy on at least one of them. Come along on my thinking process journey.
This is the original image:
It’s the church in Gimsøy on the Lofoten Islands in Norway. The original idea was to print this image, then cut out the church while recreating the rest of the image with quilt store fabrics. Not a bad idea in general, but…
One of the challenges of working with digital images is that what you see on the screen is not necessarily what you’re going to get when you print the image out – on ANY medium, not just fabric. The brightness of your screen affects what you see when you look at it here, but if you print it out – it’s always a crap shoot, honestly. How it comes out depends on the medium you’re printing on (paper, fabric, etc.), the printer itself, and a host of other things. In this case, the fabric printout came out really dark – much darker than I expected it to. The image is still visible, but the church is more gray than white, even in the lightest spots, and the sky looks ominous, as if it’s about to storm any minute. And I don’t get that from this image when I look at it on a computer screen.
I also realized, when I sat down to see if I had any fabrics that I could use for this quilt, that the specific angle of the sunlight is going to be a challenge to recreate in fabric. I could probably do it. But I’m not sure I really want to, honestly. So I’m going to “leave it out.”
As a result, this quilt has turned into something quite different than I expected. The current plan is to use the printout as a template to create the elements of the image, but not to use the church fussy cut out of the fabric printout. It’ll be a little simpler than the actual image – I’ll only include a handful of gravestones, for example, and only one tree. It may end up being so simple that it’s boring, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
As of right now, these are the fabrics that I’m planning to include:
From top to bottom: water, distant mountains, church, church roof, grass, and gravestones. I have bought a sky fabric since I took this picture, but the jury is still out on whether or not it’s the right sky. And I’m still looking for a fabric for the tree.
Paper templates to come…