Photo Challenge- Flinders Street Station

One of our challenges at the Waverley Art Quilters was to take a photo and interpret in a small A3 quilt. One of our members had her own photo of Flinders Street Station in Melbourne and we decided to use that as our inspirational photo.

I didn't want to make a photo realistic quilt of the station; I wanted it to be more abstract. One of the many features of the beautiful old building is the line of clocks above the main entrance and I decided that the Flinders Street Station clocks would be my theme.

When I was playing around with my Gelli plate and doing all those mono-prints, I had the Flinders Street Station challenge in mind and so I picked out all the fabrics that I thought suitable and started piecing them together.

Piecing the fabrics

I had a stencil of a large clock that was perfect for the project and I tried to use the creams, oranges, browns and greens of the building.

Here is my first attempt, I wasn't happy with it because there was such a distinct line of piecing right through the centre of the quilt. You can see I tried to soften the hard effect with some smudges of brown paint but it didn't help.

1st Attempt

I unpicked it all and tried again. This time I cut the pieces a bit smaller and took more care in where I was placing the pieces; I liked it much better.

The Gelli printed fabrics are thicker than normal quilting fabric because of the layers of paint and to keep the piecing nice and flat on the front I pressed all the seams open.

2nd attempt

As you can see from the photo above I quilted around the clocks and added some more circles to keep with the theme.

I was happy with my quilt but I thought it looked a bit flat and I had the idea of adding dots of white paint to enhance the clocks, I was surprised at how much it lifted the entire quilt.

Flinders Street Station ©2014 Linda Steele

I really enjoyed making this quilt, so much so I might make more of this sort of thing.

Bye for now,
Linda