23. An Uphill Struggle Journal Quilt

This is my latest Journal Quilt for my 52 Journals project where I make one small quilt for every week of this year. This one is sized 10" square and is also make for a Sketchbook Challenge who set a monthly theme. For the first time in the Sketchbook Challenge my heart dropped when reading about the new theme for this month. It was: Urban Sketching.
Living in the back of beyond doesn't offer any opportunities for urban sketching and West Linton can hardly be descrived as an urban
environment. I wouldn't ever want to take my sketchbook to Edinburgh
and draw in situ. Way too much attention, it would really put me off.
So I started thinking about alternatives and somehow my mind drifted to
small Italian hill towns such as can be found in Tuscany. It might not
be truly urban but after all they are towns and were once independent
states. I remembered the curious juxtaposition in one street of farm buildings, small cottages, town houses and defensive towers with of
course also at least one church. An idea came and as the first hing
that came to hand (despite the fact I have a veritable wealth of
sketchbooks!)was my diary. I scribbled it down in there. Then I
graduated to drawing my town plan to scale i.e. 10" square as I've made
all the quilts for the Sketchbook Challenge. I had fun colouring in!]the drawing using Promarkers and used this as the template for making the
fabric Journal Quilt for this week with the assistance of lots of
Bondaweb. As background I chose to use a black/white squared fabric
that brought to my mind the tiled floors you find in many Italian
houses and churches. I used a selection of brightly coloured Chines
cottons as well as my hand-dyed ones to bring the houses to life. I've
tried to describe how this piece came to be but in reality even I don't
fully understand my mind's process. I just try to get out of the way
and let it happen. And in this case I'm very happy with the results. It
might not be all that urban compared to sketching in say New York but
it's a lot more urban than our rustic location and what's more
important, it works well as a design and I thoroughly enjoyed the
hectic day that led from scribble to drawing to fabric.
I don't usually have such a long write-up as I would reserve this for my blog, but sadly I'm having lots of problems with Blogger at the moment which means I can't publish pictures there. So I'm using Blipfoto instead!
I'm also blipping early as I have a very busy day ahead of me and probably won't have much opportunity to comment. Apologies for that! Rest assured that each and every comment on my blips gives me great pleasure