I’ve completed my latest quilt Urban Sunset.  In this earlier post I talked about creating the quilt top, and all that was left was adding the quilting.

Here’s the completed top.

In the process of creating a quilt, from design to completion, deciding how to quilt it is often the most difficult decision for me.  Once I have a quilt top completed, sometimes I’ll print a photo of the quilt and then draw various quilting options on it to see how it might look.  For this quilt, I printed a portion of the quilt onto fabric and then experimented with different quilting options so I could see them in thread and fabric.

Below is my practice quilt.  This is a portion from the lower right corner of the quilt top.  (Printing on fabric causes the colors to be quite washed-out — one of the reasons I prefer to print my fabric designs at Spoonflower.com rather than printing on my own fabric using my inkjet printer.)

When I created the fabric design in Photoshop, I used a Photoshop brush made from a photo of bricks.  I wanted to complement the brick pattern in the quilting, so I tried basically outlining the bricks with the quilting (#1 in the photo).  That didn’t work too well, so I tried straight lines — horizontal or vertical or both (#2).  I thought that would work, along with a lot of varying of the thread colors.

The bottom of the quilt is the urban skyline.  To emphasize the buildings, I tried a grid (#3), vertical lines (#4) and vertical lines without a horizontal top line (#5). I thought any of these would work, but to keep the quilting different from the circular areas, I quilted the buildings with vertical lines and a horizontal line across the top.

For the dark blue background sky I tried a pebble quilt design (#6) and sort of an echo quilting (#7).  Neither of these worked.  Once I had the rest of the quilt quilted, I decided to keep the background simple, and I just quilted horizontal lines throughout the background, in a dark blue color that blends with the fabric.

Here’s a detail of part of the quilting.

Here’s the completed quilt Urban Sunset.  It measures about 32 inches wide by 25 inches high.

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And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there… Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
— Ezra Pound

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.
— Ludwig Mies van der Rohe