Designing with Pavements I

  This is the first post in a short series 'Designing with Pavements'. In January 2007 we arrived in Granada, Spain to live. One of the first things which caught my eye as a quilter were the pavements.

  Many of Granada's pavements are made of cream and terracotta paving slabs with geometric designs on them. They are often arranged in a checkerboard design. The more basic ones consist of rows of dots or lines forming rectangles but the more complicated form pathways of octagons and stars beneath your feet.

  I'm not sure why the pavements are so decorated. Most of the old streets in the Albayzín, Granada's old quarter, are laid with white and grey pebbles arranged in complex designs with swirls and flowers – another treasure trove of ideas for quilting designs, embroidery and Kantha. Perhaps this heritage has created the paving slabs and no doubt it all goes back to Islamic designs and their creators who lived here for centuries. 

  So I took inspiration from what I was walking on. To date I haven't made a quilt from any of them but the series is planned to show you how I explored the designs and what I came up with. Perhaps they'll inspire you to create something too.

STARS AND OCTAGONS

  As you can see from the photo these blocks make a stunning pavement. (Last week it rained all week, hence the damp look and it was really difficult, nigh impossible, to find a cream tile with no chewing gum stuck to it!) Turning the photograph visually makes it no longer a pavement. This trick is valid for lots of ideas when you start with something real – a building, a tree, a landscape. Turn the image and you forget what it is and begin to see shapes and lines and design possibilities.

  My first block was a straightforward copy of the pavement. Looking at the piece I think I pieced each piece separately though it would be very easy to sew long strips of fabric together and then cut out the wedges to sew onto the stars. Or as many of you will have already realised this is the traditional Spiderweb Block which is very often foundation pieced.

  To make my small sample even sweeter I added tiny silver beads to the centres of the stars. On a less whimisical note I also tried out some fly stitches which I think would be an excellent way of decorating and quilting at the same time.

  Going back and looking at the pavement, what is really striking are the lines defining the forms. In the pieced block these lines have given way to the forms which are now the predominant design feature.
 So, with the second piece I went back to the lines and stitched them onto one single piece of cloth. I stitched from the back and put No.5 perle cotton into the bobbin of my machine. I love this couched effect with the thread. I think this little piece is beautiful in its simplicity. I also changed the octagons into circles.

  But how to make an entire quilt? Again I went back to the pavement and its checkerboard layout. The final piece is a classic four patch – 2 lights and 2 darks. The darks are heavily stitched and one of them is also pieced. I've kept both the octagon and the circle and pieced the circle into one of the white squares. Looking at the back of the pieced block you can see the patterns made by the quilting stitches.

  I was well aware of my limitations as a machine quilter; the only way I could achieve this amount of stitching was on small panels which would then need to be joined to form a quilt. Perhaps this is why I stopped. My sketch book from the time has lots of photocopies of different shadings which I cut up and played around with but there are no notes for my thought processes, or for what I intended to do on the two white squares.

  I know I'm not alone. Every quilter has a box, a cupboard, a drawer, a bag of unfinished blocks and ideas. Some really are unfinished quilts but other pieces of fabric are the beginnings of ideas which were only half explored, or maybe hardly explored at all. Don't forget about them, maybe it's time to bring them out into the light and share them.

  I'm revisiting all my pavement experiments and I can feel the cogs in my brain beginning to turn. Strangely when I went out to find the original paving to photograph for this post I found the same tiles outside the door of where I now work. I don't think I'd noticed it until I looked. So keep your eyes open for what's around you – quilting ideas might be,quite literally, under your feet.