Last week I blogged about a new topography quilt I designed encompassing the neighborhood where I grew up. These topo quilts are made based on USGS topographical map, with each layer cut out based on a topo line and then built up on the quilt surface in layers. One challenge with this is that there's always the "leftover" bits from the cutout. This picture shows the leftover piece after I removed the piece I needed for the quilt I blogged about last week.
The very first quilt I did using this technique was just a small sample, and I actually made two quilts, one which was the inverse of the other. That way I didn't waste all the little cut out bits.
It worked fine for that first quilt because it was just an abstract/geometric shape, but for the quilt based on actual topo maps it didn't really seem logical to use the cut out bits since they didn't really correspond to anything? The leftover bits sort of correspond to something like the air that is inside a deep canyon or something. The inverse of land? However it takes a lot of work to design and paint and cut all the layers for these projects and I couldn't bear the thought of throwing them away. So this time, I carefully kept all the ones from the Canyon Road quilt and made them into a new quilt.
It's not nearly as thick as the prior one for several reasons. First, much of the thickness of the prior quilt came from the fact that on the top sections, many of the layers cover the whole thing (so there was no "extra" to use here). Secondly, I didn't have enough of my beloved wooden discs to separate the layers, so I used much thinner plastic buttons to separate the layers.
Another difference is that I didn't mount the cut panels onto a quilted background, they just hang freely. The sections are connected with tulle which is barely visible unles you get right up close. For example in the picture below, you can see the pale pink tulle connecting the two sections.
Here's the final piece, I named it Agua Fria Reimagined. Agua Fria is the name of the neighborhood I grew up in, and of course reimagined because this isn't actually the topography of Agua Fria, more like the inverse of the topography? Or inspired by the topography? I was very happy not to waste all the wonderful cut layers.
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