'Homage to Venice' - Free Quilt Pattern

“At 45 degrees 14’N, 12 degrees18’E, the navigator, sailing up the Adriatic coast of Italy, discovers an opening in the long low line of the shore: and turning westward, with the race of the tide, he enters a lagoon. Instantly the boisterous sting of the sea is lost. The water around him is shallow and opaque, the atmosphere curiously translucent, the colours pallid, and over the whole wide bowl of the mudbank and water there hangs a suggestion of melancholy……

A hooter sounds; a bell booms nobly; a bit white sea-bird settles heavily upon a post; and thus the navigator, rounding a promontory, sees before him a city….It is old, and very grand, and bent backed. Its towers survey the lagoon in crotchety splendour, some leaning one way, some another. ….

…..and as the boat approaches through the last church-crowned islands …….so the whole scene seems to shimmer - with pinkness, with age, with self satisfaction, with sadness, with delight. The navigator stows away his charts and puts on a straw hat: for he has reached that paragon among landfalls, Venice.”

These sentences, paraphrased from the opening pages of the most wonderful book ‘Venice’ by Jan Morris (first published in 1963) for me, perfectly sum up why I love Venice so much and why I wanted to capture a little bit of it’s magic in a sewing project.

I’ve written before about my love of this enchanting city and travels there you can read more about that here if you are interested. It seems to me that it is a place that is an endless source of inspiration - the colours, the shapes, the stories and yet trying to formulate all of this into a quilt was more difficult that I had anticipated. I actually started this project way back last year and completed the quilt top, but wasn’t at all sure about it and put it in a basket with a pile of fabric pieces. When I was looking for a backing piece for another project, I came across it and pulled it out. I thought maybe I should finish it up anyways as it was ready to quilt. I found the perfect backing fabric in my stash that really was a colour pop finish and as it is not a large quilt, I set to work this last week to quilt it. It has turned out to be a surprise in so many ways.

It is really very simple - almost like a whole cloth quilt. A block of background fabric with an appliquéd quatrefoil shape and a petal shape that is hand stitched as an outline to connect it all together. The quatrefoil is a feature found in the architecture of the city and in many artistic forms throughout, such as mosaic floors and decorative framing and it is a lovely soft shape to work with. Most cities have a colour palette and Venice has a really very distinctive one that is simply delicious. The aqua blue, the corals and terracottas, the shimmering gold, marble and ivory, outlining jet black and turquoise gemstone colours mixed with soft pinks and sunshine tints. Because of this, I think that the choice of fabrics here is quite important and strong, bold patterns can be quite effective to reflect the dramatic and moorish architecture of the city. The I used were fabrics are a mixture of Alison Glass and Anna Maria Horner and are perfect for this sort of project. They are not twee or ditsy or even really vintage - they are the colours of spice and exotic art and sea faring adventure - which I suppose just about sums up how I feel about Venice. It is quite an electric mixture and I think this is why I wasn’t at all sure about when I first made it. However, the idea was always that it was for my velvet patchwork chair, which I simply adore and this needs strong colours to compliment it’s bold blocks of colour.

In fact what really transformed this quilt was the free motion quilting. It is easy to underestimate the power of this craft form and here I really saw how it added that finishing touch to the project. I just used a simple squiggle stitch all over, avoiding the quatrefoil shapes and the hand stitched petals and it worked so well I was really surprised how it pulled the whole project together.

As the lockdown goes on… and we are all weary and fed up of not being able to go anywhere we can at least allow ourselves dream and this little quilt has really pepped me up this week, with memories of Venice and hopefully holidays to come. There is a free pdf pattern here with templates here or you can link on the ‘tutorials page’ if you want to have a go. I don’t know if I have managed to capture the spirit of venetian fairy dust , but for now, I’ll just curl up under this and dwell on that idea.

See you next time, Ruby xxx