I’m one of the six people who volunteered for the C&T slice quilt for the NAMTA raffle. (See related posts below for more details.) I was so excited to do it! I have seen quilts made from sliced up photos at Pacific International Quilt Festival and other quilt shows and I’ve always been dying to try.

Fabric selection for the bed

For me the biggest challenge was probably fabric selection. When I moved into my current house, the plan was to stay there two years at most so I never unpacked my fabric boxes. That was more than three years ago. I always buy new fabric for the projects I want to do. But for this quilt I just needed a smattering of different accent fabrics and some larger pieces for backgrounds and I didn’t want to spend the money starting from scratch. So I opened up each of the fabric boxes in turn, pulling out the possible matches. That was quite the walk down memory lane! I’m still in love with a lot of my stash, but some of it? Eh, not so much.

I used a combination of techniques for my slice. I pieced the larger portions of my backing. The wall was three pieces put together with gently curved piecing. The technique is super easy: Layer the two fabrics to be pieced together, right sides up, overlapping where the pieces will be joined. Use a rotary cutter to cut through both layers in a gentle curve. Turn the two fabrics right sides together and pin the cut edges, matching the peaks and the valleys and smoothing out in between. Sew a standard 1/4″ seam allowance.

I used fusible applique for my foreground elements. For the larger pieces like the chair legs, bed frame, and window, I used the standard method of tracing the shapes from the pattern onto the fusible, fusing it to the fabric, then cutting out the shapes on my traced lines. For the smaller pieces like the highlights on the chair, the colors on the floor, and accents on the window, I followed the technique in Laura Wasilowski‘s books: I put fusible on the back of chunks of fabric then free cut my shapes.

Building appliqués on Silicone Release Paper

I built my appiquéd elements on Silicone Release Paper. That way I could build the chair piece by piece and get it perfect before sticking things down to the background. Because you can see through the Silicone Release Paper, I could assemble my chair right on top of the pattern to get the pieces just right. I arranged the chair legs until I was happy with them and then tacked them down with the iron when I felt they were right. This made it so easy!

Before fusing the chair and other elements to the background, I painted them. I used the Liquitex^® Ivory Black paint (with the Matte Gel Medium) for my dark outlines. I used a combination of colors including Brilliant Blue and Bright Aqua Green mixed with the black and with Titanium white to add highlights to the jacket hanging behind the wall.