Today is the reveal of the Twelve by Twelve’s 20 X 12 metamorphosis challenge. The theme was chosen by me as an homage to our changing directions, as a group. So, I felt a bit of pressure.

I floundered a bit. I thought about how my cataract surgery created a metamorphosis with my eye sight and was wondering how to show that. But, finally, as I was working on something for my online class with Elizabeth Barton, I knew I had something I could use.

In the class, we had collected photos of landscapes and buildings and objects that we wanted to turn into art quilts. I had a couple of photos of the very unique Disney Concert Hall in LA.

Our process was to layer paper over the photo and with a light box, sketch the scene, selecting the most important elements and leaving out the rest. Here is one of my sketches.

Another exercise was to put this on a grid, cut it up an rearrange. When I did that, I discovered this neat little piece that held some promise.

I moved on to working out the values for this.

And colors. This was done with silk. The layout seemed pretty boring.

I finally went with different sizes and used batiks with handdyes. The quilting is more controlled than I normally do, but I think it adds to the architectural effect. Here is a detail.

I have been in SF all week-end. I did get one 3 x 3 done so far!! Hand stitched on blue silk.