Let Me Show You the Door

The doors are finished! (Insert celebratory fanfare here.) I'll bet you thought this day would never come! Certainly, I've had my doubts along the way. The first door block was created on July 20, 2012. It seems a lifetime ago. Yesterday I was able to finish the 11th door. This morning I put the finishing touches on door #12.

First, door #11: When I checked back on my travel posts, I was able to remind myself that this is O'Brien Tower at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland. You can read what I said the day I visited this place right here. To my recollection, it was a fabulous day.

It's technically not a door; but, as I'm fond of saying, my quilt, my rules. It was a bit of a challenge to get the perspective right, and I was also dealing with the photography problem known as "keystoning", where tall buildings tend to lean backward. Anyway...I did the best I could, and it turned out okay. I've kept all my doors fairly primitive...mainly because I'm a crappy artist. 

After that was finished, I took a break for a couple of hours. It wasn't my intent to get started on the next one right away, and I was still gnashing my teeth about how to capture the dog statue out front and the items in the window. The problem with both is that there is a lot of detail, and the appliques are tiny. Without having some kind of laser cutting tool (lacking in my sewing room), I didn't see how I was really going to capture enough detail in these for them to look like anything other than big gray blobs.

Then, it hit me that I could simply print the window onto fabric, but out the pieces I wanted, and still add the little bits of color with fabric applique. Here's where I was when I quit for the day yesterday:

Somewhere along the way, I lost the little dog at the top of the window, wearing the green jacket. Even with printing the picture on fabric, the detail was barely visible, and so I filled in some of the lines with a Pigma Micron pen.

This morning, first thing, I finished up the top-stitching, added embellishments, and door #12 was finished. Yay!

Here's a collage of all twelve doors:

While traveling way back in May of 2013, we stopped off at the Quilting Bee quilt shop in Spokane Valley, Washington, where I purchased some fabric for the back. (That's a great quilt shop, by the way.)

I'm afraid I didn't purchase nearly enough, and so I'll probably use this in the borders. Also, I might fussy cut some of those shamrocks to use when I set it in a single Irish chain. Originally, I thought I might use a Double Irish Chain, but then the quilt would be as big as all outdoors. Instead, I'm going to use a setting something like this:

The blocks will all have green borders in order to bring them to the right size, and then I'll figure out what else to do from there.

So, I'm feeling pretty darned spunky about having all the doors finished. Now I'm excited to get to work sewing it together. On today's agenda, I have a pedicure this afternoon, and I need to do some things out in the yard. And with all those doors finished, I'm energized and ready to get going.

Today I'm linking up to: