NOLA Houses

Our daughter Emily lives in New Orleans (i.e., NOLA; you can see the quilt I previously made for Em's house here), and works for Habitat for Humanity (click for main web site or NOLA site). Last fall she was promoted to a new position which included her own office! So she asked me to make her a quilt of NOLA houses to put on the wall.

For those of you who have never been to New Orleans, you may not realize that it features an amazing variety of architectural styles. These range from one of the standard and ubiquitous styles, the "shotgun" house (a narrow house where the rooms are arranged one behind another), to the grandest of mansions in the Garden District. In between are many shapes and sizes, and often featuring the bright colors one usually associates with the Caribbean islands. Click here for a visual sampling!

So I had a ton of options to choose from . My original thought was to do a traditional block quilt with maybe 16 squares, and each square being some pieced version of one of these houses. 

But around this time my quilt friend Kathleen Warren and I got together for a working (well....really playing) session using her abstract quilt-as-you-go freeform technique.

She is a true artist with a definite eye for color and design. She helped me "cut loose" and just randomly build up a design on a pre-cut piece of backing fabric. The idea is to fill the space and then mount it on a 10"x10" pre-stretched canvas.

As I was doing this, the proverbial light bulb went on in my head. Why not do individual houses like this and mount them on these same 10x10 frames!?!?!  I love to mount my artwork on stretcher bars, but these have almost always been larger pieces; I had never considered doing an individual mounted block.

Then, these could be hung on her wall in lots of different arrangements and switched from time to time. Em liked the idea, and then we set out to decide which ones to do.

We definitely wanted to do her cute house (narrow, but not a true shotgun), and also wanted to do one of the popular versions that Habitat builds down there. I had decided that I would make 8 in total, so we began to look for others to use. We found a few, and I set to work.

As I do a lot, I "translated" these images into a grid pattern in Excel. I then made them using a combination of sew-and-flip, paper piecing, and fusing. So these are not "quilts" in the traditional sense; more fabric art. 

For the most part, I tried to match colors of the fabric house to those of the actual house  The hard part was portraying the dimensionality of each in the (basically) two-dimensions of the fabric. In some cases I think I succeeded; in others, the final versions have a flat look.

Each house has from 80 - 100 pieces! I then fused the completed houses onto the background (of grass and sky). Then, the completed piece was staple-mounted to the canvas frame.

After much work, we decided that 4 was plenty!

Here is each one; first the photo used as the model, then the actual fabric version.

First, the Habitat house (under construction):

 

Next: a double-wide (usually two shotguns joined with a common wall):

Then, a colorful and ornate beauty:

And finally: Emily's house!

Here they are just hanging around:

...and on site at the Habitat For Humanity office in NOLA with Em: