My latest slow cloth is finished with a couple of weeks to spare. Autumn in New York is inspired by Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, as part of the QuiltWorks Novel Idea book club. This cloth is completely hand stitched with silk applique on a hand dyed indigo vintage linen napkin. There's a lot of hand stitched embellishment that you can see better in the detail photos below. I backed the whole thing with a single piece of medium weight grey shot cotton and turned the edges under the edge of the napkin to hand sew down. The edges peek out and allowed me to square up the napkin. It's about 22" x 22". This quilt will be hanging in the QuiltWorks gallery for the month of April along with 35-40 others. I can't wait to see the whole exhibit. The few that I've seen so far are really wonderful.
The only building I wanted to be recognizable is the Empire State Building. To make things easier I decided to stitch the topmost part as you see above. Lots of little split backstitches make that up. All of these techniques were learned from Jude Hill. Please check out her website for all sorts of wonderful online video classes.
Meanwhile I've already started on a couple of other projects, my Undercover Quilter book club project has a great start and my Small Wonder Challenge project is looking really good. More on those later. I'm still trying to figure out what book to use as inspiration for my guild Children's Literature challenge. There are so many wonderful books to choose from! We are heading out for a little spring break in a few days, I can't wait!