Dayton Landmarks Quilts: Part II The Arcade

Today, I'm sharing with you two images from the Dayton Landmarks Project undertaken by the Miami Valley (OH) Art Quilt Network.  At left is Ronnie Doyal's view of "The Arcade" a building in downtown Dayton which once held several shops and restaurants.....I have never been inside, and it was closed long before I moved to Dayton.  The few times it has been opened for the general public to go in, I wasn't able to attend.  You can find out more about it here on the Friends of the Dayton Arcade website and here on Wikipedia.

This particular image gave some of our members trouble....While we had specified that the pieces should be 42" long, several members took their drawings in to be enlarged from the "slice" we gave them and asked the photocopy shops to enlarge to 42" and when they got home, discovered that they weren't 42".  So...lesson learned the hard way...never leave the photocopy place without MEASURING the actual dimensions as you shouldn't have to pay if they didn't do what you asked.  I recommend carrying your own measuring tape.

The "slice artists" are from left to right:  Diane Boley, Fran La Salle, Susan Schaller, and Kate Burch. These particular pieces have LOTS of detail.  Unlike most of the other people working on this piece, these artists did see each others work before they were finished.

I was going to show you two pieces tonight...but because the detail on this was so extreme, I decided to show you some closeups and save the other for it's own post.....I didn't want to make it so photo heavy it wouldn't load!

I hope you can see this a bit better.  Of the four artists working on this piece, Diane Boley probably is the newest to art quilting.  One of the interesting things Diane did was to use Angelina fibers in the sky to make it sparkle a bit.

 Fran LaSalle paid a lot of attention to detail and she, I think, got the most of the sculptural pieces on the building.  She did a consummate job at shading and in getting those carvings down. You can get a better sense of her shading in the second image.

Susan Schaller used nothing but Lumiere paints in her piece and did all the "construction" with free-motion quilting...you can see how she handled her carvings in the above image.

Kate Burch's slice was the last on the right, and I think it is interesting how she got the fabric to mimic the mottled effect on the building. I can't swear to it, but I think Kate used the same ombre fabric that Sue DeSantis used in her Carillon piece.