Miami Meets Manhattan

When Giucy Giuce's Deco Glo II fabric line was announced, I wanted to make a quilt to highlight the color gradient in the collection. I pondered variations of New York Beauty blocks, based on the few NY Beauty blocks in my Ode to Joy quilt. Around this time, we made a visit to Miami Beach and went on a walking tour of Art Deco architecture. I spotted an arch-shaped ornament on a building there, and the idea struck me to merge the New York Beauty spikes into a tall arch shape and assemble the shapes in a clamshell type quilt.

I drafted the design using Affinity Designer, and used our library's laser cutter to make custom acrylic templates.

The spikes are paper pieced.

The neutral fabrics are mostly Essex yarn dyed metallics. The black backgrounds are a variety of metallics and non-metallic yarn dyes.

I used the laser cutter to make a few quilting guides too. I used these to quilt the echos in the white and silver arches. (I originally cut these from 1/4" acrylic, but I got the scale wrong, so I had to re-do them using scraps of 1/8" acrylic.) These were also helpful in quilting the colored centers.

 For the back I used a 108" Chalk and Charcoal print.

The binding is another Essex metallic. I had ordered this to use as another background for the spikes, but it read too light to me. It works well for the binding though.

I tried something new for my photo setup. In the past I've pinned my quilts to a muslin photo backdrop when I wanted a clean background, but that can be tedious to do.

This time I sewed a set of small pockets along the top of the muslin backdrop and purchased a set of strong neodymium magnets to fit inside.

A wide pocket curtain rod fits well in the 4-inch hanging sleeve, and works with the magnets to hold the quilt in place against the backdrop.

Here's a view from the back with the quilt held in place:

There are multiple Art Deco inspirations in this quilt, including the fabric collection itself. As mentioned above, I found a specific inspiration in Miami Beach, and the fabric colors are reminiscent of Miami too. On the other hand, the silver and black metallic fabrics remind me more of NYC skyscrapers, and the New York Beauty inspiration is there too. All this inspired the name "Miami Meets Manhattan."