Peachtree Curves

I took this photo of a spiral staircase at the 2023 QuiltCon in Atlanta, at Peachtree Center. I thought it might make a good basis for a quilt. (A 2019 workshop with Michelle Wilkie probably helped plant this idea in my mind.)

It took a while to figure out how to draft the "steps" portion of the design. I finally came up with an approach using Affinity Designer, starting with concentric circles and radial lines. I then applied some distortions to roughly replicate the image.

The finished quilt is 52 inches by 70 inches. I had the pattern pieces printed on large-format newsprint (at PDF Plotting). This one sheet of the pattern is 33 inches by 47 inches:

The "steps" use large-scale paper piecing. The largest curve uses fabric cut to 19 inches by 7.5 inches for each step. I found I got better results using a walking foot with the large paper pieces; otherwise the seams wanted to pucker a bit.

I had a happy accident as I was mocking up various color combinations. I unintentionally filled a set of steps with a gradient, and I thought the result looked pretty cool. This led me to consider Jennifer Sampou's Sky Ombre fabrics for the steps. The remaining fabrics are Essex yarn-dyed linens and Kaffe Fassett shot cottons.

The mix of fabrics, along with the curves and various dense quilting motifs, produced quite a distorted quilt. I had to block it before trimming to square it up, and still had to trim about an inch from the bottom.

For the back, I used a Tim Holtz wideback print I had purchased on sale with no particular project in mind. I finished the edges using a facing, and included the original photo inspiration on the label.