Ostia Antica

 When this theme was suggested I bought myself a copy of "Stitched Photo Mosaic Quilting" by Timna Tarr. I found a video of our granddaughter that was going to provide a still photo for the basis of my first mosaic quilting. Then I promptly dithered over the whole process of translating the video into a still photo, (finally achieved!) and working out how and where to get it printed at the optimum size without bankrupting myself in the process (!). 

Whilst this thought process was still rattling about in my brain, I came across some photos on Social Media of the Mosaic of the Provinces at Ostia Antica, an ancient Roman city and the seaport of Ancient Rome. As you can tell from the title of this post the Photo Mosaic quilt idea was swiftly jettisoned, to be returned to later :)

Being inspired by the photos to delve further into the history and nature of the Mosaics at Ostia Antica I discovered a line drawing from 1912 of the full mosaic, which you can see here The drawing just looked like a quilt pattern to me, so I decided to base my quilt for this quarter's theme around one of the mosaic squares from the drawing of the original.

The original mosaics were made in black and white tiles and I did consider making a monochrome quilt, but in the end I decided that this quilt was inspired by not a copy so went with fabrics that looked liked tiling instead.

The cream fabric has a tone on tone check on it which you can't really see in the photo and the pink fabric reminded me of Venice so was a shoo-in for the central square :)

I found a length of this lovely fabric in my stash and thought it would be ideal for the backing fabric.

The blocks were fairly straightforward to put together. The cream squares within the purple strips were 6.5" squares, the purple strips were 1.5" wide, the pink squares were 2.5" and the cream borders were 2.5" strips too.

I wanted the quilting of the piece to reflect the Roman part of the inspiration for the quilt so I quilted straight lines in the purple strips - Roman roads, even in the hilly North of England and Southern Scotland were straight.

 My centre block was the ideal place for some cross-hatch quilting that resembles rows of the Roman Numeral - X :)

The original Mosaic of the Provinces has four fish swimming at the centre to represent the port, so I decided to quilt the open cream blocks with a fish. I ordered some dolphin templates to use for the blocks but they did not arrive in time, so I hunted through my many craft magazines and found this needlelace template to use instead.

The circle quilting in the remaining blocks is a nod to the shields portrayed in several of the other sections of the Mosaic. Some wavy lines to represent the sea were added to the border strips.

I used a New to Me binding method, using the backing fabric as the binding and finished it off with a zig-zag (now known as Roman Numeral V!) stitch to attach the binding to the front of the quilt:)

 I was tempted to call this quilt "A port in the storm" as I was working on it (before the power went out!) whilst Storm Eowyn was flinging waves up to our door and rattling our windows till we were sure they were going to fall in! Thankfully, the sea eventually calmed down, the windows withstood the ferocious winds and the power came back so it was all fine in the end.

Once again, I have enjoyed meeting this latest Endeavourer Challenge and look forward to seeing the wonderful ways that my fellow Endeavourers have interpreted the theme!