Towse's first 'sewing group challenge'

Around the middle of last year I joined the Fat Quarters sewing group, which is based in Great Missenden and affiliated to The Quilter's Guild. I have learnt a lot of new stuff and met a lot of very clever women! In the Autumn, to my bemusement, they brought around the 'February Challenge'. Everyone was given an eighth of self patterned cream fabric and a photo. The instruction was to create a piece inspired by the photo which used all of the cream fabric. My photo was the roof of Marylebone railway station.

Interesting as it was, I had no idea what to do with it, so there it sat until Christmas and a conversation about architecture with neighbours. Then I started doodling, re-arranging and more doodling until I had an image that I thought I could replicate. Of course it wasn't that simple with little paper templates and the realisation that I had done some 'strange' junctions. I also realised that the whole thing would have been easier if I had understood the practice, rather than just the theory of foundation piecing. However, here is the finished piece, which might well end up a cushion cover or something.

My neighbour, who knows more about architecture and art than I ever will, has shown quite an interest in the pattern and the process. (In fact, he drank tea while looking keenly through my latest patchwork pattern book the other day!) He says my piece reminds him of cubist inspired abstract paintings of the early C20th such as this one of 1913 by the Russian Mikhail Larionov. Does that make me an artist?