I was looking through my photos from Paris and my fabric for inspiration and it hit me to do a quilt of a stained glass window from Sainte-Chapelle. I fell in love with the interior of this church the moment I stepped inside.

I chose my photo of the rose window due to the repeated pattern of the glass pieces, but the fabric was the main inspiration to do this piece. It was a fabric that I had printed at Spoonflower last summer from a sketch that I did on my ipad. When I received the fabric I liked it, but had no idea what I was ever going to do with it. I thought for sure that it was going to take a long time to get around to using it.

Here is the fabric. Doesn’t it just scream stained glass? I might have to have more of this fabric printed for future use since this was only a fat quarter and I pretty much used it up.

My photo is a view of the window from below so you get distortion of the pieces of glass due to that perspective, but I liked that. The “leaf” shapes alternate between the thin leaves and the fat leaves in a circular pattern.  Hence the rhythm.

I decided to print out the glass pieces on ExtravOrganza to get very shear images to fuse onto the fabric and allow the colors of the fabric to show through to create the colors of stained glass. In doing that I realized that the fabric did not have enough white in it so under some of the organza pieces I painted a little white with Tsukineko white ink. After cutting out the glass pieces I went to my stash for a black fabric for the background and of course did not have anything large enough. I hand dyed some black fabric so I did not have to go out in the bitter cold to a quilt store. Plus it did not come out as black  and as flat looking as some of my solid fabrics which was actually a good thing. What I like about the “glass” pieces is that they almost glow like stained glass pieces actually would. I will always remember this lovely church when I look at this quilt.