Studies in Contrast 1, 2, & 3

 After I decided to do the contrast between the Milwaukee Skyline and Lake Michigan, I searched for a black and white skyline of the city. (even if slightly inaccurate)

 Got it sized and cut out and traced onto black fabric with wonder-under adhered to it.

 The I carefully started cutting.  Actually after just a few snips I decided to do it carefully and tried to preserve the skyline and its opposite.

At this point, I thought I'd see what I could do with the opposite skyline and try out my ideas and techniques before proceeding with the 'real' quilt. 

 I went ahead and fused it down to the orange, straightened it up and sewed the seam to the blue.

 Then I got completely distracted, let the first two skylines sit and started improv piecing.  If you've read my blog for any length of time, this isn't really something I do much of, if ever.  But I started playing around with the orange and blue contrast pieces and ended up with a piece that I thought would work for the back of one of the skylines.  I've got two shots here to try to show the color contrast.  It is pretty bright!

 So once the back was done, I tried out the straight line quilting for the upper half and the wavy quilting for the bottom half, and also tried out the satin stitch edge - matching colors along the sides.

 And so, Study in Contrasts 1 & 2 were done.
On to number 3.

 I did the straight line quilting in orange, with a purpose.  My plan was to color the the areas in the skyline with a sharpie, so I didn't have to change thread.

 Coloring in progress.  It worked. 

In this shot, you can see some of the orange actually came back, but I'm pretty OK with it.  If I wasn't, I'd just go over it again with the marker.

And so, here we've got the final version of Study in Contrasts: 3.