Gaudí Gaillardia (2015) is my Texas-style interpretation of a stained glass window in Parc Güell, by Barcelona’s famous architect, Antoni Gaudí. A common and lovely wildflower of Texas, the Firewheel, aka Gaillardia, replaced Gaudí’s original stained glass design. A grill of weaver’s needles, joined in a pattern of triangles, protected Gaudí’s window. I crocheted the grill for the wall hanging, and added buttons and a knitted triangle pattern to invoke the fabulous mosaics that Gaudí is so well-known for.
Making Gaudí Gaillardia
The color scheme for Gaudí Gaillardia was fairly straightforward, so I marked the color areas on a full-sized sketch, and labeled each piece. For instance, the yellow parts of the flower petals were labeled “Y1,” Y2,” and so on. Similar for the other colors. Before cutting the sketch apart, I made sure to take a photo of it, to help me put the pieces back together.
The next step can be stressfully interesting, because I roughly guess-timate how much of each color to knit, and sometimes my guess can be too close for comfort. This time everything went well. I arranged and pinned the cut-out, numbered pieces on the proper color of knitted fabric, with room to spare.
Once they were cut out, I put the pieces back together like a jigsaw puzzle, using the photo for a guide. I removed the paper, little by little, and pinned the knitted pieces to a foundation fabric.
When you look at a Firewheels along a roadside, quite a few of the flowers seem to be missing a petal. That’s just how they grow. I think of them as snaggle-toothed flowers, and I’m telling you this in case you were thinking, “Why is there a big wedge of purple, where the petal should be?”
After sewing pieces to the foundation fabric, embellishing to make the flower look more like stained glass, stitching layers together, and binding, I had this bright, beautiful flower.
Sometimes you get to a point in a project, where it looks really good, and you think if you keep going, you might mess it up. That’s how I felt about adding the gray crocheted grill, which was meant to look like Gaudí’s weaver’s needles.
More reasonable thoughts took over. If I didn’t like the crocheted grill, I could always pick out the stitches and take it off. Hand-sewing the grill onto the surface of the wall hanging took a while, and when it was done, I was pleased with the effect.
Gaudí Gaillardia will soon be available for sale under the TextileFusion Market tab (see menu above).