Castleford Weir

Castleford is a town in West Yorkshire in the UK. It began as an important Roman settlement, later one of the major mining and industrial towns in the North of England, but more recently has fallen on hard times after pit closures and industrial decline. As part of a regeneration project a new award-winning footbridge has been built over the weir over the River Aire. I have taken this as my theme for a series of quilts for FFFC. The first is based on the mill-race:

I decided I needed to go for the subtle end of my chosen complementaries (blue and orange) with lots of greyed colours in various shades, which I dyed using colour-gradations between Procion MX Blue 2G (sometimes called cobalt, a sort of indigo blue) and orange which I mixed.

A slightly different way of using complements, but I hope I'm not cheating and it comes within the rules:

I decided on a strong vertical composition, simplifying and elongating the image in the photograph and eliminating the perspective to produce a flat poster-like surface with the water-shapes being simplified too. The whole thing has been fused to a dark-blue base fabric which I've allowed to show in places because I didn't want the effect top be too smooth.

Critiques most welcome!