Venetian Gothic Gondolas - Craft Fabric

The fifteenth design of the Venetian Gothic quilt fabric collection is cute gondolas (gondole, plural in Italian). I really struggled with what color to make them. Gondolas are black - but I didn’t want to make them black. I really wanted more color - yet still look “black”. I explored purples and blues. I perused watercolor paintings by Sargent and his use of blues and browns to stand in for black. I ended up with a very dark blue.

Gondolas had a cover for privacy over the passenger seating area back in the old days. Wealthy folks preferred to have privacy, unlike today’s tourists who want to see the city.

I did a bit of research before making my gondola. I watched a bunch of youtube videos, mostly in Italian, of old men sharing their knowledge about designing, building, and driving(?) gondolas. Some videos had translations, and some had subtitles, and others I was left to let the Italian words roll around in my head. But I learned a new word - forcola (forcole, pl) which refers to the carved, shaped, piece of wood that the oarsman uses to control the oar movement, and make the gondola go forward, or turn left, or right, etc. And learning to drive a gondola is a real time-consuming skill - that you can spend a lifetime continuing to learn and improve and hone. And the end result, being, making you boat go forward. This feels like a perfect metaphor for my art. The hours spent learning a piece of software and improving at using it. The time spent learning about art - colors, composition, etc - all to move toward my goal and creating inspiring and fun art.

Gondolas design with coordinating fabrics. The Venetian Gothic quilt fabric collections features designs inspired by 16th century Gothic architecture in Venice. Available at my Spoonflower shop on cotton quilting fabric with 18 inch repeat, and on wallpaper with 24 inch repeat. It is also available in small size with 6 inch repeat on both cotton quilting fabric and wallpaper for cute quilting goodness.