Creating a pattern from your photo can be done in so many ways!  I like to have the photo enlarged in black and white at a local copy shop.  I trace the obvious outlines of the dark and light shapes.  In this case, I chose to have 5 levels of “light” (L1-L5) and 5 levels of “dark” for the stairs (D1-D5), and a separate set of levels for the stone fences.  Pawing through my fabric stash (if you could only see my husband’s eyes rolling as I type this) I selected one fabric for each color/level and labeled it.  Once the master trace was complete, it was a simple – and time consuming – task of copying and labeling all the little pieces onto a second tracing sheet.  This left the master trace untouched, which was critical in the next steps.  I then lay out a backing fabric topping it with my favorite batting – each substantially larger than the tracing (this allows me to make border decisions at the end).  Finally, I chose fabrics to cover the batting (a sky, stair mortar, and stone fences fabric).  These served as my foundation fabric and as a rough outline of where the stairs ended, the sky began, etc.   Now I was ready to get started!

Cutting out each pattern piece.

Checking placement against the master trace.

After tracing and labeling all the pattern pieces, I pinned each – upside down so the picture wouldn’t come out in mirror image! – to the corresponding fabric.  Each piece was cut directly on the pattern line and then placed on the foundation fabric in its place. 

 Where was its place?  That’s where the master tracing comes in!  By having the complete outline on one sheet, I could always see where pieces were to go!  Let’s just say that if anything happened to that master tracing….

Double checking placement on master trace.  

It really makes a BIG mess!