Colour and Line

… and many stitches not in time.

This was a puzzling challenge to me, as I’m not a hand-stitcher,  nor a ‘mender and saver’ – so it felt a little ‘alien’.  Eventually I decided to make something I simply wanted to do – to play with lines and colour, without much of a design in mind, and see what came out.  It turned up to be more difficult and time-consuming that I expected.  Partly because I came to it after a long period of hard work for my gallery at the Festival of Quilts, the writing of a book/catalogue for it, curating an exhibition, and being a juror in another.  And after the exhibition, a complex quilt to finish for Carrefour du Patchwork in France, and some time-consuming family commitments.  All the while feeling I needed a holiday!

Finally, here it is.  It looks simple in design, but to get it right took longer than I expected.  I feel it is more in the style of “modern quilting” (which I’ve been getting very interested in), although I used black instead of the more commonly used white background.  It is also some sort of irregular ‘medallion quilt’.

It is all quilted in black thread on black fabric, so it is very difficult to photograph without proper studio side lights.  I take my photos with the light from a big window on one side, and white reflecting surfaces on the other side.

The quilting is more visible in the detail photo, but then the black does not look so black, it looks more like very dark navy.  There is no quilting at all in the colour sections.

18” by 27”, made with hand-dyed cottons and commercial black fabric background, machine pieced and quilted, applied bits of colour on the edges.