Entering the World of Applique

My First Applique Quilt

This Rose of Sharon quilt was the first applique quilt I made. The central flowers are machine stitched with rayon thread. This began a long time love affair with the effect the shiny rayon could introduce into quilts and was an early design decision away from doing what was expected. The green of the leaves has faded quite a bit over the years but I do not mind the colour shift. Originally the leaves were a very dark green.

It continues the traditional idea of working in a block/grid format which would predominate in my journey for quite some time.

Although the flowers are stylised, it also reinforces my preference for representational imagery. This is something that I periodically try to move away from but always seem to come back to. I do find abstraction difficult without an anchor of a form of representation. I can admire the bold lineal shapes of the true abstractionist and follow compositional rules to create pieces that are lineal based. Somehow I come back to representation as a preference.

This quilt is hand quilted. Somewhere on the border the grid is fudged to get it to meet. This was another “learning curve”. I don’t think I have ever made a perfect quilt. I am not like the Amish who purposefully put some error in their work. They believe only God can make something perfect. My errors happen and then I have to work toward “fixing” them. During covid lockdown, I joined the inaugural group of Textile.org Stitch club (UK) and was introduced, in one of their workshops, to Gregory T Williams. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from that course was to “Embrace your whoopsies”. Maybe i was already subconsciously doing that but, since then, mistakes are incorporated into the overall whole of my creations by finding a way to incorporate them into the work. I was reminded of Julia Cameron’s words in “The Artist’s way”: don’t fear imperfection. The perfectionist will redraw an image until the paper tears. Perfectionism can also be a means of stifling creativity. Often you are the only person that knows where that imperfection is.