Country Was IN

9 Squares in a Country Tradition

Revisiting quilts I made such a long time ago is a trip down memory lane for me. This was the first block of the Month project I did. My work was very left brained (accounting/management) and drained me so much that I needed a creative outlet to re-energise. I found the block of the month options were a real plus. Each month a block with all the fabrics arrived in the mail so that I could focus on that block and work away to get it done before the next block arrived. It really helped. living remotely from any patchwork or fabric shop, getting the monthly block was also a bonus. You can learn the skills of accounting but never really enjoy the work and my quilting was the outlet I needed to keep going.

This quilt was a mixture of pieced and applique. I was still hand quilting at this stage.

I spent a year as an AFS scholar in Iowa so the American Country theme harked back to that time. While my style changed over the years, becoming less traditional, it is fun to look back on where my development began

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.

In the Beginning

An early quilt

For as long as I can remember I have sewn. Dolls clothes as a child, my clothes as a teenager, my children’s clothes and things for the home as a young Mum. Textiles have always been part of my life. When the children were little I made very thrift bedcovers for them from a range of left over fabric from making clothes with old woolen jerseys joined together as wadding. At night we would talk about the fabrics and the stories associated with them - this was a piece from the end of year preschool dress I made for the girls. Or this was a piece of Craig’s pyjama material. It was a far cry from the quilts of today. There weren’t many classes and nothing on line so it was basically teach yourself. I don’t have any photos or parts of those early quilts but I know they were quite crude.

I finally found a course at Grandmother’s Garden a patchwork outlet that taught drafting and piecing and plucked up the courage to attend. This is the result of that course. Machine pieced, hand quilted. Twelve squares in traditional blocks drawn out on a graph pad and then cut out with seam allowances. Very traditional with a slanted colour palette very masculine I was told.