You never
know where a mere drawing will take you.
In this case it took this quilt all the way to Quilt Canada’s National
Juried Show 2022.
I like to doodle while I’m talking on the phone. Since my rational brain is taken up by conversation, the doodles I make are far more varied than the ones I actually “think” about. After I’d amassed quite a few of these during my Tuesday night phone calls with my sister, I thought it might be interesting to see if I could cobble them together into a cohesive whole. I also thought this might be a good subject for the guild’s challenge - to do a monochromatic quilt. That’s a quilt that’s made from one colour and its variations. These two criteria proved to be ridiculously challenging, akin to climbing Everest in bedroom slippers and a tiara.
First came the design, where I took all the doodles I wanted to use and, using tracing paper, fitted them together onto a large sheet of grid paper. I kept moving the outline shapes around. I also kept adjusting them into recognizable objects. What can I say – in my mind anything abstract is simply an exercise in modifying it into a “real” object. So, things morphed, and an apple and a globe and several other doodles from the first design did not make the cut as it evolved to include a dragon, an armadillo, a black fish, a school of fish, a snake, an alien, and even an embryo. How all these items are connected is a story yet to be revealed. Even to me.
The monochromatic part did not work out, as I had begun using fabric that varied in colour gradation from pink to purple. It worked so well for this design that I just gave in to it and turned my monochromatic efforts to another quilt, My Mother’s Cats.
To bring this quilt to life, it required an intense amount of detailed stitching, with satin stitching around many of the shapes and minutely spaced machine quilting over the entire surface. A three-dimensional flower was finally crafted after numerous attempts, giving the quilt a much-needed focus. I filed all the failed flower attempts with my bedroom slippers and tiara, in the Probably Never Box.
