My quilt in the SAQA Benefit Auction, Spirogyra, sold in the middle of last week, and today I received notification that the buyer is a maker herself and a well known Californian collector, so I’m very pleased to have a piece in her collection at last. In thanking her for her support of SAQA, I wanted to give her some insight to the thinking and processes that led me to make the 12″ auction piece, way back in early February this year. (That’s a time I often find it convenient to do a couple of small projects while working in front of a cooling fan) That’s quite a while ago now, so I needed to look up a few blog posts and after thinking about it for a while, my email to her included the following comments:

Since I began freehand cutting and piecing in the early 90s, inserted strips or wandering lines, as I think of them, have long been part of my work.  These strips began signifying bits of memory, as a way of adding important colours into essentially landscape backgrounds, as I frequently associate places we’ve lived or travelled with particular colours.  My textile art background from waaaay back is interpretive or creative embroidery, and I have long felt that the most expressive stitch of all is that most basic one – the glorious straight stitch including the stemmed versions of other stitches like french knots and fly stitch.   These elements came together in 2020 with Pandemic Pattern  With plenty of time at home to follow ideas, and having always been a keen sample maker, I joined some scraps of fabric in earthy colours and trimmed them to segmented strips which I then couched/hand appliqued with gold thread, a work that became Bush Colours   It is really a landmark quilt, because many works featuring segmented lines have followed.  I love the whole process of piecing and raw edge stitching/couching of those lines.  Experimentation and sample making early this year led to making Spirogyra. Green is my favourite colour, and from that section of the colour wheel I have heaps of scraps and offcuts after making a bedspread several years ago. As these particular techniques are incredibly economical in fabric usage, I have enough to continue producing works featuring these colours for quite a while yet!  The links in this paragraph go to specific blog posts dealing with these works in detail.

Quite often small works such as those in SAQA’s annual Spotlight and Benefit Auctions or the Ozquilt biennial Australia Wide calls (40cm sq.) lead on to larger pieces, such as the one I’m now working on, with a working title of Spirogyra 2 –

Being larger gives scope for much more complexity and exploration of the depth created by weaving the strips over and under.

Quilting has started, and at the moment is fine traditional quilting along both edges of the segmented and the machine+hand sewn strips. The blank empty gaps will need to be quilted by something that retreats to the background. ie is less visible, in a darker colour and a fine texture, suggesting the watery medium of a pond or very slow river, in which strands of Spirogyra float.

In addition to my belief in the value of making samples, I also believe that in writing about my work and thinking a little deeper about certain aspects of it helps me understand the role of textile art in my creative life.