Recently in one of my art quilt FB groups there was comment on when members regarded a work as being ‘finished’ and I was a little surprised how much variation was in the answers. Although many art quilt makers regard the end as completed binding or facing, my personal view is that it’s not ‘done’ until hanging sleeve is on the back and my initials are free machine embroidered on the front, but as I say there’s an array of other answers.
Going back to the step before that, the treatment of the edge of the work, a year ago I wrote: “One enduring legacy of traditional quilt making is that most art quilt makers carefully bind or face the straight or straightened edges of our quilts. These are the standard procedures for those utilitarian predecessors from which art quilts descend, and I myself have mostly bound or faced quilts, even ones with extremely irregular shaped outer edges, eg., Pahoehoe.
That facing was challenging and a bit finicky in parts, but was worth it – because it would have been an entirely different quilt if all four irregular edges shapes had been chopped in a straight line. I have seen other artists deal with this issue by placing the whole irregular shaped composition onto a rectangular backing and then treating that as the surface design to be quilted and ultimately faced or bound – ho hum.…I need to think more about this idea, but I was really pushed to thinking about it recently when I saw how one artist did some lovely improvisational piecing of units with repeated shapes and skillful use of colour. When it reached the point of finishing the edge, she got out her straight ruler, trimmed off all the interesting little irregular shapes, and placed a facing along each of the four straight edges. The result was ‘nice’, but much less interesting than it could have been.”
This makes me think about a quilt that led me to design decisions so very much not me, especially when it came to the edge finish. The quilt itself was heavily hand quilted and beaded too bring out the look of tribal masks in the piece of hand-dyed fabric, but in the course of that hand quilting, I kept getting images of using cross stitches to “seal up” eyes and lips (made me think of see no evil speak no evil). I just didn’t do that sort of stitching on my art quilts. I was always a neat and tidy and fairly traditional executor of my art quilts, shuddering at purposely left stray threads hanging down or ragged outer edges of others’ work. But I followed those urges anyway. When it came time to add squares with eyes printed on them, I attached them with cross stitches along the edges. And the closer I got to “finished”, my thoughts had truly gone wild, at least for what I would usually do, and I could think of nothing but just leaving the top’s edges frayed, trimming back the backing and binding to match and using cross stitches to hold the edge together. What a piece – what a renegade feeling it gave me and I still think of it as one of my best pieces but one where I was being led by some unknown force. To have bound this or even faced it would have mad it a lesser quilt with less impact imo.
Wild edges are so much more interesting and authentic than those squared off edges, aren’t they? When I think about my own work, it seems that squaring things off is often the result of habit rather than design. What I think of as my better work almost always has those irregular edges………you have given us another post that brings us to making thoughtful decisions. Thanks.