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Late
march
(2011) Pastel
on paper 60
x 45 inches As
part
of preparation for a week-long Design Camp that I was to take in
June,
2005, students were told to come with three ideas that might serve
as the
starting point for a quilt. I spent a good bit of time thinking
about the
midwestern landscape, and went out in late March to take photos of
the fields.
I was enthralled with the color scheme at the time--many soft tans
and browns
with a glimmer of muted green. (I didn't yet know how difficult
full-on spring
would be for me, that first year after Jeremy's death.
I was to find the dramatic display of new
life almost unbearable.) I gathered fabrics, and thought a little
about how I
might use them, but then, just before the workshop, I settled on
another idea,
which ended up being the first quilt in this series, Loss. As
I
worked on quilts over the next several years, I became
frustrated with my
reliance on commercial fabrics, which limited the palette of
colors that I
could have at hand. In 2010, I took a summer workshop in
watercolor and pastel,
in which I learned the principles of mixing colors. As a final
project for the
class, I created this pastel version of a midwestern
landscape, something I had
continued to think about since Design Camp. Each rectangle was
made by heavy
layering of different colors to create a complex presentation
of hue. This
experience gave me the confidence to embark on dyeing my own
fabric, which has
greatly enhanced the range and complexity of color work that I
can use in my
quilts. A year after this, having studied fabric dyeing with
Carol Soderlund, I
made a fabric version of this quilt. |
Late
march, hand-dyed
cotton (2012) Hand-dyed
cotton,
machine quilted 60
x
45 inches Pleased
with the proportions of the units that had
been determined by the size of the pastel paper I had used, I
kept the same
measurements for the blocks for the quilt version. With
newly-learned skills in
hand-dyeing, I could create a wide range of greens and blues
for the blocks.
The particular red used for the one block (which I think of as
a barn) was a
color I had made a large sample of in my first dyeing class.
It is a complex
mixture of red, yellow, and blue primaries, a color I have
used in a number of
my quilts. In the midst of the soft, gray-greens that comfort
me, there is also
heat, heart, distress.
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