Regret (2014)

Hand-dyed cotton fabric and thread, flannel batting, machine pieced, hand-quilted

70 x 62 inches

The idea behind this quilt is the nature of the feeling of regret, which in my experience has to do with a missed connection between two people. My experience of regret has been intensified by the death of people I love—my parents in 2003 and my son in 2004. Once a person is gone, the missed or failed connections become more salient, and, at the same time, there is no longer a possibility of repair. No further chance to apologize, or to change a behavior. Working on this quilt helped me understand the pull that regret had come to have in my life. 

The design process was arduous; the simpler the design, and the smaller the range of colors, the more impact each decision has. What exact red color to mix, with what level of mottling? What exact black? What shape should the figures be, and in what relationship to each other? There were also challenges in the pieced construction. My first plan was to cut out the black shapes and appliqué them onto the red ground, which would have been much easier than piecing. But I could get much sharper lines and points with piecing, which I thought important for the meaning of the quilt, so I moved to that method of construction. For this, I relied on garment sewing methods that I learned in my teens.

As part of the process of working on this quilt, I wrote out a list of my regrets about my relationship with Jeremy—all the things I wished I'd done differently. I thought of incorporating the litany of regrets by quilting them into stitching lines over the image, but a small trial showed that the overlaid script interfered with the stark abstraction I wanted for the image. I eventually decided to write them out on the cloth that backs the quilt. To obscure the writing, I overlapped the lines a bit. Words are still sometimes legible, but it is difficult to read more than a word or two in a row, even for me.

I was planning to machine quilt with straight-line quilting, perhaps blocks of lines going in different directioons.  I thought this would work with the stark message of the quilt. But then I took a workshop with Dorothy Caldwell on "Human Marks." One of the exercises in the class led me to a stitch (improvised, done while blind-folded, to the word "dialogue") that I've come to think of as my "conversation" stitch. The stitch was appropriate for this quilt about regret, which often comes from missed conversations, or conversations gone awry. I began the stitch in the black areas. I liked the way the stitch looked on the back side of the quilt as well, so in the red areas I did the same stitch, but worked from the back.