No. 17

No. 17
84.5 " x 84.5"

I am the little one. The big one is my baggage. Sometimes, a lot of times, it is grief, a lifetime accumulation of losses. And it hovers immensely large and just above me threatening with it's crushing weight. 

Sometimes it is fear.

Sometimes it is mental illness, depression, unregulated chemicals in my brain that can only see gloom.

Lately it is the staggering loss of democracy in the land that I love. The trauma of violent and illegal kidnappings of our people wrapped the unsubstantiated cloak of vilified 'illegals'. The invasion of our military on our home ground and people. Or the vengeance of an unhinged leader also vilifying everyone who disagrees with him. I cannot forget the incitement of violence during the Jan 6, 2021 change of leadership, and the current pardons of all the violent felons...by a felon. The denial of science, climate change, the politicalization of vaccines, and the loss of women's rights to control their own bodies. The criminalization of using words like science, climate change, and DEI. The government censorship of education and ensuing retaliation. The loss of separation of church and state. The erasure of our history. The removal of health insurance, and jobs, and closing of our government. The sell out of our national parks. Corporate bribes, grift, the wanton greed and pocket lining of the president, and rising inflation. The loss of the value of truth. The loss of freedom of speech. The list is long and begs for accountability and the rule of law. Where are the spineless and mute leaders of our elected Congress?

This is my personal story. I am hoping that you will notice the little me is fully formed and not squashed flat. This is a quilt about suffering and resilience, and even though small....the mighty of the individual. And it is written in a visual language of abstraction. For my viewers it can be whatever you think or feel that it is about. Maybe grape flavored gumdrops? It is all valid. It is art.

The selection of a color palette was easy. Finding all the fabrics was not. I picked from my stash first, and then supplemented with a 'few' more. Here are the squares, cut out, and paired with some friends!

Here are the blocks, sewn into half square triangles, cut apart, and stacked. I love how the stack takes a star shape. 

Finally, I get to open them and see all the lovely color pairings. After pressing, they are trimmed to size and put on the design wall. 

This little quilt had a number of false starts and detours. I originally thought I would put a set of fabrics for the little hump from this palette. 

These are all batiks I made from my early days of being a quilt artist.  I love how they pair up with solid fabrics that I already had in my stash.

I was still liking it, not yet aware of just how awful this is going to look when stitched and paired with my dark cool big hump. I will spare you that one!

Once I changed color palettes, and remade the smaller hump, I knew it was a good decision, and I was happy with it!

The blocks were then stitched together, and cut out into their hump shapes. I used a paper template for both humps. And, drawing the big one was harder than drawing the little one!

Cutting into the smooth shapes... And cutting out the background from a whole cloth. 

I like to baste by hand, and decided to try individual ties, instead of a long running stitch. It is so cute how the ties ended up looking like faces! A perfect complement to the theme of the quilt. 

I wasn't sure what quilting stitch, or stitches I wanted to use for the hand quilting, though, I was quite sure that I wanted to hand quilt this one. I took a scrap and made a sample quilt sandwich. I spent 2 days working on different ideas, some that worked, some that did not. It was time well used!

Then I set about handquilting. This was another one of those false starts I referred to earlier. At about 2/3 of the way finished, I realized that the tension had a big problem, one that was not going away with increasing amounts of work. I still can't believe it took me so long to decide to rip it out. I think that once I got invested in the hand work, and then did it, it seemed an impossible choice to rip it out. But, it looked really bad. And, I didn't need it to look perfect, or be perfect, but this was far beyond my comfort level. So, in 4 hours, I ripped out 20 days worth of work. Sigh...

Then I had to start over. I rebasted it with safety pins this time (because it was faster, and I wanted to get started correcting the problem). Then I machine stitched the entire quilt in chunks along the seam lines and removed all the pins. This made it so easy to do the hand stitching later because I was using a hoop, and the pins weren't there to get in the way! And, the backing was now securely attached to the front, so it wasn't shifting at all. 

Loading the needle with stitches.

I also used varying weights of thread for the handstitching, some thicker, Sew Sassy, and some finer, variegated King Tuts threads. I loved the diversity of using different colors and different weights of threads for this project!

Last was the trimming of the quilt and the binding. A nice bonus of all the handstitching was that the tension was so incredibly even. I did not have to block the quilt to straighten it out! I applied the binding to the front of the quilt by machine, using white fabric to bind the white sections, and blue fabrics to bind the hump sections. 

And then I flipped the binding over the edge and hand stitched to the back. 

And right after I finished sewing the hanging sleeve on, the sky was filled with bright intense light from the sun behind the clouds, and there was no wind. So, I RAN outside with a hanging rod and ladder, and snapped some photos! YEASSS! A perfect finish!