24. Neighbors

Throwing lots of fabrics up on a design wall to create new work is easy. Knowing what to take off the wall is really hard. Knowing when you are finished and ready to sew the piece together is harder still. These challenges are represented by "Neighbors," one of a category of quilts which in the mid-90s was something new for me, involving a more spontaneous design process. My quilts and wall-hangings up to this point usually had an idea, a concept, a plan--however "sketchy"--behind them. What I began to do now was much more improvisational.

This new approach was born of a need to work fast, which in turn had arisen from a decision to use high-end craft venues to move small works quickly. I needed a lot of work to send out to galleries and also to take with me to several large craft fairs which were an experimental part of my business plan. Small works were either wall-hangings like the one pictured here or pillow covers. Both initially represented a way of working which let me try out ideas and techniques on a small scale; they were like fabric sketches.

It wasn't until I had put up a few pieces of fabric (probably retrieved from a scrap basket or even more probably from scraps piled in a heap on the floor) that I began to think I was creating a city of sorts, a city of strange juxtapositions. I didn't try to understand why I liked these combinations (maybe some things are better left unexplored!); I just kept auditioning pieces of fabric to see what the piece would become, and at some point--the sky fabric came last, I think--it felt like enough.

In sewing it together, I had to plan ahead, because the order in which I sewed pieces could box me into corners or create nice, easy-to-sew straight lines. Though designing "Neighbors" was like creating a collage, I couldn't simply superimpose one piece of fabric over another if I were going to piece the work together without making a mess of it. This spurred thoughts about how construction techniques dictated some of the "look" of the piece and raised questions for future work: Would I limit what I represented in fabric to what could be neatly constructed, or would I design with abandon and then figure out how on earth to sew it into some form or other?

I'll answer that: yes. Yes, I would. Both. I'm still working it out.

Let me sum up: as usual, the results of working on a succession of pieces like "Neighbors" followed the laws of unintended consequences. I learned to work fast and with less plodding because I needed to sell more work: a good thing. I chose craft shows to try to do that: a not-so-good thing. I learned more about the limits and possibilities of my chosen medium and was pushed in new directions: good. Though the craft shows were not worth the effort from a business point of view, the "preview open-house sale with friends and students" the week before the show developed into a successful tradition for me for a number of years: good. From where I sit now: it's all good.