Like the wedding dress quilt of the previous entry, these two pieces marked a time of transition from working exclusively with traditional cottons to exploring the possibilities of unusual materials. The wall-hanging on the right was finished during the last year spent at our old house, and the one on the left was made during the first year in my new studio. Instead of the open-ended, no-deadline wedding gown assignment, however, these quilts each came about within a very short, no-nonsense timeline set by professionals at Robert Allen Contract, which has an office in our town. Several designers needed an interesting way to feature their fabric line for a trade show. Someone thought "quilt," and since I had some local visibility for my quilts as well as a business phone number in the yellow pages, they invited me in for a consultation. These decorator fabrics are not what one usually considers suitable for quilts, but I never turn down a challenge (see previous entry!) before I've determined it's impossible, so of course I committed to creating a quilt featuring upholstery-weight samples (by the following week? Sure, no problem!).
The mandate the first time around was a traditional pattern, so I chose a geometric design called "inner city", pictured on the right above. Not a large piece, it was relatively unexciting to make except for the adventure of working with thick fabrics which included some percentage of non-natural fibers given to melting if held under the iron too long. Since they were also quite resistant to taking a nice sharp crease, I frequently held them under the iron too long. That lesson was learned quickly, the project was completed and auctioned off at the trade show in New York, and that story ended.
Or so I thought. The following year at around the same time (which again turned out to be about two weeks before the quilt had to be in New York), another project materialized in the form of medium weight wools and shimmery transparent fabric probably intended for curtains. This time I proposed a new design which yielded a process more interesting than practical, given the time limitations--but in a tug-of-war between "interesting" and "fast," interesting always wins out and sleep loses. In real life, anything "white" in the photo on the left above is transparent, and the medium weight wools, with some circular appliqués, float on it. I sewed individually lined, curved-edge wool squares onto a large length of the sheer fabric, leaving a sheer, curvy border around the outside of the entire quilt--it's a shame I don't have a better photo of it, but that's what happens when you make something with nearly invisible components.
In trying to remember how I accomplished the uniting of these unconventional, incompatible fabrics of such varying weights, I note with interest that I'm not exactly sure how I managed to get the quilt to hang straight, without buckling. I do remember having to be extremely careful and precise, because that's a stretch for me. The nature of immersion in a creative process--especially when the process results in something brand new accomplished under time constraints--seems to be that in retrospect the experience is a bit of a blur; years later I find myself thinking "how on earth did I do that?" Yet every time those blurry experiences happen, I forget the moment-to-moment "labor pains" and come away with an expanded range of challenges I'm willing to take on, as well as a sense--absolutely inaccurate, of course--that I don't remember learning how to do these things because I've always "just known".
For the next several years, these annual decorator fabric projects greatly expanded my ability to work with wools, silks, sheers, and laces. Such projects were bright spots of creativity in between the "dry spells" occasioned by the process of using up my energy in establishing a new, rigorous schedule of teaching in my studio. The ability to use any and all types of fabric led finally to a "breakthrough" quilt which began a new quiltmaking chapter. There was just one more as-yet unfinished "albatross" to complete before that could happen.
