Compaction & Drift

Compaction & Drift, although geological terms, can also be used to describe periods in life. Sometimes our days are packed full with things to do, attempts to be efficient and effective. Sometimes we are aimlessly drifting through our days without purpose. Anyway, however it may be, in the following images I'm going to show some stages of the artwork, Compaction & Drift, as well as another piece which ended up getting cut up and reworked into 9 smaller pieces.

As with Yellow Gulch, described in the previous post, this piece was also first hand-stitched. Here you can see it as a single piece of cloth, without the "quilt-sandwich". The stitching is not finished yet.

Here is the finished piece, complete with machine quilting and binding. You can see that I rotated the work 180 degrees from my original plan. I think I agonized over the decision for a little while first, but I'm sure it was the right decision.

This piece was awarded two prizes: The Cream Award, 2016 Quilt Visions at the Visions Art Museum and the Catherine Hastedt Award for Hand Workmanship at Quilt=Art=Quilt, 2017.

If you're interested in purchasing this work, contact Shea.

MAPS I-IX

Now, on to this next piece, which was eventually broken up into 9 smaller works of art. The story behind this quilt is that I was ready to finish this series and it was going to be the last piece. But I really dislike the period between the end of one series and the beginning of another, while I feel aimless and uncertain about what to jump into next. In an attempt to avoid this period, I decided to simply make this piece as daunting as possible in order to buy myself some time while in parallel, I figured out my next series. This piece took me a month, and it was just long enough to get myself ready for the next move. But, in the end, I decided that there were so many stitches, and not enough contrast, that it was actually a little painful for the eyes to look at it. And being to difficult to discern all the details, it also didn't have much of a visual impact. Therefore I decided to cut it up. I rarely ever do this....in fact, this may have been the only piece which I have dismembered in such a way. But, I think it was the right move and now there are many pieces of smaller, more affordable and accessible works of art.

In this image, you can see cotton threads which I had recently dyed. For this particular series, I dyed the thread using Dyna-flo. I like it because it's easy to blend the colors and you don't need much. It's pretty fast and effective. I am steaming and heat-setting before use.

This artwork was one of the ones which was first machine stitched and then hand-stitched. Although I had a bigger and more professional Brother straight-stitch sewing machine, I very often used my smaller, older Brothers because of their ability to zig-zag stitch. I like the brothers from the 70's and 80's because they're strong, durable, easy to tweak and repair, can use all generic parts, and in general are very reliable.

Part of the work is finished. The top half, which will not have hand-stitching, is quilted in a bit more decorative way. The areas which are intended to have maps lines are quilted in a more utilitarian way, simply to get it done more quickly, since it will be covered anyway.

Already there is some more progress!

A close up of the stitching.

The finished pieces. They can be purchased from Roberta and Bob Rogers Gallery.