In vegetable gardening the term cut and come again means you harvest the outer mature leaves of lettuce, spinach or greens and let the inner leaves continue growing. I thought about that when I cut up a couple of my quilts this month. Disrupting and Disruptors are two quilts made from cloth I printed with a steamroller a few years back. The design began as a sketch, was transformed to a 4’x8’ woodcut, printed onto fabric with a steamroller and then quilted into three different quilts.
The final quilts looked like this
One of them (the green one below) actually ended up in Quilt National. But the other two travelled a bit and ended up in my storeroom. Because they had similar stitching and similar content I thought it might be interesting to cut them up to create a new piece.
I started with the Disruptors piece by cutting small pieces to create a traditional Storm at Sea pattern . It had light, dark and medium areas that would work for that pattern.
I spent about a week rearranging and cutting pieces up to create variations of this pattern. But I wasn’t getting anywhere, the piece looked boring, bland and bad. I needed more variety and depth as well as a looseness that the Storm at Sea pattern didn’t give me. So I took out the second quilt and cut out some more of the pattern pieces. Adding color to the monochrome composition helped but didn’t inspire me to continue. I piled up the scraps and waited for a miracle to give me a new idea.
I thought that I had just ruined two good quilts.
It’s process not product
When I got into the studio the next day one of the quilts was laying on the table with the holes cut into it. I realized immediately that I liked it better than the patterned work that seemed so labored and boring.
I filled the holes with pieces from the second quilt. The inserted fabric pieces are connected with a ladder stitch by butting the edges together. Then, more stitching merges the background with foreground. Below are some details of that added stitching.
Thus, two became one. I’m still fiddling with more details and I’ll have to stabilize those loose ends but I think this one is about done now. On to the next challenge.
Layered Chaos, 66”x44”
