Having just the turn of the month of September to create a piece for this prompt, I had just received a large piece of cloth that had traveled to me from my brother while in Japan. With a few smaller lengths of the beautiful fabric the parcel shared what could become side pieces in this prompt design for Loose Coins. I was able to create a base that could solve a small mystery for me. How could I connect various coins here that had been a treasure for my 9-year-old grandson, Luke? He had been with me while I was sorting through some coins in a jar in my bedroom, and he also saw the tiny coins that his great-uncle had sent from Japan. We agreed I should make “Art, Gram” and I started stitching the base for the artwork.

We struggled for a bit with how we would sew cloth and then sew on COINS! Well, I worked on the centerpiece of cloth that meant so much for a child with autistic skills and a mind that said “Let’s use your sewing machine”. Well, then we both remembered that I had just had a second round of surgery for my two feet this past week, and I couldn’t use my sewing machine. Well, I got underway on Saturday last and I hand-stitched the cloth together and finished the piece with a lot of encouragement from a little man.

Luke watched, all this past weekend as I stitched the cloth above. He thought and worried and then he came along with the idea to turn the coins on backs and fronts so people would see the “faces” and all of the backs would have really “cool” pictures. (the actual beauty of the coin has stories of wars, animals and people. His idea was to GLUE them when the quilt was finished using ‘Gorilla Glue’ on the ‘flip side, Gram’. I was not at all keen, and he knew I had been stitching like mad to create art cloth on another designed piece for the Cloth in Common project last week….all about coins with hand stitches. I didn’t think that I would finish a quilt that had been covered with old coins that had traveled for many years and covered with glue, yet it worked!!

I am sharing a photo below of a sashiko design I decided to try and finish to be used for submission below while I couldn’t be using my sewing machine for this project. Hand-stitched design on cotton cloth in case. I tried hand stitching into the late evenings to finish at the Connections Fibre Artists Retreat the week before I was home and then worked for this week to create and make the quilt at the top above with Luke and his ideas.

And thankfully, the stitches seen here have “been traded” to become instead a special little man’s “loose coins on cloth”…

Bethany Garner, ‘And the stitches became loose coins, 18 ” x 40″

Cotton commercial cloth, hand-stitched and mounted on a frame (ready for travel with the need for folded edge backing/flat wood in .)