In my house, we have a long-running joke: I take a perfectly fine piece of fabric, and the first thing I do is to grab my rotary cutter and chop it up. Now I have to sew it back together, -although in a new way, to make it whole again… Of course, this is not the end of the story. With several pieces in my collection, I’ve taken the most delicious and masterfully hand dyed fabrics, some of my own creation and some from a local artist, to do exactly that.

Technically, this perfect yard becomes just strips, uneven cut, half-randomly sorted and shuffled. Strips then become tiny unruly squares then cross-cut and re-arranged further into chaotic crumbs. The fragments are fed back into the sewing machine, shuffling the colors into a new order.
I trust the story is built into the hand-dyed cloth, I know it will tell me what it is going to be. Threads may fray at the edges like open wounds and at times, I leave them on the “wrong” side exposed to further the rawness. The work can look like a battlefield of colorful shrapnel. But at other times, it may tell me the story of a peaceful sunrise over a lake: “Sunrise Over Wanapum”, 20″x 16″ (2024)

But this process does not destroy, it is a forced liberation from geometry. It creates a distance from classic quilting, which relies heavily on straight lines and sharp matching points. At the same time, it transforms the uniform softness of the original fabric, often a piece of art in itself. All I need to do is to look for the proverbial Red Thread and pick up the story.

Deconstruction happened not only with the base fabric, I kept going with surface features. The black and yellow lines are created in silk organza, just to be frayed beyond recognition.
My choice of silk organza for the frayed lines worked very well, because silk has some grip to hold onto the stitching. Organza under the microscope looks a bit like “crimped” fibers. It contrasts with the shiny polyester, used for stacking up at the leaves, which had to be treated very carefully.

This work, “Crimson Vine” is driven by curiosity, – how far can I take deconstruction of the chosen cloth?

5-7 Deconstruction

Crimson Vine
20″x 40″

Materials: Hand dyed Pima cotton and sun-printed cotton, silk organza, polyester, cotton threads
Techniques: Machine pieced and quilted, appliqué by machine.