My piece for our Pattern prompt is for Nancy – my teacher, mentor and friend. I spend a month in the spring and a month in the fall each year at the Teaching Barn on her farm in the middle of rural Ohio. I’ve taken almost all of the 20 or so classes she offers – most more than once. It is a time of learning and laughter and lots of love. I’ve taken Strip Piecing and Restructuring twice. I postponed taking this class until just before the pandemic because I thought I wouldn’t like cutting fabric into strips, sewing the strips together, cutting the strip sets apart and sewing them into larger pieces of hand made fabric, but I loved it. The class was all about making patterns with color and value, proportion and balance. It is also about thinking in a patterned way, three or four or five steps ahead.

In 2019 I made this piece, started in class and doubled in size at home. It lives on our guest bed.

In 2022, I began using strip piecing to create my Cloth in Common pieces for each prompt. Remember Building from early 2022?

The piece for our March prompt is my ode to Nancy. Not only because she taught me about making patterns with cloth but also because I used her fabrics (from the 1980s!) to create the strip sets. Thank you, Nancy, for inspiring me to do my best! For raising the bar and believing anything is possible.

This is #11 in my Road Trip series, Me and Nancy Down at the Teaching Barn, 34″x40″.

Me and Nancy Down at the Teaching Barn
Susan J Lapham
Dimensions: 40″ x 34″
Material: Commercial and hand dyed cotton, silk batting, cotton thread.
Technique: Improvisational strip pieced, machine pieced, longarm quilted.