This prompt started me on the adventure of using my favourite dye techniques in this new year as an Instructor for a group of terrific friends in two days of Dye Workshops at our Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning.  I loved making many cuts of thin/wide strips, adding small squares and rectangle scraps, and creating a new quilt that makes me very HAPPY!

Thanks to winter days and piles of SNOW, often being homebound allowed the time for building with thin and thick strips and more colourful blocks. It was fun to use LINES as a source of inspiration for using up skinny and wide bits and pieces of the bold colours we dyed using Procion MX Dyes. I followed to the finish by laying some ‘unique for me’ lines over the surface with a free-motion machine stitch.

Sewing the blocks was not a painful job, as the brilliant colours are familiar and seem to tell me where they want to be. Adding the lines of free motion stitch are another story… being 20 years older than the last similar adventure with block-based lines and strips of cloth, this quilt’s surface stitching was difficult for me to manage through the twisting and turning under the needle. As we age, we are even more determined to possibly own a Long Arm machine. Enticing for sure, but likely won’t happen for me.

I actually love the days when there is angst and wondering while MAKING and not knowing where an art piece might land as finished. Sewing during early winter mornings, as the daylight began to make itself known here in the winter, I dreamed of fewer snow piles, waiting for the 8:00-9:00 AM hours when we had daylight again. I stitched as I listened to the many reels of FIBRE ART TAKE TWO videos that bring me joy. Webinars shared so many tips and brought on the urge to use DIRECTION and LINE to create more blocks of colour. It takes time.

Most exciting about this prompt was the urge to step off in several other directions over the two months we had to create new work. Life gets in the way… I changed paths several times and like others at Cloth in Common, we all worked through the Holidays. Me, well, I was stalled by a series of good fun arts play and teaching jobs.

Decisions are made and hours of work get underway, and sometimes the mindset for what fits the prompt is ever-changing. I worked on two additional, very different starts and stops in this project… but decided that the colour play in LINES, Taking Colour Off in All Directions was the most fun!

TITLE: LINES, Colour Off in All Directions

Bethany Garner

Dimension: 36w x 40h

Materials: 100% Cotton Lawn, Hand-Dyed Procion MX Dyes, Cotton Threads

Technique: Machine pieced and quilted.