On September 23, 2013, I started drawing a quilt that I meant to have drawn in July, early August at the latest…but then my life sort of exploded and I couldn’t focus. I had gotten into the 25th anniversary SAQA exhibit called Celebrating Silver, curated by Yvonne Porcella, on the strength of my description of silver as the color of age and experience, the crone versus the mother and the maiden…so I started by drawing the crone…
This is two days of drawing, about a month after school started, when I am mostly exhausted when I get home from school…
I made a copy of the page and then taped the copy to the next page to continue the drawing…
And then I decided it sucked. I actually liked the start for the mother, but decided it just wasn’t working out…so I cut it off and started again.
Better. Much better. So down to two pages…and I keep drawing. Then I start drawing up the sides…
And I decide it needs to be longer and I add to the bottom…
There is a size limit on this thing, but I cut really close to that limit. Go BIG! or don’t go at all, right?
Then I started numbering. Oh my.
This thing has enough detail to kill me. And it almost did. One thousand two hundred and thirty-seven pieces. None of them very big.
I started tracing it on Wonder Under in October…
I finished right before I left for Houston last year…
Lots of little tiny pieces…
Which then had to be cut up…I didn’t even start until mid-November.
This is the background fabric I originally chose for this quilt…
Stay tuned to see what happened to that decision…right before I sorted all 1200+ of those tiny pieces, at the end of November.
I started ironing them to fabric in late November…
And trimming them as well. There are some things that are portable and some that aren’t…
I can’t drag my whole stash around to iron stuff, but I can drag this shoebox around with a pair of scissors…
The fabrics started piling up in December…I took a few days off ironing. Not sure why? School. Tired. Whatever.
But eventually I got my focus on (realizing that time was getting TIGHT)…
And finished ironing everything down to fabric on December 6.
More tomorrow…hopefully…if I have internet. I will be at the SAQA Meet and Greet Thursday at 5 at Houston, as long as flights fly and nothing bad happens. I will be tired! Yay! But I will be there. Like I told my dad, sometimes you just have to run away from all the crap…I totally grabbed all the stuff I needed to grade and ran away from school. I need to go back out and get meds and food and money for tomorrow, but I’m not going back there until Monday. You can’t make me.
Kathy Nida 