Category: Storytelling

The Boulevard

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The Boulevard is the main thoroughfare through my small city in Virginia.  It’s a four-lane route with restaurants and businesses flanking each side along with strip malls. I live a block off The Boulevard.  At night I see the lights of the businesses and the red lights from my living room.  In the early morning, it is quiet and I hear the trains flying by parallel to The Boulevard.   In this piece, I explored different ways of making a log cabin block to give the feel of The Boulevard.  My starting point was elongated log cabins, then playing with the width of the strips.  I added a traditional log cabin block to represent my home on The Boulevard.

It measures 38” x 38”.

I entered this quilt in the Modern Quilt Guild’s Log Cabin Challenge, sponsored by American Patchwork and Quilting magazine. It will be on display this week at QuiltCon in Atlanta, Georgia. I won’t be there, but I’m excited it will hang alongside so many amazing modern log cabin quilts.

I used 28 weight thread, mostly stitching in the ditch. I hoped it would give a feeling of driving lanes.

Light Coming Home

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I started this quilt the week of the Eastern Kentucky floods. I grew up across the border in Southwest Virginia. The images of the debris entangled against the bridges and houses. The lives lost. I processed this through making this quilt. Lots of curves and sharp lines.

When I began, I thought I would use more of the rust fabric, but it felt important to use the vanilla fabric as a dominant background with the black fabric and thread outlining each piece. Mildred Haun’s short story, Darkness Coming Deep, inspired the name of this quilt. It is the story of the death of a child. I wanted to express the opposite of that pain, Light Coming Home. This quilt represents lightness coming to me through the making of this piece.

This quilt will be exhibited at QuiltCon Atlanta 2023 as part of the Windham Fabric Ruby & Bee Challenge.  These are the colors:

  • Russet 51583-40
  • Mandarin 51583-31
  • Vanilla Custard 51583-53
  • Pool 51583-45
  • Cornflower 51583-46
  • Stormy 51583-44

It measures 52.25″ x 52.25″.

I took some risks with the quilting. I used 30 weight Aurifil in black to define all of the seams and to add the illusion of piecing growing from each section. In some places I stitched in the ditch more than once. In other places, I used Sulky 28 weight in white. along with blues and rusts I had from my mother’s stash; some are probably 50 years old, but they worked great.

Mr. Wordle’s Ultra Vivid Voice

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This is Mr. Wordle’s Ultra Vivid Voice.

I created this work during a Finding Your Voice workshop, taught by Irene Roderick. My intention was to make a quilt with the online game, Wordle, as my starting point. To win the game, you have to guess a five-letter word. You have six tries to guess it correctly. When you get the word correct, each letter is surrounded by a green square.

At first I made five green improv blocks. At one point the piece looked like a face (see last photo).  I called him Mr. Wordle, then I killed Mr. Wordle because his eyes seemed to follow me. You may believe this was a rash decision, but I will plead a crime of passion.

The quilt represents the process of improv as well as the process of getting the right Wordle word.   What is happening in my brain was translated into this improv piece.  Ultra, vivid and voice are five-letter words.

The quilt measures 46″ by 56.5″. I used yellow, red and pink thread throughout.

I started with stitching in the ditch with my walking foot, but it didn’t seem like enough quilting, so I added tons of straight-line quilting, trying to echo sections of the piecing. It adds more movement, and it made me happy.

Here is how it began: