Resilience: a New Quiltlet

I was going through some of the bins in my studio and found a little watercolor on muslin that I had done for this 2011 post, "Product Testing: Watercolor Ground and Walnut Ink." Whoa. At the time, I had created it as a sample, but now that I was working with fabric, perhaps I could stitch it into a quilt. What would that look like, I wondered, and started pulling cloth out of other bins. I found cloth I had tea- and coffee-dyed, much like I had done in the 2018 post, "Eco-Artists & Coloring Cloth with Plants." The naturally dyed cloth combined with the image of the nasturtiums seemed conceptually  appropriate, and the colors worked, too.


"Resilience" is a small quiltlet (22"w x 26.25"h = 56cm x 66.5cm) with quite a bit of stitching. I didn't want to add much color to distract from the little painting, so I mostly used the linen thread I had tea/beet-dyed in a few different hues (also in the 2018 post, above, and in the 2019 thread post),


some orange, yellow and dark blue sashiko thread for a tiny bit of emphasis; I sewed into the painting as well,


and regular embroidery thread for the script at the top, "i only planted them once."


I used a variation on a sashiko flower pattern,


and of a woven bamboo pattern,


as well as a plain running stitch.


Because it was so textural and invited touch, I French-knotted the word "resilience" in Braille,


and in a repeated Morse code pattern.


I like nasturtiums. They just keep coming back. And here's the back.


If my watercolor ground is still good, I'll look forward to more experiments with art quilts.

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