Riding the wave of a kaantha workshop with designer Padmaja Krishnan through World Shibori Network Foundation, I wanted to incorporate the background pattern that she taught into my next work. One of the main characteristics of the pattern, which is simply a running stitch, (“breathe in, breathe out”), is that one lets the cloth pucker as one sews. The puckering rebels against everything we are taught in Western sewing; we use hoops with our embroidery to keep everything flat. But the puckers add a texture unlike other stitches. To me it looks like waves as well as natural earth layers.
I knew this would be another ocean piece, so I began layering disparate scraps of blue cloth (“kaantha” means “rags”), then searching through a book of Diebenkorn paintings for composition inspiration. An abstract Y became a whale tail. Whales migrate, passing through various countries and oceans with no need to understand human-imposed boundaries. Combining the Bengali kaantha stitching with Japanese sashiko, Panamanian reverse appliqué, and Western machine stitching in one piece, my intention is unification: the whale’s tale.
and the back:
With these raw-edged quilts, these days I have been applying [Amazon link] Fray Check around the perimeter just at the edge as much as possible. It dries clear and has a strong smell at first, which eventually dissipates.
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