“Cloth Strokes:” A Painting in Cloth

One thing often leads to another in my studio. Sometimes a long time goes by between the first idea and the one that follows. Sometimes the second idea chases the first right away. The latter is what happened with this art quilt.

Another Idea is Born

When I finished my Experimental Wall Hanging, I didn’t feel like moving on to another of my many unfinished projects. I was trying to force myself to get back into art after months of deep shock and mourning, and didn’t find it easy. Then I remembered my mother’s advice about surrounding myself with color when the world feels dark. I pulled out some of the most colorful, cheerful fabrics in my stash: the leftover sari silk ribbons which I used for making the Flow Series and the Tiny Textile Sketches.

The sari ribbon skeins looked quite small when I bought them. I used A LOT of ribbon to make the Flow series, yet, against all expectations, there was still quite a bit of ribbon left… I began playing with the leftover ribbons, arranging them by color and putting them one next to the other.  Before I knew it, another idea popped into my head.

I wondered what will happen if I combined those lovely silks with more bodied, textured home-décor fabrics like the ones I used for the wall hanging, in the same layered-rectangle structure I used there. Believe it or not, but this idea was so exciting that it kept me up at night. It felt good to be excited by art again. I just HAD to find out!

Painting with Fabric

I took out my scissors, started cutting strips and composed a couple of mixed-fabric strips. I loved how they looked! The contrasting textures really spoke to me, as did the contrast between the frayed edges of the silk and the defined line of the fabric on top.

Once I started, I couldn’t stop. In somewhat of a frenzy, I spilled my scrap drawers all over the carpet (if you ever wondered why I can’t keep my sewing room tidy!), dug through them, auditioned, cut, sorted and matched. Over the next few days strips started accumulating. 

I then sewed each strip with just one stitch in the middle, to hold all the layers together. Since the silk is very thin, this was enough. Then, I began playing with different backgrounds and different strip arrangements. In the end, I liked a horizontal and vertical arrangement best.

Building Up Cloth Strokes

I stitched together a large background from several different pieces of solid fabrics, and began filling it up. Each strip was like a brush stroke, but in fabric: Cloth Strokes! I followed my intuition to create the composition. It was an improvisational process, and felt somewhat like putting a puzzle together without knowing what the final picture will look like. The tie-dye effect of the silk combined with the solid upholstery fabrics I put on top created a a painting-like feeling. I was really excited when it slowly came along, this painting-with-fabrics experiment! 

When the entire background was filled, after many, many hours of work, I started pinning everything down. It didn’t take long before I realized that this was a mistake. Pinning every strip separately required an enormous number of pins. I ran out before half the strips were attached, and had a lot of stab wounds to boot… Even the strips that were pinned, however, did not stay quite as put as I needed them to be. The quilt was definitely not stable enough to safely move from the floor to my sewing machine. When I tried lifting it, everything wobbled dangerously, threatening to undo days of work. Disaster!

I put the quilt back on the floor and removed the pins. Then, I carefully moved every single strip off of the background and onto a large board. This took forever, as I had to make sure I put each strip where it belonged. Then, I started moving small sections of strips back to the background, a few at a time, sewing as I went along. The whole process was somewhat frustrating, to say the least… If this wasn’t enough, this quilt ended up being one of my largest, and I really had to struggle to push it under my sewing machine to get to all the parts that needed sewing…

Eye Candy

In the end, it all worked out. The finished piece, which I named, how not, Cloth Strokes, is full of interesting color nuances and textures, including lots of lovely frayed edges. It looks OK from afar:

I think, however, that Cloth Strokes REALLY needs to be viewed in person, from up-close. Only then can it truly engages the senses.

Here is some close-up eye candy: 

And a selfie for scale:

The warm, happy colors of Cloth Strokes made my heart sing, lifted my spirit and helped distract me from the news. More importantly, working on it got my creative juices flowing again…