The quilt with a secret code

improv process

The third and last episode of the series “The secret lives of quilts” of this Summer is out on Patchworkvictim blog, on its YouTube channel, and here above! This episode tells the story of the quilt “Open air”.

I made “Open air” at the end of the pandemic period. It was started in one of the workshops with Irene Roderick, which I had the opportunity to attend in the on-line mode. This quilt expresses the feelings you can have when you get out of your home, after a long time spent in the inside. In that moment, the air outside feels so fresh, the light so bright, that it almost surprises your eyes for the sudden change of luminosity. I tried to express this in my work, thanks to the large amount of white fabric used, and I always feel good still now when I look at “Open air”.

For this quilt I also used printed fabric with text. This is a way of working that I adopted after having met the quilter Linda McLaren: it was Linda who proposed me to try fabric with text in a previous work and I continued also in this case. I placed words spread around in the texture. Sometimes these words compose a sort of a message; in some other positions they are put casually. So, we may say that this work is a quilt with a “secret code”.

Follow the track of the quilt

Exhibits

The second episode of the series “The secret lives of quilts” of this Summer is out on Patchworkvictim blog, on its YouTube channel, and here above! This episode tells the story of the quilt “Night lights”, made for the game #qisdualism by Quilt Improv Studio.

This quilt refers to the dualism of darkness and light: the lights have a special character during the late hours and I tried to represent their brightness being more piercing, when coupled with their opposite in the background.
I like to walk in the night towards the sea, beyond the last streetlamp. Yellow reflections swim on the water waves, under a black sky.
I like to be in energy saving mode, in the last hour of the day at home. Streetlamp rays filter through the window tile, scattering light marks on the dark wall.

I made a blue-tooth-tracker pocket in the lower part of my quilt sleeve. After reading shipment loss (and late retrieval) story shared by @quiltinginthefog, I adopted, already since this year start, the solution to follow my quilt tracks. I was struggling for a good place for the tracker, to avoid bumps in the quilt back. When @quiltinginthefog confirmed that she chose a place near the sleeve, as I was thinking too, I went for the solution you can see in these pictures. I was much reassured by seeing the track of my quilt, until it arrived to the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, UK.

Here below you can see it hanging in the show!