Sunday, March 21, 2010

Termite art – part 1


I had the pleasure of speaking at our local Quilters’ Day Out last week. It’s always a challenge to figure out what to say to an audience of mostly traditional quilters without making them feel that you have abandoned them for the rarefied air of “art.” But I feel such a bond with the traditions of quilting that I love to have these crossover opportunities.

Once I read about the concept of “termite art” – obsessive work made of a gazillion little bits assembled together – and decided that it described me pretty well. I thought I would use this as my theme for the speech, because if there’s anything that traditional and non-traditional quilters share, it’s a love for sewing little pieces of fabric together.

I started by displaying probably the most traditional quilt I’ve ever made, one incorporating thousands of 2-inch squares of leftover bits sewed together. (I wrote about my 2-inch squares in a recent blog post.)























I’ve made those 2-inch squares for years, working on them when I needed the therapy of sewing in a quiet room but was too tired or stressed to do anything requiring actual thinking. The first several thousand went into this quilt, but I kept sewing. One day I realized that my therapy squares were disproportionately green, and it gave me the idea to put them together to make a design. I was on an alphabet kick at the time, so the design happened to be a letter.


















Green T, 2001, 33 x 44

That worked out so well that I made three other quilts with the same concept.






















Black T, 2002, 33 x 44






















Orange Pekoe T, 2002, 33 x 44






















Earl Grey T, 2002, 33 x 44

Later I took the concept farther, abandoning the 2-inch square but still using bits of pieced work to make up large expanses of monochrome.






















Complementary With an E, 2005, 50 x 68

I'll post later this week about other series that I think qualify as termite art.


4 comments:

  1. As I was surfing the quilting blogs today i found this wonderful entry, then went on to read the earlier post that you referred to. Thank you for sharing these ideas. You have a new fan.

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  2. I know I have seen this work but I had forgotten how beautiful some of the surfaces are. I love the "background" fabric for the E.

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  3. I came across this post via a link from another blog - I love what you have done with all your scraps. I'm basically a traditional quilter and hate to throw out my scraps, even the smallest of the small, thinking 'one day I will use them' but not knowing how. You have given me some great ideas to work with. Thank you....Joy (in Australia)

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  4. thanks to all for your kind comments!

    Joy, keep reading -- in Part 3 I'll tell you how to use even tinier scraps.

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