Whenever I’m looking at textile or fibre art online, one of the things that I look for is how artists have finished the edges of their work, and I sometimes save an interesting image to my Pinterest board ‘edge treatments’.

One enduring legacy of traditional quilt making is that most art quilt makers carefully bind or face the straight or straightened edges of our quilts. These are the standard procedures for those utilitarian predecessors from which art quilts descend, and I myself have mostly bound or faced quilts, even ones with extremely irregular shaped outer edges, eg., Pahoehoe 2. That facing was challenging and a bit finicky in parts, but was worth it – because it would have been an entirely different quilt if the circular shapes had extended and then been chopped in a straight line on four edges. I have seen other artists deal with this issue by placing the whole irregular shaped composition onto a rectangular backing and then treating that as the surface design to be quilted and ultimately faced or bound – ho hum.

However, depending on design content and to some extent the fibre composition, I have treated some edges in other ways –

I’ve lately been thinking about how when an artist takes up a piece of cloth and does something like cut holes in it, pleat it, paint or add stitch to it, they then put it down, figuratively and literally – it’s done, a little bit of art has been performed, so to speak, and it’s finished. To me, the question is – does it always need to be framed or defined by an edge – or can that edge be just left, with the idea that whatever the artist has done to it is just part of a continuum and then Time just moves on? That little piece snatched from a moment in time can be mounted hung, draped or worn – it’s purpose might determine some further treatment, but a lot of art is 2D and can be left. Many 3D works have ragged unfinished-looking edges, and so I am questioning the automatic formal edging of all quilted fibreart we call ‘art quilts’.

I need to think more about this idea, but I was really pushed to thinking about it recently when I saw how one artist did some lovely improvisational piecing of units with repeated shapes and skillful use of colour. When it reached the point of finishing the edge, she got out her straight ruler, trimmed off all the interesting little irregular shapes, and placed a facing along each of the four straight edges. The result was ‘nice’, but much less interesting than it could have been.

If I’m home at the start of the new year, I like to make two small works months in advance of their due dates for annual events later. These small works are often actually samples for something bigger I have in mind, test pieces you might say.

I was thinking of sheer fabrics, and about crossing them over each other to somehow use that pattern of sections where they cross. Then I thought of oversewing them, or oversewing any old strip of fabric and removing that fabric to leave just the stitches…. which led me to the point of stitching over two machine sewn lines – with varying widths between them – so the result was this sample , which then led me to using segmented fabric strips plus overstitching method of couching I’ve used a great deal since 2019-20.

The result is the small work I will donate to the Studio Art Quilt Associates benefit auction that comes up in September. I called it Spirogyra because that is the name given to green threads of algae – all of which somehow came from the deep recesses of memory about senior biology classes in the mid 60’s, and that was a bit surprising!

A Uruguayan friend, Laura F, visited the recent glass and textile exhibition Salonlatino Artevidriotextil in which I had a piece. Although I had talked with her about it and sent her the publicity about the works in that show, she later told me she’d instinctively looked about for one of my art quilts (tapices) that she’d always known as my art.

I met Laura here in Uruguay on my first visit in 1989, and it was the year I began making quilted textile art, too – art quilts or tapices as people call them here. I was accompanying husband Mike on a business visit from Denver CO where we were living at the time. A few years later Laura helped arrange a couple of solo exhibitions in Montevideo and in Punta del Este in the early 90s. She had never known my pre-quiltmaking persona as a creative embroiderer, but my first solo exhibition of anything was of embroidered art, “Sunburnt Textures”, Perth, Western Australia, 1987, just before we moved to the USA where I began making quilted textile art. So my piece in the show somewhat suprised Laura, as she had no idea I was “a really very good embroiderer!!”

In the last five decades I’ve read many textile and quilt catalogues, visited websites, browsed on Pinterest, participated in and attended fibreart exhibitions, met many makers and taken some amazing workshops with some special teachers. After such a long time, there are many artists whose work I instantly recognise in an online exhibition, a magazine or a Pinterest page. By this I mean that whatever they do, a certain signature aura shows up in any image of their work. Such a signature comes from how they combine different elements in a work including techniques, materials, patterns and imagery used, and the use of colour – collectively forming the artist’s style. On a more personal level, when an artist’s emotions and feelings are presented through their unique style, their voice reaches the viewer. I have always felt that the best artist statement about any piece of art is a well chosen, brief title, and whether it comes with a written statement is usually not important to me, but I find some statements can help some viewers interpret what they see a bit more deeply.

Textile artists whose work I easily recognise and really love because it always resonates with me, include Dorthy Caldwell, Emily Barletta , Carolyn Nelson , Bonnie Sennot , Roberta Wagner , Annita Romano , Marian Bijengla , but there are many more. And there are several non-textile artists whose work I adore because they make marks in repeat patterns that always make me think of texture in stitch, so I feel akin to each of them, even though I don’t know the first thing about any of their media. These are generative artist the late Vera Molnar, glass artist Giles Bettison and painter Shane Drinkwater.

Like all the above artists, I don’t do pictorial textile art, and my semi abstract works might more properly be likened to craftsmen like weavers, knitters and traditional embroiderers and more who glory in repeat patterns. My own patterns are not usually rigidly repetitive, but are more akin to the general but recognisable patterns of the earth’s surface textures and the structures within its crust, from where a lot of my inspiration comes. I’m considering signing up for a Sue Stone workshop in repeat pattern and texture when it opens for registration next. Even though Sue’s embroideries are not the kind of thing I do, at all, there’s a disconnect that might take me in an interesting direction with my own art.

Many art quilt makers and all traditional quiltmakers find ourselves with scraps and offcuts at the end of every project. I believe these two words are in are interchangeable, although I myself think of offcuts as being ‘larger’ scraps. However, everything is relative, and there is no precision here. I tend to save pieces as small as about 2 square inches, depending on how precious it is to me, but I’ll skip defining ‘precious’ just now.

My regular readers know I’ve been using strips of fabric in my work for decades – I just love segmented strips of colour. I’ve both pieced them into backgrounds –

and since 2020-21 I’ve also been laying them onto the fabric background and overstitching them, a process called ‘couching’ in embroideryspeak.

If I had a dollar for every time someone has commented “You do such intricate patchwork!!” I’d be wealthy !

But my readers know the starting point is to machine sew varying widths of strips, long side to side, and cut across those groups of strips. I use pretty small stitching so that when I cut across these ‘collections’ of fabric bits, to make strips varying from 0.5 to 1.5 cm wide, they hold together well in the handling.

In the past week I’ve been working on two segmented strip projects. In one, I’ve dipped into my large quantity of blue-green scraps to form strips oversewn with neon green stitching. Sized 30cm square or 12″x12″, my 2024 SAQA Auction quilt is well advanced –

And finally, I’m now in the strip assembling stage of desert coloured scraps to use in a much larger work, as you might assume from these ~1m+ strips. The background fabric could be black, cream, or a burnt gold which I might dull down a bit by overdyeing it… or maybe none of those, but there’s plenty of time.