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!