After the epic dual shelf collapse in July from which I found no time to properly recover, my sewing room got so bad that it became literally unusable. Finally my schedule opened up so that I could take the
three days required to dig to the very bottoms of the piles, the backs of the drawers, purchase new shelving and bins, and generally do an archeological dig through my sewing life of the last 17 years.
I thought I would show some of my old work that predates my blogging and crazy quilting. I found a bunch of color copies in the bottom of a cabinet....this from the Age Before Jpegs....
So come on along, setting the Way Back Machine to the mid 1990's or so.... ;-)
I was into Broderie Perse, at least my own take on it, in a big way for many years. You will notice the flowers were as much in evidence back then as they are now; I must have cut out a jillion of them from commercial quilt fabric. This piece is 8" X 11". I probably made 35 of these little "sayings quilts", as I called them.
Here's another one:
This was for a friend, using her chosen phrase and favorite flower, the iris, and bug, the dragonfly.
I was into cutting out a lot of letters back then, too.
This is skipping ahead to early CQ days, but the letters and flowers are still there. It was for a friend's doctor's office.
She's a gynecologist. ;-)
From there the stained glass quilt phase began. I found a picture of one that I had totally forgotten about making.
I think this must have been for a church Christmas bazaar.
Then the fabric collages veered into landscapes. I miss doing them and may have to circle back to them one of these days. (There is a small one in my book, though.)
I remember being very inspired by that birch bark fabric, and using up every inch of it.
Pale winter sunlight.... This was for my oldest brother who likes it c-o-l-d.
Maybe my strangest piece, this is a collage (a work in progress shot) rendering of one of my Uncle Bill's kachina dolls. He hung this in his fancy office when he was the head of the F.D.I.C. in Washington, DC, which made me very proud. In exchange for it, he gave me his mother's oak workroom chair, which I am sitting in as I type this.
I read every single one of the 20 Brother Cadfael mysteries during those years, and decided to make a fantasy rendering of what I thought it might look like in the old England of the books...
This was large, very detailed, and kind of burned me out on landscape collage!
The next piece is a small embroidered wool landscape that I loved doing very much, for my friend Cindy Thury-Smith. She fulled the wool in it.
Cindy loves lavender, so I used a Van Gogh painting of lavender fields as my inspiration. Notice that the trees are needlepunched?
Sometimes it feels good strolling down Memory Lane... But now, everything is re-organized, slightly rearranged, and ready for new work.
This view is looking into the room....
...and this view is looking out, back toward the rest of the house.
But what is that on the table?
In the foreground are the contents of an envelope of goodies my friend Tracey Brookshier sent to me. On the end of the table is this....
A UFO! This is when I was using all vintage cottons, I was just in love with them. I had bought some rubber stamps for the precision "paper" piecing, except that the guidelines were stamped on muslin.
I really like this and will have to finish it...someday....
I've got lots of threads I can use....
