I have a love/hate relationship with quilting. I love the
way it looks. I love the way stitching patterns transform a plain fabric
sandwich. I hate the prep work required to keep the sandwich layers in place, and I'm not all that fond of planning things out to the inch. My rules for patchwork are that I should already have 90 percent of the fabrics I need, and that the pattern be no more complex than a 9-patch. There are LOTS of 9-patch variations. I
avoid embarking on large quilting projects. I quilt
pockets, cuffs, bodice inserts,
pillows, and doll clothes. Random is nice. Bits from an assortment of projects made these strips. They were destined for a tote bag.
My favorite quilted
jacket was pieced directly onto the corpse of a too-large plain jacket. I used 2-inch wide stripes of fabrics that
pleased me, and added curved bits for yokes and cuffs. It allowed me to use fabrics left over from clothes I had made for myself. I was out of step with
the quilting community, which had discovered stripes and paper pieced work.
True patchwork, for me, is random fabric
combinations. In college I made draperies of 2 and 4-inch blocks, with poor
joins that didn't bother me as much as they should have. Today's lovely pieced quilts of fabrics from the
same company, bought at the same time?
They are a little too perfect, a little too confining for me. I can appreciate the work. I just can't make myself do it again. I bought all the fabrics for a clever vest pattern in Threads, sewed it up, admired it, and promptly gave it away.
In 1971 a roommate introduced me to the joys of Grandma's Flower
Garden, a hexagon arrangement that took hours to cut and more hours to hand
sew, making it appropriate for a college student. I learned a lot about grain and fiber with
that pattern. Polyester/cotton blends
were tricky. Some hexes came out well; some were elongated. I've
thrown out most of the results. I
suppose I could do a pillow or two with the leftovers, but the blocks stay in the
UFO box to keep me humble.
In 1973, when my
grandmother gave me bow tie quilt pieces
cut from fabrics she found at our house, I HATED the way colors from different decades worked
together. No, I don't like greyed colors
paired with brights. There are some colors and patterns I never
ever want to see used together, such as a navy/kelly green plaid with a pink/blue seersucker. I
unpicked a good many of the blocks she sewed, redoing them in combinations I found less objectionable. I tried random block
placement and hated it. Some 40 combinations later, I gave up, and the pieces
languish in a box of fabrics somewhere. Years later, an aunt told me she forcibly prevented my grandmother from giving other brides boxes of pieces because she knew the bride would eventually hate it. And I stopped feeling quite so guilty. 
In the 60s and 70s applique tended to be rounded and
cartoony and sweet. I avoided it until
a friend had a bleach accident with a lightly appliqued sweatshirt jacket. I
took the jacket to the fabric store,
found a bright print that worked, and
added bits from my stash. I was hooked. Cartoon flowers of randomly
chosen fabrics joined stripes from my enormous collection
of bias bindings to adorn many a sweatshirt jacket. The Koos van den Akker
technique of large organic shapes framed in bias worked fine in miniature, for Barbie
sized dolls. I haven't tried it in a human scale.
Recently I've graduated to stealing shapes from nature. I photocopied leaves, making favorites in original, medium and enormous. Enormous lost, but medium adorns the sleeves and front of a jacket.
