3. Where do you get your materials? Anything that has a hole in it or can have a hole put in it is fair game for inclusion on one of my quilts. I have wholesale button accounts with manufacturers and buy them wherever I travel. People give me their grandmother’s old button jars and their mismatched costume jewelry. Yard sales and thrift shops are possible sources. Once in a while, I find interesting things on the street. Finally, eBay has been a valuable source for materials from all over the world, especially glass buttons from Czechoslovakia.
4. Where do you get your ideas? The images for my work come from a wide range of sources. Many of them are from dreams, as I have delightfully lucid ones. Sometimes, I get the title of the piece before the image, as I love adept wordsmithing. Other time, I find a particular piece of fabric that speaks to me to create something around it. Finally, clients will ask me to create something for a certain spot in their homes, and the piece is a reflection of it’s future home and surroundings. Usually, gardens and flowers are an important part of my work, as I’m a rabid, avid dirty nails gardener.
5. How do you know when a piece is finished? A piece is finished when it looks balanced to me. I delight in being able to use a wide variety of materials and make the composition work, which may mean seven little blobs of a color scattered around the lower right to counter the visual weight of a large area of the same color in the upper left. I often “hum” the placement of a piece, moving it around on the surface until it hits the right note, and then, that’s where it’s sewn down. Of course, there is the effect of an impending deadline for submission to an exhibition, or a client waving a check in front of me that can speed up the finishing of a piece.
|
