In October of 2019, I washed out a bunch of fabric and yarns from my latest dye day. When they had been washed, dried and ironed, I hung them up on my wall and stepped back. I had originally planned to use the fabrics to make smaller embroidered work, but I saw the potential for each of the three to be used as whole large cloth pieces. I began to work with the larger piece shown on the left in January 2020. The orientation flipped in its final form.
Working with a larger piece of fabric was a bit daunting. I’m used to smaller works and I did want to lose the intimacy of those pieces. I began by setting some intentions. When I looked at this fabric, I saw lakes and lands of Finland. In planning for travel I had begun to follow a lot of photographers in Finland. They post a steady dazzling display of the beautiful lands of Finland through the seasons. If you ever need a soothing rabbit hole of Finland landscape photography, click here, here, here, here, here, and here.
I started by marking out what was land and what was water. In some places on the quilt, the boundaries were blurry which is a good thing. I then backed the fabric with quilt batting as I was going to do most of the stitching and embroidery with it for added loft and texture. I first outlined in green thread and free motion stitching landforms and then put in some initial water marks with blue threads. It gave me a place to begin and I could quickly focus in on smaller landforms in the larger piece.
I then began the slow process of embroidering and giving the land more definition, texture and interests. I tried not to look at all the surface that needed to be covered but focus in on the areas that I was working on. Again – I didn’t want to be overwhelmed. Embroidery is slow and it only gets done stitch by stitch. But I saw that I wasn’t getting the separation between land and water quite like I hoped for.
I tried a few things and what I found worked was outlining the water with a dark green running stitch.
I worked on this quilt through the early days of the pandemic, the lockdowns, the opening back up and the day to day news grind. It gave me a touchstone. Each day I knew what I needed to do. I just needed to put myself at my table, turn on my light, and let the threads slip through fingers and cloth to give voice to the hidden lands emerging from dye and fiber. It was comforting working on this piece. I thought a lot, listened to podcasts and audiobooks and kept working each day.
This piece will forever be a time capsule of 2020. The disappointment of postponing our trip to Finland, canceled residencies, canceled shows and life on pause. The horrors as the pandemic gripped the world and the anxiety of living in a time of deep never-ending uncertainty.
In each work, there are always problems to create, solve and a lot of work to do. There are times when I have no idea what I’m doing, but bit by bit I figure it out. This quilt never caused me to doubt myself like some do.
The biggest obstacle that I remember from making this piece was cutting away some of the fabric to add in handwoven fabric. Once selected and the fabric was cut, there was no way out but through.
Selecting handwoven cloth to use in the quilt.
I finished the embroidery stage a lot sooner than I expected. Sometimes that happens. It just felt done and I was ready for the quilting part. According to my Instagram notes it took four weeks to do the embroidery. I put the fabric on my worktable to take a look and then begin to pin the layers together for the hand quilting stage. I knew from the start that I wanted to hand quilt this piece. I wanted the slowness, softness that it would bring and the time element that has gone into this piece all along.
embroidery and hand quilting together
I finished the quilt in May way ahead of an October deadline for a show I wanted to enter. The work wasn’t accepted but I’m confident that it will go out in the world some where and sometime. The pandemic has put so much on hold, and this quilt can wait for its time.
I think the hardest part about this work was finding the right title. Sometimes when I’m designing or working on a piece the title will just appear in my head. I’ll just know. I jotted down a lot of possibilities for this one before selecting a simple title with two parts – the Finnish word and the English meaning – Koti: Home. Simple seemed best for this work. There is a lot of weight in the word home.
I don’t consider myself a quilter, but I love working with the quilt form in my work. Quilts come forward into the world with a lot of content just in their very nature - home, women’s work and time. In making conceptual work, you always hope you’ve done your job as an artist to have the meaning of the piece reach the audience.
Koti: Home
46" h x 32" w
Whole cloth quilt with handwoven fabric appliqué, hand dyed fabric, handwoven fabric, cheese cloth, hand embroidery, free motion machine stitched, and hand quilted.
Cotton, linen, and silk
STATEMENT:
With what began as cloth for several pieces, when I saw the pattern I had created with dye, I saw the lakes and lands of my ancestor’s Finland and their adopted home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I began this quilt, the largest of my embroidered pieces to date, while planning a research trip to Finland which ultimately had to be postponed due to the pandemic.
I come from people deeply connected to land. Though memory fades, traces of ancestral homesickness can still be found in my family. Working slowly, using traditional craft, I capture land, time, and memory in quilt form to create a new map to express what it means to be home.