Sometimes I Learn Something, 2020.
As with everything else about our lives, the pandemic significantly altered my plans for my making and art practice. I had been excited about committing to working with found / reused / repurposed textiles, and moving away from purchasing new fabrics as much as possible. My ideas around waste, reuse, consumption, deterioration, repair, and emotional attachment to textiles run concurrently through my drawing practice, my mending practice, and my sewing practice, and I was excited about taking this next step in embracing new restrictions in quilting.
Instead of course it became unthinkable and largely impossible to spend hours sifting through used / discarded clothing bins, or thrift stores. And yet, simultaneously, because of my anti-waste proclivities, I had piles of "new" fabric bits, gleaned from friends’ clothing-sewing scraps and my time at a small home sewing brand. The main problem with this? Few to none of these are fabrics that I would have purchased myself. I am, and there’s really only one way to say it: an absolute asshole about color.
My personal color palette is outrageously narrow, and HIGHLY particular. It goes like this: Reds but ONLY WARM reds, fuck a blue undertone, same for all pinks; fuck orange; ehhh yeah some yellows but very few of them; fuck green; fuck blue UNLESS it's a true peacock deep blue-green (nonsensical, I know), fuck purple. Yes to neutrals, but again, warm-undertone only. Get out of here with your "cool grey" that shit is blue, or worse, purple, and fuck blue and purple, remember?
So what do you do with an enormous pile of orange fabrics when you absolutely loathe the color orange?
You accept the challenge, I guess.
This little quilt is called "Sometimes I Learn Something" (the implication being, of course, that sometimes I don't). Despite the fact that it is absolutely ORANGE, in the end, I love it. I'm a little disappointed in my reliance on navy blue to help push it to an acceptable-to-me place; this feels like a cop-out, a predictably easy answer to a more interestingly complex problem. Regardless, I'm proud of myself for trying to continue to expand my comfort zone.