Destroy This Quilt
In July 2024, I joined Zak Foster’s Quilty Nook, in part because I felt so intrigued by the Destroy This Quilt (DTQ) project that people in the community were doing. I started my DTQ shortly after joining the Nook, and the process was fascinating and eye-opening and helped me deepen my personal creative practice in multiple ways.
I started with an old 60x60 rayon tablecloth - I didn't have a theme in mind when I started, but over the months of working on the top, it became about earth, wind, water, fire and how all those elements weave together and are part of me, and I'm part of them.
My DTQ base, July 2024
Several prompts in, July 2024
One of my favorite parts of the process was inviting my daughter to join me, we worked on several aspects together but the most memorable was when we made a rock spiral, then used decolourant to dye the shapes of the rocks
Over the course of the rest of 2024, I added more and more to the quilt top, until it was a maximalist explosion of many ideas and techniques and colors:
I assembled the backing of many leftover pieces of fabric, most of them favorite soft fabrics like linen and woven and double gauze
and I pieced the backing in such a way to allow for the words I stitched from the back to still be visible after quilting:
Before I started quilting, I took a few photos of the back of the quilt top, to remember what all those months of stitching looked like!
The piece took quite a long time to quilt, with many starts and stops. I hand quilted and hand tied each section of the quilt with different thread colors and styles of quilting, so there were times when I would need a break from it.
I put the final stitches into the quilt this week, and it was a very satisfying feeling when the work in progress “became” a quilt:
some favorite details:
overall, this was a project that helped me grow as an artist, and as a quilter. It helped me see other ways of doing things and I’ve already seen changes in my other work(s) as a result of new ideas and new ways of approaching things that originated with this piece. While at times I was tempted to set it aside, I feel very satisfied to have seen it through to completion - it feels like a little piece of me is in this quilt - raw, unfiltered me. And that’s a special feeling.