SPLAT

I had the most amazing experience last year working my way through the prompts for Zak Foster’s Destroy This Quilt process, but since my first version isn’t finished, I wasn't initially sure if I wanted to start a new one when the Destroy This Quilt Reboot started this year. Then my guild had a big secondhand fabric sale and I found this piece of fabric and almost right away knew that it would be the base for my DTQ round 2:

It's very lightweight, a thin material that feels like a sarong, about 35"x45" which feels more manageable size than my first DTQ, which is 60" square.

I let it sit for a while, then one day while swimming laps in the pool, a vision of what I wanted the first prompt to look like came to me fully formed - lines of this very particular turquoise-y color. I often get visions and insights while swimming, it's one place I have little to no distractions and my mind wanders to interesting things.

I poked around my solid fabrics and couldn't find *quite* the right color that was in my head. Which inspired me to go to a local thrift shop just in case I might find something the right color there. I'm not a big thrifter, I often feel intimated by finding something on the racks, but this time it hit SO differently when I was looking for a particular color. I felt so jazzed to explore, and came up with a handful of 5 or 6 options, and was able to compare colors to find just what I was looking for. This long skirt also offered the advantage of being large enough yardage to easily cut the strips I would need:

Cutting the strips was interesting, my first one came out pretty curvy and I cut it down until it was straight-ish. By the 4th or 5th strip, I had started to figure out how to get what I wanted from the garment. This led me on a quest to see what the Quilty Nook (a subscription-based (paid) community with a bunch of archived workshops) already has on "breaking down" garments for quilting. I was riveted watching LUKE Haynes demonstrate and discuss his methods for getting yardage out of different garments in the Clothes to Quilt workshop, and since then my friend Cosy and I have started hosting Garment Deconstruction zoom parties on the Nook!

Here's the piece after prompt 1:

The color looks EXACTLY like what I was picturing, which is very satisfying. I've decided I'm not going to use any quilting cotton for this project, only garments and other found textiles. BUT I'm not going to limit myself to what I have on hand. My experience of looking for and finding the skirt has me eager to continue those quests if/as needed along the way.

Next I had a vision of these cartoonish blob-like shapes with tentacles but something was holding me back from cutting them (not sure what). But when my first idea didn't work out how I wanted it to, I just went for it and I really love the shapes.

For another prompt I traced and appliqued the shape of my foot, and I decided to make French knots in the shape of Braille letters as a hidden message (hidden to people like me who don't know/read Braille). The image below shows my white french knots reading “FOLLOW YOUR BLISS” on my foot shape in my best approximation of Braille letter shapes

For another prompt I cut a hole in a shape that appears in other places of the quilt and mended it with the same color/shape.

I struggled a bit with one of the prompts - at first I saw a constellation in the quilt, and tried stitching lines between several points to make the Virgo constellation, but it was very messy and did the opposite of the intention of the prompt - it was moving my eye in all sorts of awkward ways around the top. 

So I tried connecting a few other points on the quilt with a stitched orange peel-type shape (found bottom right) but again, it felt like something being slapped on to the quilt, not something helping to tell the story (the top has lots of little holes all over it now from all the stitches I've ripped out!!). 

I paused on the prompt and added the word SPLAT (now the title of the quilt as well) and that inspired me to satisfy the previous prompt by connecting the shape of my sole with one of the splatted amoeba-like shapes with little raindrops/drips that echo the other shapes in the quilt. I love the way the drops give the feeling that I've stepped in something, and it's splattering everywhere!!

Probably the most fun addition to the quilt so far: I knew I wanted to play with using an unusual material to stamp, and started thinking through/poking around for options like potato stamps and lettuce ends, and quickly realized that the perfect fit for a SPLAT quilt would be a banana peel :)

I held up each part of the peel, and my daughter (age 7) painted each part in turn with acrylic paint we had mixed with textile medium, and then we pushed them down together one by one

In true Destroy This Quilt fashion, I’ve also burned a hole in the quilt top for one of the prompts:

I did this right by the sink, and blew out the flame quickly before it could spread too far!

I expect to finish the quilt top sometime quite soon, and will share another post here once it’s done! If you’re curious about the Destroy This Quilt process and think you might want to give it a try, I highly recommend checking out The Quilty Nook - it is an amazing community with so much inspiration and encouragement!