Gaia Speaks

Late one winter night, I was walking in my neighborhood park, thinking sadly about how wantonly we are treating our beautiful planet. These words then came into my mind:

I have love for you
Love each other
Go slow
Be kind
See the Cycles
Be of the Planet

I knew I needed to make this experience into a quilt. 

I made multiple sketches, maybe for about a year.  Many of them were trying to do too much at once - showing different biomes and figures cut from animal prints, etc.  I settled on a landscape that would be simple enough to let the words I had heard be the focus of the design. 

The landscape is a compilation of elements from places where three of my friends live - Illinois (the foreground), Montana (the river), and Quebec (the distant rolling hills). 

 

 

I traced the parts of each that I wanted to use (the light strip in the second photo),  then enlarged them onto butcher paper using grids. 

 

 

 

I chose to add the words within a representation of the pulsing energy of the living planet.  I was inspired by a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh in which his brush strokes express the movement and energy of air and light.  These eventually turned into raw-edge fabric arcs, inspired by a fashion photo of a dress by Kilentar that uses traditionally woven fabric by the Yoruba of Nigeria.

I rejoiced when other artworks unexpectedly gave me clues to design and technique!

I worked slowly over three years, only when I was sure of the next step.  As usual, it seems, my vision was more complicated technically than I realized.  But I didn't want to hurry this, I wanted to make sure I had really expressed what I wanted to say.

First, I chose landscape fabrics from my stash.

One technical problem was that the sky fabric I really liked was not large enough.  I kept playing with solutions while I settled on the land and river and trees, and began sewing them.  The largest land pieces were too short, too, but the small seams between pieces could easily be hidden by the prints.  

I cut the paper pattern apart, and used the pieces to rough cut the fabrics.

 

The river fabric I found was just barely big enough, but it had a distracting amount of yellow/orange.  I  appliquéd some blue bits over the large yellow places.  I just couldn't find anything I liked better, and believe me, I tried lots of candidates.

The additions to the river were treated with a seam sealer and hand stitched with a tiny running stitch. 

The large, gently shaped pieces were machine zig-zag appliquéd.  

I chose fabrics for foreground trees and bushes.  You can also see me experimenting with the sky.  Here, I was thinking to add other blues to make the right side look like evening darkening into night.  Again, I vetoed that in order to keep it simple.   

I made patterns, cut the fabrics, used seam sealer on the squiggly edges, and eventually stitched with the same tiny running stitch.

I made a very rough little mock-up with ring fabrics to see if the rings could look airy and transparent.

I marked the rings with chalk by using a 4-foot ruler as the radius for the circles that I'd inherited from my father-in-law's business.  And then I basted them so they'd last during the sewing.

 

At that point, I basted the layers, and machine quilted in the ditch along the major landscape shapes. 

Push had come to shove, and I had to find a sky solution before I started putting the rings on.  It turned out to be so simple and straightforward really.  I had just enough smaller chunks of that fabric to cut big arcs, and then I could put the ring fabrics over the joins.  So funny to have spent ages in search of what turned out to be pretty simple to do!

 

I then chose fabrics for the rings, some had been used in the landscape and some were new.  I wanted the rings to be energy in the air, "there and not there".  

The ring sections are cut curved, using a a template for the curve of each ring, not bias strips.  I decided that would be more reliable, and also easier to work with.  I experimented with using a wavy machine stitch to put them on.  I found that it would keep the pieces flatter if I stitched along both edges.  I also mocked up with the flannel I used for batting, to make sure I liked the look of that.  So I ended up simultaneously appliquéing and quilting them into place.

 

The next step was to embroider the words.  I printed them out, experimenting with various sizes.  First, I  figured out how to have them curve along the rings.  I clipped one side of each paper strip and opened that edge.  Then, I traced the words. 

 

 

Next, I discovered that the prints in the background were too busy to easily read the words.  So I went back to my stash and found solids that were more or less similar to the print colors.  Tricky!  I also had to piece colors together as most phrases went over more than one background fabric. 

I embroidered the words on the solid fabrics and removed the tracing paper.  Then I cut to size, and appliquéd those pieces alongside the rings.  Quite a process! 

The embroidery and appliqué were done sometimes while watching the Olympics and sometimes outside under the sky and trees.   

Finally, I was able to square up the edges, finished with facings on the back, put on a sleeve.....and sign the quilt. 

I hope many people will find comfort and a new understanding in this quilt and its message.