These diamonds are worked like darning, but employed as embroidery on cotton fabric. I’m using embroidery floss, which as you can imagine is a real pain in the ass. I’m constantly having to pull out and redo rows of weft because of failing to get the needle over or under a single strand of the 6-strand floss. I think the final product will be worth it, but wow, this is tedious. I work at it a little bit several days a week and it’s going to take months to complete.
This is part of a six quilt series I’m working on for my upcoming two-person exhibition with Lisa Sylvestre (link: asil) in September. The works are, in part, about memory and comfort, as all quilts are in a way about memory and comfort. These quilts will depict a particular space in a particular room, drawn and stitched from memory in different states of abstraction. I’ll write a lot more about these over the coming months.
This panel of diamonds is just one method I’ll use to illustrate a red transom window in that remembered room. It’s going to be the slowest part of the whole project, which is why I’m working on it every day. This will eventually be pieced together with other fabrics (including the linoblock printed brocade, which is the wallpaper in that room of memory) and quilted along the lines that separate the diamonds. The real life red transom did not have a diamond pattern; it may have had a floral diapering pattern or it may have been plain red glass, but I can’t remember and every time I try to call up the image in my memory it shifts, which is all part of how memory works and also why the window will be drawn many different ways in the quilts. Some, but not all, of these will have portraits. All of them will have plants.