New Quilt: You will be in the midst of them.

Through this spring and summer I've been meditating on my quarantine experience and how to express at least some of that experience in my quilts. I live alone, and in common with many people for a lot of this spring my only interaction with people was through zoom meetings!

My family in particular has kept me connected, meeting twice a week for celebration of the Episcopal liturgies of  Morning and Evening Prayer and at other times in between for games and conversation.  For those who may not be familiar, the Episcopal daily office liturgies are short prayer services designed to be led by lay people rather than clergy.  They include prayers, psalms, and other Bible readings.  Quite a bit of the service is communal or responsive prayer and the joining of multiple voices (even over zoom) gives me a shared sense of community.  

With a few occasional additions or absences, we were 8 zoom, screens.  My grandma, my Aunt Susan and Uncle Kenny, my sister and her family (on 2 screens), my parents (on 2 screens), my Aunt Janet, and me.  We're spread across four states and 6 households. On Sundays, my 8 year old niece typically reads our Bible lesson from the Old Testament and my 6 year old nephew led us in responsive reading of the Psalm.  Hearing their voices through the computer (and those of other family reading the other lesson) was a source of strength for me. 

In any case, my mind kept coming back to the idea of connections, of our virtual connections keeping me grounded even in the absence of in-person interactions. The idea of a tree connecting us and its roots keeping us grounded really spoke to me.  Our June call for our 4 Common Corners art quilt group was "Wisdom of Trees" so it seemed fitting.

I started with eight different fabrics to represent the 8 zoom screens: silks, polyesters, a piece of some old polka dot pajamas, and other miscellaneous weird things.  On each panel, I wrote the prayer of St. Chrysostom, the prayer with which we close our services.  Its line "and you have promised...that when two or three are gathered together in his name, you will be in the midst of them" has turned into a mantra for me as I continue to move forward in this chaotic time.  

I cut a tree silhouette out of tablecloth vinyl and used it for the wet sunprinting/painting method that Betty Busby uses.  Basically you get your fabric wet, paint it, and then lay down the vinyl.  When you set it in the sun to dry, the areas outside the vinyl dry faster so the color wicks out from underneath the vinyl and you wind up with a cool printed silhouette.  I used paint pens and other pens to accent the shapes and then layered and did initial quilting on each panel separately. 

Then the squares were trimmed to size.  The panels were laid out over several strips of water soluble interfacing and then the quilting was completed.  The edges are finished with couched yarn and then the quilt was soaked to remove the stabilizer.  This results in a quilt with eight separate panels held together quite strongly by apparently tenuous threads of quilting.

Here's the whole thing.  It came out how I imagined.  

My family member's names are quilted into the blocks, indelibly imprinted into the fabric of the piece.  Here are a couple examples,  Aunt Janet and Grandma, but they are all there if you look closely enough.

One interesting outcome, there is one block, the third down on the right, which doesn't appear to have the prayer written on it.  Interestingly, this was the block I chose for "me"; the fabric was pale pink, and I used a fantastic neon pink paint pen to write the prayer.  You can see it pretty clearly in the very top picture.  However, after the paint had dried and I was done quilting, you can hardly see any of the writing on this block!  It's the first time I've ever made something neon pink that has completely receded into the background.

Have you guys been incorporating your quarantine experience into your art?