color pop :: a dialogue with two talented women

i mentioned some months ago, a treasure trove of hand-dyed fabrics that i got from a artistic friend who has terminal cancer. when our local creative group chose color pop as our theme, i knew i needed to make something with the fabric scraps that she gave me. i also realized that the color palette also went with the other treasure trove of samples that another friend gave me last year. it was time to start a creative dialogue with these women. as you can see, olga (the cat formerly known as paws mcgraw) was eager to help.

i got out the scraps and ironed them and just began sewing them together - doing it in a very intuitive way without thinking too much about how it would end up. just selecting colors and sizes that fit together and just sewing and holding them up and sewing some more. as you can see, the color palette is indeed bright and fits perfectly with the theme of color pop. 

once i had enough bits and pieces, i sewed them into mini quilt rectangles, wanting them to be around the same size, so they could hang in a group of three. since we are three women, three dialogues seemed right.

dialogue 1

dialogue 2

dialogue 3

then it was time to quilt. in my stash, i found a spool of rainbow-colored thread and i knew it was perfect for this color pop project. on the back side of the quilts, i used some shibori indigo cotton that i had dyed last fall. 

i had a small fight with my sewing machine, but we worked it out in the end. 

i had a lot of trimming to do, but it felt like part of the process. i quilted in a very intuitive way as well, following the lines as i saw fit in the moment. then switching. it felt like it was indeed a dialogue with the fabrics, as they whispered to me what they wanted.

dialogue 1 - finished with binding and quilting. this was the first one i made and is my favorite. probably because i'm also a firstborn. :-) this one features only fabrics from the friend who has cancer. that wasn't actually intentional, it just happened that way. the intuitive way i sewed the bits and pieces together just happened to come together like that. 

dialogue 2 - i love the block-printed pieces at the bottom and top left - they are from the friend who gave me all the samples and works from her education at what eventually became kolding design school. 

dialogue 3 - this one is another dialogue between the three of us. i hung them on these hangers with the cute colorful clothes pins just to photograph them, but decided that it was also how i wanted to display them at the exhibition. 

the night we hung the exhibition, we got these cute little coronita beers. it took hours to find the right placement for everything. i loved how my works looked together. i had also recovered the chair i've been sitting on throughout corona with some hand-woven fabric that we acquired together with one of the looms we got for the little museum where i weave. 

i bought the beautiful hot pink fleece at a wonderful leather shop in aarhus, thinking i'd make a festive color pop pillow of it. in the end, i couldn't bring myself to cut it up, so i just draped it over the recovered chair. it looked perfect with my mini quilts and the colorful knitted hugging pillows one of the other members made. now my chair is back at my desk and the hot pink fleece and the new recovered look give me a new perspective when working at home. 

dialogues 1-2-3 and my recovered chair, which i called "working from home.”

and the beautiful skirt that my friend lent to me - it's what she made with the dyed fabrics back in the 80s. and it was FABULOUS. what a privilege to wear it. i felt absolutely amazing. i positively embodied color pop. what a beautiful day that was. i'll always be grateful for the opportunity and the dialogue.