Being Fibre Inclined

Recently, Barb has been getting back to her fibre-inclined roots. Mostly because of the seductive influence of the Interweave website, she has been sifting through the midden of her fabric reserves, hoarded from former lives as one who quilts, and one who sews. (A much nicer term than "a sewer".)

As a very little girl, she followed her seamstress mother through fabric aisles, fondling the cottons and silks on their long, rectangular bolts. "Gabardine" and "twill", "taffeta"” and "dotted Swiss" were as everyday terms as orange or yellow or blue. Many times she went off to sleep with the sound of the Singer sewing machine, purring into the night, accented with the occasional expletive deletive, as her mother worked on wedding dresses and bridal party gowns.

Barb has long been a special kind of quilter, an "out of kilter" quilter. Playing with design, colour , and texture are a much higher priority than sewing a straight line, or for that matter, doing a lot of precise measuring.

She enjoyed quilting for many years, until temporarily losing her mojo.This came about after agreeing to make a wedding quilt, which morphed from a simple design to a king-sized colour-wash quilt, involving lots of decisions about value placement. The quilt was a beauty, and a baby quilt followed from the scraps, but Barb did not sit down to her old inherited Singer for five whole years after that.

In those five years, there have been a lot of developments, if you follow "Quilting Arts" magazine, and "Cloth, Paper, Scissors". One of the most inspiring books she has read lately has been "Stitch Alchemy: Combining Fabric to Paper for Mixed Media Art," by Kelli Perkins.

Fabric and paper, two of her nearest and dearest passions, make for wonderful bedfellows. Most appealing to Barb are combining painting and guilting, free-motion machine quilting, reverse appliqué, and mixed media art quilts.

Currently, she is preparing a Fall Workshop for the Spinners and Weavers Guild, "Art Journaling for the Fibre-Inclined."