Autobiography: “Destroy this Quilt”
My quilting practice has changed a lot over the past eighteen months, largely due to the influence of an amazing online quilting community. The Quilty Nook welcomes quilters of all backgrounds to join together, share their stories, and find inspiration. Founded and led by acclaimed quilter Zak Foster, the Nook brings together hundreds of members with virtual sewing circles, creative challenges, and workshops intended to inspire members to push the boundaries of their quilting practice and find new ways of expressing themselves through their craft. I joined the Nook in August of 2023, and my quilting practice has absolutely been challenged through Zak’s creative prompts and the support of this creative community.
I was always interested in minimizing waste in quilting, but I am even more passionate in my commitment to working with repurposed fabric. I am also keener than ever to apply a “craftivism” stance to my quilting to tell stories that need to be heard. Perhaps the biggest influence on my work has been “Destroy this Quilt.”
“Destroy this Quilt” was a Quilty Nook creative challenge that ran through 2024. Twice a month Zak Foster provided a new prompt designed to help the artist “learn to embrace imperfection, trust the creative process, and develop a more experimental approach to quilting.” Each month, one prompt involved adding something to the quilt, and the other involved altering or “destroying” something previously added. It really forced me to let go of envisioning the finished product and focus on the process.
Autobiography - “Destroy this Quilt” 2024
Prompt number 5 was simply “Quilter, what is the shape of your soul.” I knew immediately the answer to this one was “a river.” You will see two rivers along the sides of the quilt. But even with the “soul” prompt behind me, I didn’t grasp until much later in the process the extent to which the quilt that was emerging was autobiographical. Towards the end I became more intentional about selecting autobiographical motifs. You will find a hand with a hole in it shaped like a heart, images of home (stuffed for extra comfort), and an exercise graph that replicates a week on my phone’s step counter, a lot of green vines, and my personal mantra for moving forward regardless of what life throws at you: “Change one thing.”
Sometimes I would fall behind, and then end up scrambling to catch up a few prompts all at once. This sometimes resulted in some unexpected blending of two prompts. My favourite instance of this blending can be found in the upper right corner, where prompt #16 – “What’s something you lost as a child?” – bumped up against prompt #15, which asked us to “rough up” a patch of fabric with something abrasive until it we created a hole.
This juxtaposition of prompts evoked a myriad of losses experienced a child with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis—represented by the damage done to my stomach lining by all the aspirin I had to take in the days before the enteric coating was developed to mitigate the harsh side effects. I tore up a section of fabric with my nail file, I patched it from behind with some fusible interfacing and then decorated it with a cluster of buttons to represent all the pills I had to take as a child.
Autobiography finished at 30” x 40” and was backed with a colourful print I repurposed from ArtsJunktion.
For a quilter like myself who learned to quilt by following patterns, Zak’s influence has been transformative. The quilts that resulted from Destroy this Quilt are much more maximalist in style than the “Modern Quilting” style that I cut my quilting teeth on. But I find the focus on process suits my expression, and I feel I’m just beginning to discover the creative possibilities. Behind the Blue Gown, which I talk about in an earlier blog post, is a project I could not have envisioned prior to my participation in The Nook.
I’m currently in the process of creating a new quilt by working through the prompts with “Destroy this Quilt Reboot.” While the prompts are the same, the quilt that is emerging is very different, and I am continuing to discover new things about myself and my artistic vision.
For more information about The Quilty Nook check out this link. You can also find @zakfoster.quilts and @quiltynook on Instagram.