The Lumberjack Plays the Piano

The Lumberjack Plays the Piano

Hand dyed, hand stamped and commercial cottons, machine pieced, machine quilted. 40x37” 1994

As I recall, I had started holding classes at my house and was teaching improvisational piecing, and some elementary surface design class, like stamping. I made a stamp from Styrofoam and printed the red border and the thick and thin black on white. I think I used a ink syringe to do the skinny black on white lines below the diagonal piecing. There were also some commercial black and white prints in the mix too. At the time I was using a lot of prints, as it was suggested that if I used only hand dyed fabrics my classes wouldn’t appeal to the average quilter.

The quilting is mostly stitch in the ditch and some curly outline quilting around the shapes in the dyed parts. And it has a real binding!

In those days it was quite a leap for me to be just piecing and assembling a quilt randomly like this.