Design Concept

The theme of this quilt is flight; not birds or airplanes, but the feeling of being in flight. The design began with the left-over scraps from another "flight" quilt called Migration #1. The narrow, triangular strips were the irregular edges of the seam allowances in the string pieced Migration quilt. These strips were arranged on a base of fleece, along with various colored threads, in patterns that seemed to dance in air. The resulting composition was stitched with many different colors of thread and then placed on a background of blue fabric, wool batting and a backing fabric. Free motion quilting integrated the stitched center with the blue border.
Life in the Margins 4 is part of a series of machine embroidered quilts in which I am trying to capture the spontaneity of a doodle. Since doodles often filled the margins of my school notebooks when I was growing up, I call the series "Life in the Margins."

Exhibitions:

• The Artist Works Gallery, Naperville, IL 1990-91
• Excellence of excellences: New Wave Quilts, 1991 Brea, CA and Japan
• Celebrating the Stitch, Textile Arts Center, Chicago, IL and three year traveling exhibition, premiering at the Newton Arts Center, Newtonville, MA

Publications

• New Wave Quilts, Exhibition Catalog, Japanese language only