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In the early 2000s I made a series of quilts with lots of paper-pieced spikes in curving templates. The spikes were made from hand-dyed color gradations. Each time I sewed a seam, I had to trim off a triangular seam allowance. Rather than throw these in the trash, I arranged them on a background of black fabric. They ended up making a spiraling pattern. I couldn’t figure out what to do from there, so the arrangement ended up with other UFOs in a box labeled “beginnings”. The box moved with me, first to Paducah, Kentucky, and then to Port Townsend, Washington, where I live now. In 2023, our Peninsula Fiber Artists group did an exchange of unfinished project and challenged each other to finish our UFOs. I donated several pieces, but still thought I might do something with this one.
Meanwhile, I do all my machine quilting on a modified industrial machine with a rather complicated thread path. I change thread color frequently when I am quilting, and rather than taking the time to lead each new thread through the whole path, I tie each new thread to the end of the previous thread and pull the new thread through the whole thread path. I cut off the 2-3 feet of old thread, then I just need to thread the needle. I keep a trash can next to my machine where I drop the ends of the old threads.
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At the end of a quilt or two, I have a gorgeous pile of thread trash in many colors. I have saved this thread trash for several years, and finally got the idea of using it to finish my spiral of seam allowances. I spread it around the outside border of the spiral and used another bunch in the center. In order to stitch over all that thread mess, without tangling the darning foot on my machine, I covered the whole thing with black tulle.
I quilted the whole composition in looping and spiraling patterns with many different colors of thread and finished it with a black binding. When it came time to choose a title, I thought the center spiral looked a bit like the action of a blender. Puree, of course is one of the choices on most blenders. I was thinking of calling my quilt Thread Trash Puree, and then I remembered that one of the many different threads I use in my quilts is a brand called Polyneon, made by Madeira. My love of alliteration took over and the title became Polyneon Puree. |
