Before we dive into this week’s guest post, I want to give a quick shout out to CJ Hosack, author of my January guest post. Her book, The Slayer’s Magic, is out TODAY. You can buy it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or order it from your favorite indie shop!
Now – today’s guest post’s a real treat, with an inside look at a creative process that brings new ways of thinking to an older art form. Lyn’s also a writer, which you can definitely see from how she describes her approach. And, as is becoming habitual – more photos at the end! With one exception, credit below, all photos and quilts are Lyn’s work.
I make quilts. A ’70s revival of the craft pulled me in. I learned the rules. I practiced. I became skilled at traditional quilting. But I’m a rebel now. I ignore the rules. I make art.
Modern quilters take advantage of limitless possibilities to create art with fabric. Some pieces rival photography in rendering realistic images. Others, meticulously planned or wildly improvisational, reflect intriguing interpretations and abstractions. My work is improvisational. “Improv” quilting is like unrehearsed comedy or pantsing through a novel; kind of whacky, curiously elusive, potentially more authentic in inexplicable ways than a scripted performance.
When I write, I’m seldom brave enough to follow a trail to find out what will happen in a story. I always know where I’m going before I put the first words into sentences. With fabric, I tend to plunge in blind. But in any creative endeavor, there’s always that first thought, an insight pulled out of the ordinary, a pin prick of an idea. What’s this about? What am I trying to say?
Where do ideas come from–what ignites them? Songwriter Billy Joel says it’s the music first. Lyrics and meaning come later. For me, it’s color first. Shapes and structure come later. I stay in the present, respond in the moment; yet it’s a thoughtful process. A beginning–colors. A middle–play. An end–the only requirement to be considered a quilt … stitching layers together.
Every piece I make is different, but if you were to sort the fabric in my scrap bin, you’d discover a collection of colors that say a lot about my love of nature. The quilt I share with you now is a medley of muted greens and muddy blues, ochre and pale yellow and alizarine crimson. Hand-dyed solid-colored fabrics reminiscent of mossy grass, red clay, dirt, and sunshine, tied together in a bundle of 18×22-inch cuts called fat quarters. Before I conceived of the quilt I would eventually make, I found the colors.
That’s how it started.
A bundle of curated fat quarters is like a flight of wines, small tastes especially selected to go together. Working with “fats” limited my design options. My brain sat on the bundles; I slept on the thought of them, touched and unfurled and tossed them in the air. I decided to make the most of my smallish pieces of fabric by making a pile of strips cut “wonky” (a quilter’s word for uneven widths and lengths).
I considered using wonky strips to make a sort of plaid. I sketched a design made of wavy lines that echoed one another. Nothing grabbed me. I realized I was trying too hard to plan the design. I refocused; what did I want to say? My earthy colors and a blue that looked like water swirled with silt suggested a hike by a lazy river. That made me think of the quilters of Gee’s Bend; their simple but striking designs. The fabrics in those quilts are scraps. It was all they had to work with. Use what you have. What would a Gee’s Bend style quilt look like in these colors?
And that was it! I knew what I wanted to do.
Gee’s Bend is a small community that is tucked, as the name suggests, into a bend in a river. Descendants of enslaved people live on an isolated peninsula created by a meander of the slow-moving Alabama River. The women who live there have made folk-art quilts of astounding unrefined beauty for generations; I like to think no-rules-quilting originated in Gee’s Bend. Their quilts were discovered during the civil rights era, and in 2002 curated into a museum collection that toured the world. I first visited that exhibition at the DeYoung in San Francisco, and again years later, at the Denver Art Museum. The images never left me. I wanted my design to honor the style and voice of these quilters. I named it before it was even started: Homage to Gee’s Bend
Why an idea sprouts into art is still a mystery to me. It’s not predictable. When I have a handful of color sweeping me away, ideas fly in out of nowhere. I don’t search for fabric to match an idea. I love the fabric first, like a box of untouched exquisite pastels or a gift of fresh vibrant spices; I want to draw, I want to cook, I want to sew.
I consulted images of Gee’s Bend quilts, studying the piecing and the impact of unplanned combinations of color, texture, and shape. The designs are made up of basic strip-pieced patterns or blocks. Some whole bed quilts are simply one giant block. Because of the constraints of working with smaller pieces of fabric, my quilt would need to be blocks made of short strips rather than longer or larger shapes. Blocks are joined together in rows and usually arranged on a grid; six- eight- or twelve-inch blocks, three across and four down is a common configuration. But that’s really traditional. I like different. I ignored typical block sizes. My longest strips would be 18 or 20 inches so I started by building a bigger block. I primed my creative pump by roughly copying an example of a Gee’s Bend bed size quilt that is essentially one huge block. Below you can compare a picture of the whole quilt, on the left and my smaller block interpretation, on the right. It’s different, but the similarity is there.
I loved that first block and began making more. These would be joined in a three by four grid with straight seams. The grid is part of the design in most quilts, BUT I didn’t want those lines to speak as an element. That suggested the possibility of making blocks reflecting the Gee’s Bend aesthetic, slicing them into pieces and recombining to form new images, so the squareness of each block is lost … I wanted a symphony instead of a group of solo block performances.
Every block was a work of art. I put them on a design wall, arranged, rearranged, and added more until it became a cohesive whole. Something didn’t look right. The grid behind the construction was still singing quietly. On a whim, I separated and offset rows, and that helped. It meant inserting something that would create the separation. I laid a strip of plain solid “sashing” between the rows. A new grid emerged, even more prominently. Nope! I decided to put four blocks into what quilters call a four patch, separated from a pair of two blocks with a strip of much smaller blocks in a similar pattern. Check out the picture. Can you see those columns?
This changed things on the top half of the quilt. I mirrored that construction in the bottom half. Two vertical columns made of mini-blocks became a design element. Our brains work to make sense of designs; direction, spacing, lines. Such elements lead the eye around a piece. My small block strips worked! Left to right, top to bottom. The viewer’s eye travels with the design.
If this reads like word salad, I apologize. It’s hard to put the nuances of improvisation into words. This piece was not constructed according to a plan. It was created spontaneously. It feels like my hike on the banks of a river, but it depicts nothing. It is itself. A pattern to copy the design would be impossibly complicated. I respond in the moment to ideas dredged up by my muse, who takes note of myriad things every single hour and remembers details that, given the slightest excuse, like a beautiful bundle of fabulous fat quarters, might ignite at any moment.
Lyn’s McCarty is a maker from way back. Among her first creations, Star Trek fan-fiction and Barbie fashions. Who knew what that full circle would look like? Sci-Fi is hotter than ever and if she still sewed skinny dresses from scraps of fabric, they’d have a following in 2024! She kept branching out, attracted by anything new; macrame, sculpting, beading, painting, and if you can imagine it–creative wallpapering. After crocheting her way through high school she took her bare feet and ripped jeans to university and earned a BA in History, a Masters in Special Education, and credentials licensing her as a teacher, behavioral specialist, and administrator. She leaned hard into quilting and writing as ways to explore and express her passion for engaging with people. Her art and stories reveal an abiding affection for the exceptional gifts and challenges that make each of us unique. She and her husband live in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, their three children grown and young dogs at their heels, hiking the hills, rock-hounding the rivers, searching shells on windy winter beaches, and making.
Lyn’s quilt, Homage to Gee’s Bend, is included in the Geometric Expressions Virtual Gallery, which is a juried art exhibit online, with 42 quilts selected from a global call for submissions.
For more information about the Gees Bend quilts that Lyn used as her inspiration, please visit the website of Souls Grown Deep, this piece by the National Endowment for the Arts, or the website of the Gees Bend Quilting Collective.
More of Lyn’s quilts:
