Buttons&Beads&Quilts!

When I first started quilting back in graduate school, I had a traditional quilter as a teacher. I don’t think she quite knew what to make of
some of the designs we were coming up with, but she gave me an excellent foundation for the process. Some of the major don’ts were to never, ever have knots on the back or any wads of thread. I suppose that this criteria would be important if the piece were going on a bed, as the lumps and bumps would be uncomfortable against your skin. Another really important feature of a well-crafted quilt was 10 quilting stitches/inch. By rocking the finger pushing the needle along and pressing against the bottom finger carefully, I was able to obtain maybe 6-8 stitches/inch. So with a few more quilts made, I decided to start showing my work.

Back in the 80s, there were few venues to show quilts besides county fairs and similar sites. Very few art exhibitions accepted fiber art of any kind (women’s work), much less pieces that purported to be art quilts. So, it was quite a surprise when I would get judge’s notes back that said something to the effect of “We love your images, but your backs are too messy”. (This was  back when shows where you paid an entrance fee gave you judges’ comments.Those days quickly passed.) “So, who looks at the back of paintings?”, I thought. I had never seen the back of a painting in a museum, and my pieces were meant to be hung on the wall, too. I quickly learned to “read between the lines” of a show prospectus just as you would a hotel description, i.e, “ocean view” is not the same as “ocean front”. I began to get into more and more shows that treated my work more as an artistic endeavor, and not as to how accurately I could
duplicate machine quilting.

Now, I view the backs of my pieces as statements regarding the creation process. When my own mood is tranquil, then the thread slides in and out easily. When I’m seeking solace from stress in my work, the thread knots and kinks on the back reflect my inner emotional landscape. (Kind of jumpy when you did that part, huh, Nance?” A friend suggested that I could just cover up the backs with another piece of fabric and then hide the “mistakes”, but I prefer to leave them as they are as a testimony to the weeks of work, calm or not, that went into their creation. Besides, while I always sign the backs with a small panel, there are all of those finger pricks, where the DNA in my blood could be used some day to prove that a particular piece is a real Smeltzer.

To see more of my art work, please visit my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com .