I’ve been interested in photography for a long time. I took art photography classes in high school and learned to develop my own black and white film (dating myself a bit, here!) and use darkroom techniques to get the images I wanted. When I joined the Peace Corps in 1998, the thing I most wanted to take with me from the U.S. was photos – mostly those that I took around home and on two major road trips from east coast to west coast and back again, stopping at national parks. Landscape photography has always drawn me in. With film, it was more difficult because I didn’t have the attention span or the patience to deeply learn the ins and outs of camera work. With digital photography, I was set free – to experiment, to learn, to get immediate feedback on what was going right and what was going wrong, and to get the images I wanted no matter how many takes it took to get me there.
I got my first DSLR in 2010, when I lived outside of Charlottesville, VA, within sight of Shenandoah National Park. Since then, I’ve taken DSLRs and other digital cameras on multi-state road trips, international vacations, and short jaunts around the corner or into the backyard. I’ve experimented with sports photography, night photography, and nature photography in addition to landscape photography, but it’s the landscapes that always have seemed to be the default for me.
Quilting is a newer venture. I taught myself to quilt in the fall of 2008, when I was seriously underemployed and had moved literally across the country for the guy I was dating at the time. I knew few people beyond my boyfriend and his grad school classmates, who, as PhD students, spent more time in the lab than out of it. I was, in short, bored. My mother’s old Singer sewing machine, a workhorse that was older than I was, had made the journey across the U.S., so I relearned how to use it and found a local fabric store and a book to learn from. Some of the projects from that year – placemats, a table runner, a couple of small blankets – can still be found in my linen closet.
My quilting skills can best be described as “better done than perfect.” I use my seam ripper as little as possible. I was recently, at age 51, diagnosed with ADHD, and my ADHD traits are clearly manifested in my quilting:
- I start far more projects than I finish.
- I get grandiose ideas but have absolutely zero follow-through, so few of them ever get realized.
- I get bored and wander off if I have to do the same thing over and over again.
I will never be one of those quilters who does intricate portraits or who can work with tiny blocks to create stunning works of art. I want my quilting to be simple and quick. The quicker it moves, the more likely it is to get done. All of the larger quilts in my collection took me years to finish, and each one was put away at least once for over a year when I got bored or frustrated and couldn’t look at it anymore.
When I was teaching, I had little time for quilting, or any of my other hobbies for that matter. Oh, I brought my crocheting to faculty meetings to occupy half of my brain while the other half took in the important stuff for work, but to dedicate an hour or two or five to putting together a quilt top was largely beyond me. So when I stopped teaching in 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, and got a job in the corporate world that really was only 40 hours per week, I decided that it was time to break out the hobbies again. Quilting was one of them; photography was another.
In 2014, I made a small quilt for my grandmother for Christmas. It was my first venture into using photographs in a quilt. We’d done an extended family photo session in the fall of that year, so I used some of the photos of us in a quilt pattern I found in a book called Panel Play. The quilt was little more than a lap quilt – it was meant for Grandma, at age 98, to take it with her when she was going to spend a few weeks in a nursing home while my aunt, normally her caretaker, was recovering from surgery.
From there, the idea of using some of my own landscape photographs in quilts was born. Yes, I do still print some of them out on fabric – more about that later – to incorporate them into larger quilts. But the ideas are starting to expand out into other ways of turning what I produce with a camera into something that I create with fabric. There are three finished quilts (including Grandma’s), and about ten more planned in various formats – some with printing, some with thread painting, some using fabric to imitate the image, some using the image as inspiration for a color scheme or maybe something else. There are plans – well, actually mostly vague ideas right now – to try to figure out how to bring the beauty of some of my night photography – the aurora borealis and the Milky Way, specifically – to quilt form. What might any of this look like? Join me as I figure it out!
