One of my favorite teachers at Woodstock School was Kathleen Forance, our art teacher. I had long been as much of an artist as I could manage , mostly drawing and coloring. Kathleen got me into textile arts: embroidery, batik, weaving.
My first experiments in embroidery included small scenes from my own life (or my imagined life). In perhaps the very first, I showed myself in bed under a multicolored quilt. That was my inspiration to make a quilt.
Throughout high school and into college I made crazy-quilt blocks, most of them decorated with scenes I’d embroidered myself or commercially embroidered patches, all representing key memories and things that were important to me at the time. I had access to wonderful fabric scraps, ranging from my dad’s 1960’s loud wide ties in Thai silk, to printed and ikat fabrics from India, printed cottons from Thailand and Indonesia, and more. Other Woodstockers of my vintage will recognize some of the fabrics that our clothing was made from, by the tailors in the bazaar — there was little ready-made clothing available in Mussoorie at the time.
In 1989, while on a visit to Texas with my infant daughter, I used my cousin’s sewing machine to put the blocks together, framed in black velvet. The whole thing was a bit narrow to actually use as a bedcover. My mother gave me a selection of Japanese printed fabrics, which I stitched together to add borders on each side (I’ve only actually got one sewed on so far).
