In a previous post I mentioned Ruby Short McKim and her book "One Hundred and One Patchwork Patterns." I was intrigued when I first meandered through the book and noticed the patterns she developed from floral inspiration, her "Poppy" design among them.  I liked that a stylized geometry could effectively represent natural forms more typically rendered in fabric using appliqué or embroidery techniques, and sometimes both.

The Christmas cactus plant that was a longtime resident of my Somerset studios – it bloomed annually and nearly on schedule over the course of some 25 years – struck me as perfectly suited to being rendered in fabric. There was already a kind of geometry in the way the plant was articulated, so figuring out how to define its parts and how to configure them to suggest the leaves' draping habit were the design challenges. The sheen of the satin acetate pieces against the matte calicos and the light-absorbent cotton velveteen created a bit more visual complexity, so there's a lot going on in an area just a bit larger than a square meter. 

This one was machine-pieced, an easier proposition for my big fingers given the small size of many of the pieces, and minimally hand-quilted. Finished in 1978, the quilt went relatively quickly into a private collection, where it remains to this day. It sold for what I thought at the time was a fair price, $350.00, or about $1673 today, probably still reasonable as a career starter but I'd like to think that on the resale market it might bring at least twice that. Unfortunately, studio craft market values haven't increased as much as we'd like to think they should have over the last fifty years, the dearth of collectors of studio craft (and of studio quilts) one of the reasons. More on the market for work like this in a future post.

In these final days of what's been a difficult year nationally and internationally, here's hoping the next one is somehow an improvement all around. Fingers crossed...