I am a hobby quilter. I struggle to think of myself as an artist. I know a lot of quilt artists and they are amazing people. I was sitting with my coffee not too long ago (ok it was probably a couple of years ago but anyway) and was thinking about famous painters. They developed a personal style. They painted the same subject matter multiple times. Think about Monet and his water lilies. They had phases where their paintings followed a theme. Think about Picasso and his Blue Period. This is the sort of thing that defined being an artist for me.

I look at my quilting. I make a specific pattern one time and I’m done. I’m always on to the next great thing. The first 20 years of my quilting, there was no pattern. There was no driving subject matter. Then 13 years ago there started to be a subtle shift in how I work.

For a start I was designing patterns and needed shop samples. That meant if I made a design, I was going to make that quilt a lot of times. Not just once. Some of the designs I liked a lot and really enjoyed making it multiple times. Other patterns it was a chore to do it it several times. The only problem with this was that I had to make the samples exactly like the pattern. If I made it multiple times and I wanted to tweak the design, that would mean changing the pattern. I look back on the designs that I can make over and over vs the ones I only made a couple of times.

I look at the other work that I’m doing. Last week I talked about project vs process. I’m seeing that the quilts that I make multiple times, have a process element that I really enjoy, so that pulls me towards making that pattern multiple times. I’m not publishing patterns anymore (that’s a long post for another day), so I’m free to work on whatever catches my eye, and if I want to repeat myself, tweaking things a little bit each time, I have no barriers to doing that. So I can stay on a design element as long as I find it fascinating.

Lately things have been getting smaller. Smaller pieces. Smaller blocks. I still like big quilts so that means a lot more piecing and a lot more blocks but that’s ok. I guess as an artist, I’m entering my Small Period. I’m also doing a lot with half square triangles. Can’t get enough of them. So maybe this is my Triangle Period. I’m digging deeper and deeper into what I can do with a shape and what it can become. In both of these areas it’s all about the scrappy. More scrappy is better. If not 10 fabrics, how about 100 different fabrics in a quilt. This is definitely my Scrappy Period. I like the juxtaposition of the repetition in the small blocks with the randomness of having 100 fabrics in a quilt. This is a whole new direction for me, discovering that even though I can’t draw at all, maybe there is an artist deep inside of me.