do you know these challenges on instagram that go like "post x images throughout the next x days and tag someone who is next"? if you are on instagram, i'm sure you do; everyone seems to get tagged eventually to play along.
usually i decline politely. recently though i was tagged for a "5 day artist challenge" and as usually, i would have declined, were it not for the wonderful claire voelkel-sedlmeir and her kind invitation to join in and play. i like claire's work a lot and how she approaches creating and creativity, and also how she opened up the idea of using the challenge to document my process and my working days. instead of trying everyday to "produce" something that would be presentable, i chose to document my days, how i collect things i might use for ideas or inspiration, but also the days that lack any kind of creative work, because taxes or paperwork or admin have to be done.
day two was one of those day - i had to do my accounting, and after staring at my laptop for a whole day on my way home i realised that i hadn't taken 5 photos yet; and that the underground wasn't working and we were stuck at u3 volkstheater. i started snapping a few images to bide my time, one of them of the platform's floor tiles - it's this one:
i posted it on instagram, and claire commented: "what a fun quilt that would make."
that idea stuck and i worked on creating a quilted version of the platform floor; not an exact copy, but aiming to incorporate the structures, colours and textures.
in my head it needed to be a tiny quilt; the end version was much larger than my tiny quilts usually are, but i allowed the materials and the idea to find their size and trusted the process.
this is how the finished quilt looks like:
top:
back:
and hung on our studio wall:
the top is hand pieced with linen and cotton (yellow) fabric; the back is linen; two layers of cotton batting; hand quilted with soie d'alger silk thread by au ver à soie.
dimensions: 29 x 69 cm