It's Easy Being Green

Pacific Piecemakers Quilt Guild challenges its members each year to produce a quilt to meet a theme, and to exhibit the quilts in an annual show at Gualala Arts Center. The show closed this week. This year's theme, "It's Easy Being Green," spawned 38 quilts whose makers interpreted the theme with surprising variety--from Barbara Wendt's array of green and yellow squares abstractly reminiscent of meadows, to Janet Windsor's large and whimsical skeleton quilt provocatively named "Or Else," to a recycled Japanese rug from which Mary Austin extracted and reconstructed an old Japanese coat that had been used to pad the rug.

My 30"x30" entry, "Crop Rotation," definitely challenged me; I wanted it to utilize methods and materials that consume little generated energy and to represent sustainable agriculture. Last summer, I had visited a small town near Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. There, in San Juan, I met and admired women who dyed fibers outdoors, stirring the strands in pots over open fires, using crushed vegetables and insects for their all-natural dyes. Then they hand wove the fibers on hand-made wooden looms, producing beautiful cloth with a limited palette of subtle colors. I bought the precious fabric and, as soon as I heard the theme of the PPQG challenge, knew that I wanted to use them in this project. I knew I also wanted to do hand-piecing and hand quilting and to find and use some ecological batting. The challenges for me were mostly how to hand-piece without the loosely woven fabric unravelling (also a challenge to my patience); how to achieve a workable design when most of the fabrics were in similar values; and once I thought of the stripes of vegetable-dyed colors as rows of crops, how to convey rotation of crops abstractly.

Here is the artist's statement that ended up hanging with the quilt to explain what I did:

Crop rotation—growing different crops in succession in the same field—is one of the most powerful techniques of sustainable agriculture. Striped blocks represent rows of crops; the circle, rotation. Every fiber of fabric in this piece was first hand dyed in an outdoor vat in Guatemala, using only natural plant and insect dyes, and then hand woven. Blocks were hand-pieced. The Quilters Dream Green batting is made 100% from recycled plastic bottles, a process reported to result in huge reductions of energy consumption, water usage and carbon dioxide.