Chocolate, Cocaine, and Textile Art

I'm excited to share this, but I had to wait to post it until this evening -- the opening night of the "I Love Chocolate" exhibit at Gualala Arts Center, where the piece is now hanging.

I designed this second quilt in my Under the Microscope series after seeing photographs of drinks, drugs, and endorphins under the microscope.  I really wanted to find a photo of dark chocolate under the microscope, since that’s my pick-me-up of choice.  But when I saw something like this on Florida State University’s Molecular Expressions website -- cocaine under a microscope -- I just knew I wanted to interpret it in fabric. 

It’s such a beautiful part of the mystery of creation that something that might appear as a white powder (I’ve never seen cocaine myself!) could be so strikingly bold and colorful at the cellular level. 

Of course, I took a few liberties, using hand-dyed and dye-painted fabrics (mine and others’), playing with the quilting lines, and even stitching some thread scraps on as embellishments in a few places. The endorphin connection seemed enough to qualify the subject matter for the Chocolate Challenge, and I appliquéd on a "bar" of the commercial chocolate-colored challenge fabric. However, since the other fabrics are not commercial prints, that appliquéd piece is only temporary and is not shown here. 

The first in this series was my "Tequila Sunrise," featured in my post on January 6, 2010.

"Bring On the Endorphins!" will also be exhibited at Voices in Cloth at the Oakland Convention Center, April 10 and 11, 2010.  Come see it and me!  I'll be white gloving at this East Bay Heritage Quilters show on Sunday, April 11th.