Overall Geometry
The first patchwork I made was inspired by a piece in the 2012 Gees Bend exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. There was one work – no image of which I can now trace – that combined old work clothes and denim overalls into a powerful abstraction in which trouser shapes were still visible. On the spot I resolved to upcycle the family’s blue jeans into my first quilt.
More recently I’d been considering how to re-upholster an Edwardian barrel back porter’s chair; a family thing. For a couple of years I had fixated on Malabar stripes, until I realised that my template for tessellating irregular pentagons was the ideal size for repurposing denim that had exhausted its useful life as the legs of jeans. I remembered the satisfaction of sewing something as solid as denim, and the pleasure of watching the indigo variegation develop, a blue narrative enriched with shroud-like loin creases and the ghosts of phones, wallets and keys.
Believe it or not, this chair took more than 18 pairs of adult jeans, cut up and re-pieced in five-sided shapes. Thank you to the friends who donated when I ran though my own hoard; and thanks to Neil Riley, the upholsterer on Blackstock Road, N5, not only for being up for this unusual job, but for accomplishing it superbly.
Anyone remember the Volkswagen Jeans Beetle of 1974? It might just be the gold topstitching, but I think we have a bit of that vibe here.
Blocks and Stripes Workclothes Quilt by Lucy Mooney c. 1935, published in The Quilts of Gees Bend, Tinwood Books 2002
My first patchwork quilt; about 2012
