I started thinking about this quilt ten years ago when I was preparing for my first trip to Gees Bend, Alabama to spend a week with the quilters there. I called my acquaintance Lucy Mingo to go over some details and in the conversation I asked what she was working on.
“I got a piece of yellow domestic I’m quilting on,” she said.
I didn’t know what that was, so I waited until I got there to see. “Yellow domestic” was what I called unbleached muslin, and she had quilted it in her signature style of free- form arcs. It was an all-white quilt—a format usually reserved for the fanciest, showiest form of quilting. We became friends on that trip; I visited her several times, admired her beautiful chickens, shared meals and talked about quilts. I asked her permission to do my own version of her yellow domestic quilt.
Finally, 10 years later, I received this beautiful Japanese blue and white wool ikat from Patricia Belyea and knew I had to do something special with it. When another friend, Kevin Womack, sent me a piece of his hand dyed fabric I got the idea to cut that into bias strips and imitate Lucy’s quilting style with bias strips on the blue and white background. The upper part is pieced of several fabrics, another couple of wools from Patricia and a Marimekko black and white.
After quilting it with lines that followed the design, I went back and quilted in a number of Lucy’s chickens.
The quilt, signed with Joe’s embroidered signature, comes with a four-inch hanging sleeve, Certificate of Authenticity, and a custom cotton bag. Shipping and insurance are free to a domestic US address.
Joe Cunningham is an internationally known quilt artist, writer, teacher and lecturer. His quilts have been shown worldwide and are represented in the collections of major museums. He lives in San Francisco, working in his north light studio.
In the earliest days of American quilt making, a popular technique called broderie perse involved cutting flowers, birds, trees and other design elements from one fabric and aappliquéing them onto a plain background. This allowed a small piece of precious printed fabric to be exploded onto a much larger background.
When I found this piece of 1970’s floral fabric at the bottom I realized I could cut away all the plain fabric above the flowers and replace it with something else, like this Japanese black and gold polka dot, in a process I could call reverse broderie perse.
I was thinking about the hurricane Dorian, then bearing down on us from the Caribbean. That led me to the creation of the storm of black “sticks” blowing across and the cloudy skies above, created with cleaning cloths from a friend’s printing press.
While the clouds are hand quilted with #5 Perle cotton, the rest is quilted with a view of a city, as if seen over a hedge.
The quilt, signed with Joe’s embroidered signature,comes with a four-inch hanging sleeve, Certificate of Authenticity,and a custom cotton bag. Shipping and insurance are free to a domestic US address.
Joe Cunningham is an internationally known quilt artist, writer, teacher and lecturer. His quilts have been shown worldwide and are represented in the collections of major museums. He lives in San Francisco, working in his north light studio.
Having recently read the book of Job in the Bible, I ran across the classic quilt pattern called Job’s Tears, a cute little four-point star often made in sparkling jewel tones. The incongruity of the pattern name—Job is crying because God has killed all his family and livestock, covered his body with boils and cast him out of his land, just to test his faith—with the pattern made me want to make my own version.
I had recently received a box of paint-spattered work clothing from the Chicago Lyric Opera set painting department, and realized this grubby stuff would better convey the atmosphere I sought. Along with some paint-spattered jeans from Pamela Belyea and Gary Faigin of Seattle, and some hand-dyed fabric for a lightning bolt from John Cardin, these work clothes and drop cloths gave me just the mood I was after.
In doing research about tears, I learned that tears of different origins have different chemical compositions and form different crystalline patterns when dried. So I programmed my quilting machine with an imagined crystalline pattern formed with broken bits of the classic four pointed star.
The quilt, signed by Joe in the quilt stitching, comes with a four-inch hanging sleeve, Certificate of Authenticity,and a custom cotton bag. Shipping and insurance are free to a domestic US address.
Joe Cunningham is an internationally known quilt artist, writer, teacher and lecturer. His quilts have been shown worldwide and are represented in the collections of major museums. He lives in San Francisco, working in his north light studio.
From my series of quilts based on traditional patterns, this one takes its name from the classic 8-pointed star composed of many diamonds. I wanted to make my own version that would look more like the fuzzy stars I see with my astigmatic eyes. The innumerable bias strips on the hand-dyed background fabric still seemed to call for something else, so I added some yellow rickrack to pump up the energy a bit.
I hand quilted this with white quilting thread to imitate the crisscrossing rays of the various types and sources that flow all around our universe. Hand quilting in an old-fashioned frame is still one of the great pleasures of my life, even though I quilt nearly everything today on my robotic quilting machine.
The quilt, signed by Joe in the quilt stitching, comes with a four-inch hanging sleeve, Certificate of Authenticity,and a custom cotton bag. Shipping and insurance are free to a domestic US address.
Joe Cunningham is an internationally known quilt artist, writer, teacher and lecturer. His quilts have been shown worldwide and are represented in the collections of major museums. He lives in San Francisco, working in his north light studio.
From my series of quilts based on traditional quilt pattern names, New York Beauty is a magnified set of the spiky points of which the original pattern is composed. Instead of a grid work where each square contains four spiky arcs, this version has only one set, and these are cut and sewn freehand.
My idea was to simply use these highly contrasting fabrics to create the curved line down the middle, but as I worked I saw that I could incorporate the black and white dotted fabric as well, and then add the black and white bias strips for even more visual interest.
Years later I heard one of my students explain to another, “Yes, of course it’s New York, you can see the Chrysler building in the spikes, Central Park on the left, the chaos of the streets on the right—it all fits!”
The freemotion quilting took weeks, as I had to follow each shape and create a little floral detail in every one.
The quilt, signed by Joe in the lower right corner of the quilting, comes with a four-inch hanging sleeve, Certificate of Authenticity, and a custom cotton bag. Shipping and insurance are free to a domestic US address.
Joe Cunningham is an internationally known quilt artist, writer, teacher and lecturer. His quilts have been shown worldwide and are represented in the collections of major museums. He lives in San Francisco, working in his north light studio.
