Bermuda Rectangle

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.