Reclamation Project

Do you have old works that you no longer want on display? Or something more recent that just didn't work very well and is never going to get out of the closet? What do you do with them?

I have two pieces that I made last year that I think are so, well, awful, that I've never displayed them. I've pulled them out occasionally to think about what I could do to redeem them but never came up with anything that would improve them. Then I got this book The Painted Quilt by Laura and Linda Kemshall. It has a wealth of ideas about adding or subtracting color to a piece after the quilting has been done. Ah-ha! I have something already quilted that is a perfect candidate for trying out these processes. It's a lot of work to quilt something up just to try out some new techniques, especially when they might take a little practice to perfect. But it doesn't take much time at all to cut up some old work into squares and stitch around the edges. Now I have more than a dozen one foot squares, plus some smaller pieces, to play with these new techniques.


Some of the processes involve removing color with bleach or thiox but my practice pieces are pale yellow and pink (part of the problem) and removing color isn't going to remove very much. But I will still try it, what have I got to lose?