erin.duane@gmail.com napa, California, United States
I’ve always collected selvedges because of their visual interest and potential reuse, but as a librarian I’ve also saved selvedges for their informational and historic purposes. The idea to create a composition using this fabric-metadata instead of fabric itself struck me as appropriate for a maximalist composition. It felt “extra” to treat these semi- superfluous strips as fabric with values, lines, and shapes: isolating the color marks from text, separating simple and complex, and interweaving “high” and “low” prints (novelty, designer, premium, fashion, vintage, and otherwise) indiscriminately. It also felt entertaining to incorporate selvedges with “rules” in a completely new way (“not suitable for use in children’s sleepwear” and “intended solely for non-commercial use”). This quilt contains selvedges I’ve saved for over a decade, elevating and utilizing every last square inch of these fabric imposters in a kind of quilty hide and seek.
