Bursts are best

"Wild", "groovy".

Those are the words my Facebook friends have used for this quilt. And I'll take them!

I started it a year and a half ago when I came back from a Japan quilt trip. Indigo is still the prevalent color in textiles there, and authentic indigo dyers still practice their art (it requires a carefully controlled fermentation process.) So, my foster daughter's cut-off jeans appealed to me immediately.

I paired them with the green fabric, which I had bought in Japan. It is a heavier weight fabric than calico. I had been searching for the "Tomato" fabric store, but there are four or five different outlets in the garment district of Tokyo, and the garment district of Tokyo is a bit seedy, and I was being guided by a man on a bicycle who first led me to an "afternoon delight" house!, SO--long story short--I took what I could get (and scolded the heck out of my "guide").

The orange butterfly batik fabric came from my friend Sally's daughter, Sophia, who had a fundraiser to sell fabric from Ghana. Hey, that's way better than magazine subscriptions! But however was I going to use it??

The inspiration came from the Silver Temple of Kyoto, a deliciously mossy, mind-emptying place. Just a couple of images:

But that special feeling I felt there couldn't sustain me through the frustration of composition (I got too ambitious), so I put it aside ... for 20 months.

Finally, after realizing I was going through severe sewing withdrawal, and as a reward for packing up a lot of my sewing room for the move, I dove in and finished the piece in 3 hours.

As my friend said, "bursts are best."