Polka Dot Series

The first quilt in my ongoing series exploring polka dots was inspired by Mary Mashuta's "Lotsa Dots" workshop. I redrafted the pattern to allow the arcs to connect and thus form continuous patterns. Number one in black and white led inevitably to exploring what the polka dot can do. The fabrics are commercial prints, plus silkscreened, overdyed, fused, embroidered, embellished with buttons and/or using fabric markers -- anything to get the colors and size of dots I need. I project a series of at least 50 dot quilts before I begin to exhaust possibilities. Fortunately, friends now bring me anything vaguely textile-y with dots that they find in dumpsters--besides fabrics, I've also acquired polka dot plastic, chiffon, rubber, terrycloth, and lamé--all of which will probably end up in a dot quilt. I see the series like Dr. Seuss's The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, each an advance on the previous one, growing more and more fabulous.
	Hot Spot, 2001 - 38" x 45" + 6" fringes My challenge to myself was to combine the black and white dot fabrics I had been collecting for a decade in a coherent and merry piece. The wooden balls seemed a natural extension of the dots, tumbling off the surface. I had to buy plain wooden balls, drill out the hole, and paint them. I thought the knot at the end of the thong would hold the balls firmly in place until a visiting child admired the piece and pulled one off. They are now firmly sewn in place with clear filament thread.
	Sun Spot, 2003 - 38" x 45" + 10" bottom extension Again, much overdyeing and silkscreening to produce yellow and black dots. I had planned to liberally decorate this piece with yellow and black wooden balls, but in the end decided that two would do.
	Ball One, 2003 - 38" x 45" + 8" fringes A collection of French quilts at the Pacific International Quilt Exposition liberated me forever from conceiving of quilts as flat, rectangular, or uninterrupted. ("Ball Two" and "Ball Three" are already sketched, awaiting construction.) Obviously, fabric stores do not stock a dozen red fabrics with different sized black dots and a dozen black fabrics with different sized red dots, so I again had to "make fabric." I did this partly by overdyeing black and white dots, but principally by creating a set of 24 silkscreens with different sized dots which I am using for most of the fabrics in my subsequent dot quilts. Again, some dots are fused and some are embellished buttons.
	Night Spot, 2003 - 38" x 45" + 5" fringe The final addition to the black-plus-color series. I am now working on multicolored versions, one major piece twice as large, plus some smaller "studies." (The nice thing about focusing totally on one kind of fabric like polka dots is that everyone now brings me anything they find with dots. I am accumulating an fabulous collection of contemporary, imported, and antique fabrics. This week, someone even brought me polka dot Kleenex!)
	Dot Dot Dot, 2004 - 22 wide x 27” high. A “break-out” study using primarily reject fabrics that I had tried to dye red with Procion dyes for a different quilt. They insisted on coming out 1940’s Dubarry pink, probably due to some poly content, dictating their destiny in a different quilt.
Going Dotty I, 2004 - 45" wide x 30" high + 16" extension (46" high). The sixth quilt in my ongoing series exploring polka dots, using mainly commercial fabrics (some overdyed), plus button embellishments.
Going Dotty II, 2004 - 45" wide x 31" high + 11" extension (42" high) A companion to Going Dotty I and the seventh quilt in my ongoing polka dot series, it reverses the use of color/black & white, but not in a mirror image.