The initial inspiration for my quilt came from the idea of explorers such as Columbus and Cook traversing vast oceans before glimpsing a thin strip of land on the horizon. The ‘land’ is a hand printed batik from the African Fabric Shop. My ‘ocean’ was created using arashi shibori (a traditional indigo dyeing method from Japan) for the front and back of the quilt. Rather than wrapping the fabric around a length of drain pipe, I used a technique learnt from Janice Gunner.
I stitched the fabric into a tube a fraction bigger than the exact diameter of the pipe. The fabric then slides on to the pipe and can be scrunched up to create the resist before the pipe is dipped in the dye bath. The advantage of this method is it creates interesting marks around the stitched lines. I turned the front arashi strip ‘sides to middle’ so that the marks look like surf at the edge of the shore. This was particularly appropriate as I had used old cotton sheets for the dyeing! I machine quilted the ocean and land, and added seed stitching by hand to soften the boundary between each.
