While on a cold (and strictly outdoor) visit to Annapolis, I noticed a bunch of large yachts and pleasure craft moored in the harbor. I wanted something that was more representative of the everyday person and these smaller, more personal watercraft seemed to fit the bill. Although I don’t know if I’d call a 75-100 ft yacht ‘small’ by any means, this was the craft that seemed to fit for this work at the time. So, the modern pleasure yacht was included on the initial sketch on the background fabric and the fun part - the fabric pull - began.

Next came construction.  I’ve found that I really like to cut ‘wavy’ and wave-like pieces for the mosaic bit when building an art quilt. And since Sea Storm is all about water, it worked out pretty darned well to cut the fabric into waves!

Given that I work with scrap, one thing I always like to do before I cut is to prepare the fabric.  This means I use interfacing, Steam-a-seam, or something similar to help ‘stabilize’ the fabric and keep the cut edges from fraying.  Since I don’t cut these bits following the warp or the bias, I have to stabilize each piece to keep it from fraying or unraveling. Actually, this is the same reason I do a heavy zig-zag applique stitch after I’ve laid out all the pieces of a work - to keep the fabrics from fraying and because I simply find it aesthetically pleasing.  

The first big challenge I experienced was the whitecaps of the waves.  How could I capture this powerful movement in this work?  At first I tried overlaying a grey-ish fabric with a small line carved out of it to capture the essence of a whitecap falling into itself.  IT. DID. NOT. WORK.  It actually took the work form vibrant with lots of movement to stiff and - frankly - just ugly.  I think I may have called everyone I knew in the hopes that my instincts were wrong.  They agreed with my instincts. lol.  

Left frustrated that the first attempt on the whitecaps didn’t work out, I sat on this piece for quite a while while life happened (I actually moved and that was a great excuse to put Sea Storm away for a wee bit while I let it ferment in my brain). 

When I came back to Sea Storm, it was like a lightbulb moment in my head.  After studying whitecaps in real life and in photos, I realized that it followed the movement of the wave.  So, why cut the scrap fabric for the whitecaps in a different way than the rest of the wave fabrics?  That simply didn’t make sense and was frankly, quite a silly (and wasteful) idea.  So I started cutting the white cap strips to mirror the other pieces.  

Like any good artist, I turned to ‘the masters’ and started looking at images of waves done by famous artists for inspiration.  How did they capture the essence of the movement and power I was also looking for?  What techniques did they use that I could also possibly apply here?  For inspiration, I turned to one of my favorite artists and their most famous woodblock print; Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”.  What really caught my attention with how Hokusai captured the whitecap was the ‘claw-like’ edges and solid white backing of the wave.  It was not unlike what I was trying to achieve but with a fabric mosaic.  In revisiting the great Hokusai’s style, I changed direction again.

Fabric as a medium may be a little more unforgiving in terms of making immediately quick changes directly onto the canvas - unlike paint -  but where I do find fabric to be more forgiving is that as I make directional changes to a work, I can ‘plug-n-play’ different fabrics to see what works and re-adjust as needed.  So, I guess the fact that you can ‘sample’ colors to see what works gives it an advantage over paint.  Pros & cons to both, right?

At this point you are probably going; “Ok, Karen - But what happened to the yacht?” The yacht was yeeted and I nixed it completely.  By the time the waves had come together, I felt the yacht wasn’t needed. To me, the power of the waves says it all.

If you’ve followed my work, you know that I really like to combine different quilting and sewing techniques.  With Sea Storm, after finishing the applique for all the wave pieces, I then added some details and depth to the whitecaps - reminiscent to how Hokusai added color and depth to the “Great Wave” - by using a technique called thread painting.  Using a variety of light gray and light blue threads, I ‘painted’ more tips of the whitecaps within the white fabrics, bringing even more movement and depth to the piece.

After thread painting, I then flipped the work over and cut into the batting to create little pockets and ‘stuffed’ scrap batting into several of the white pieces, raising them up. This stuffing technique is called ‘trapunto’, and allows you to add some 3-D - like elements to a quilt. I felt like this work needed something to make it ‘pop’ and really bring it alive. By combining trapunto and thread painting to the whitecaps, I feel like it really adds to the sense of power and movement of the waves.   After adding depth and dimension using these techniques, the final touch was adding the moon in the upper left corner. 

Obligatory cat supervisor giving his approval photo: