Torn Tree

I began designing this quilt just a few days after my son was born in 2007, but it took more than a year for me to be able to finish it.

When I had my son, my body tore and this tear seemed to symbolize everything I felt about my life and myself at that time. I felt that I had been physically pulled apart and put back together again, but that my seams didn't fit. I was also scared out of my wits because until my son arrived, I never really understood what having a baby was all about.

Becoming a new mother is such a weird and unexpected experience. I'm not referring to the act of birth itself, but the feeling of guardianship over another human being. I had always thought that my parents were always the way they were, even before they had me, but now I understood what it was like to both be myself, but now be something totally different: the mother of someone else.

This quilt helped me work through this time. In the spring of 2008 when I looked at this design I knew I was ready to make this quilt. I jerked the design off the wall and sketched it on a piece of plain, white muslin. I then took scraps of brown fabrics in all different colors and laid them over the design, crazily stitching them down with no regard for the rules or rights of quilting.

Once complete, I almost felt like chucking the whole thing in the trash. It was so alien from anything I had ever created. It was certainly out of my safety zone!

But I stuck with it. Using a walking foot, I satin stitched around the edge of the tree, giving it more definition and less chaos. One layer of batting was my only stabilizer and I was very careful not to stitch too heavily in any one area.

I then laid the fabric on my table and painted the background black and sprinkled salt in the tree branches to react with the paint to create interesting effects as the paint dried.

The bottom part was painted later, and the place where the two paints mixed gave the quilt a very neat effect, almost like the haze that sits over the ground when it's raining very hard.

Quilting this piece was an adventure as well. It was so much fun to just let go and allow myself to create without judging it constantly, without letting the fear get in my way and stop me from finishing it.

Once the top was finished, I sandwiched and quilted the entire black background piece seperately. Who ever said that quilts can only be 3 layers?

I then satin stitched the top, painted portion to the black background. This piece would hang terribly if I had tried to sandwich it like normal, but with a plainly stitched background to secure it, it hangs perfectly.

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