Patchwork Diaries

While I was working on the passages project, I ended up with a great many disappointing watercolor paintings. Because the paper is so expensive, I couldn’t bear to throw any of them away, so I saved them in a special pile to be repurposed “someday.”

I often do this in my everyday life, too. I save fabrics and old items to mend, decorate, or transform into something new. Since the watercolor paper I use is 100% cotton, it was an easy leap to turn those failed paintings into “quilted” skies.

At first, my plan was to tear the paintings into cloud shapes. But watercolor paper—especially cotton paper—is prepared in a way that makes tearing even less predictable than I expected. So I went on the hunt for geometric die punches. I assumed that, with all the scrapbook enthusiasts out there, finding them would be easy. Instead, the only useful shapes I could find were squares and circles. The only triangle punch I found was equilateral, which worked well enough for hexagons but not much else.

For the triangles I needed, I had to cut them by hand, then do a bit of math to make sure everything fit together into squares. After that, I cut strips of varying widths and got to work using traditional quilt block patterns from an old book called The Perfect Patchwork Primer.

These are deeply satisfying to make, but achieving the precise cuts by hand is extremely difficult. I have a few ideas for improving the accuracy, but I’ll need some dedicated time and space to explore them.