I’m 3 for 3 visiting the UK with a completed quilt-top and quilting the dang thing while there to then dump it on someone as a gift. This one went to I, P and N. It has no theme except pink and green. I just wanted to use up scraps. It’s a sibling quilt to another that exists in UK too. I used a plastic fabric for the backing because puffins. It’s got more loft than my usual but it’s also lumpy, which is okay. Used a @coastsidecreativeca screen print that I got at a @little.giant.collective show last year which features a fav Emma Goldman quote:
“IF I CAN’T DANCE I DON’T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION”
Big-medium tied quilt made out of the antique kitchen towels (tea towels 🇬🇧) that formed the backing for a half-finished collapsing velour crazy quilt that I picked up at the @coastgoodwill bins, Salinas.
Added a few strips (scraps) of dyed brown fabrics to make four big log cabins. Used warm-color yarns from @the_fabrica_ . Tried to make the back as plain as possible. Flannel sheet instead of wadding.
Started in April 2024. Completed February 2025.
Those questionable piles of soiled clothes in the street? Good material. Dozens of denims carried by belt loops back to my washing machine. Bedazzled skinnies, battered 501s and (if I’m lucky) baggy jeans (lots of fabric). Dabbled with big pixels and faffed around with running stitches and ties. It went to the quilt show and won comments and curious looks. One viewer called it “cosmic”. It’s the biggest quilt I’ve ever made. Also the heaviest.
Here’s another. Actually two. Started off as an experiment in putrid, technicolour, no-sense fabrics and became a thought-experiment into what the opposite of AI is. It’s called ‘Stochastic Parrot’
Stochastic Parrot is a term that comes from Timnit Gebru et al and their infamous paper warning against the inherent shortcomings of LLMs (Large Language Models). Data and data sets are biased, and as a consequence racist, and AI is going to eat up all our water. Google sacked Gebru for sounding these alarms. Go read “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” It was the first academic paper with an emoji in the title too!
I dunno if AI is escapable but I know this is way more ugly than what AI can produce when prompted to design “an ugly quilt”.. It began with a bolt of rainbow-tie-dye-yin-and-yang. Then gridded with parrots. Throw in some chevrons, egg n bacon muffins, crocodiles, angel fish, red/gold Chinese brocade, donuts, camo, and pattern that looks like curtains of my childhood. Voila!
Backed with Marimekko and digital camouflage. The most bog-awful machine-forced bindings which definitely did not impress the crowds at this years Pajaro Valley Quilt Association annual show, in February.
As ever, buoyed by friends. These are now in the private collections of two pals. But one is on public display in a workplace. Outside the gents. Years ago, I posted selfies under a hashtag #petesbogselfies so this feels like a full circle moment.
Did this. The first bits were made during a Seminole piecing workshop with @racheldkclark in spring. Sewed the strips together between lengths of brown cotton (my own black walnut dyed fabric; and a 20-year-old bed sheet). Hoovered up the last remaining black scraps in my stash for the irregular border. Found a couple of fantastic orange 4x4 foot Mothercare bed sheets in a Batley charity shop for the back. Formed a new habit by buying wadding/batting (actually curtain insulating fabric called “bump”). Machine-quilted the lot with orange (top) and black (bottom) threads. Mum and I repeated last year’s wrap-forward binding, which frames it with 1-inch of 🧡. There was an attempt to match the colour palette of ceramicist Clarice Cliff. The quilt has been described as acid 🙃. I reckon it’s a bit Hacienda (Manchester) and caution tape vibes. It now lives in England, hopefully being used as a cat blanket (?) Thanks to Em for helping with the product photography!
It started as a 10x10 square, made for others, completed late, undelivered, and not used in this final quilt.
I pulled all the red, green, black and white that I had. Started making strips of stripes and then cutting squares to triangles.
I showed it at the PVQA annual show and at @subrosa_space for @the_fabrica_ 15th birthday. At the former, I shared this label text:
Yes to fabric. No to fighting. Yes to red and green. No to abandonment. Yes to olives and oranges. No to vandalism of orchards. Yes to redlines, enforced. No to 2,000lb bombs. These are scraps, and green starbucks aprons, and table-cloth from a catering company. It is just a quilt. Ceasefire now.
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Stop shipping bombs. Cease material support for war crimes. Give up on the political doublespeak. End the genocide in Gaza.
To go from that to this.
It started off as a rough design (not pictured) by my then 9-year-old niece, which I converted to triangles and squares. Gathered every scrap that was pink, green, yellow and other. Patterns, solids, whatever I had. Chucked in some camo.
Thrashed the pieces together. Killed a machine along the way. Didn’t have the skill or patience to maintain the symmetry of the quilt-top. Spent way too long putting small salvage pieces together for the back.
Said niece was a near year older by the time it was complete… just in time to be the bed for her new pet cat.
My second quilt. A bit mad. Machine-stitched n the ditch. And the binding is sketchy as heck.
After seeing some of my quilt-stuff in photos, Lou asked for one. “Pink! And maybe a green/white/gold (Celtic FC colours) one too.” Cheeky to ask for two. It takes ages to make a quilt. My solution was to do a riff on a widely-ridiculed souvenir: the football-tourist’s half-and-half scarf.
I loved gifting this.
Conceptually, it might be the only half-and-half quilt in existence? A tongue-in-cheek play on one of the crappiest and most mocked accessories in the globalized beautiful game.
Used a raft of scraps for this one.
Quilt-top made in California.
Back and wadding sourced at Salvation Army, Batley, Yorkshire (£3)
Assembled in West Yorkshire, in collaboration with my mum, who is a genius and taught me a new binding technique.
Delivered to Fife, Scotland.
Machine-quilted with hand-sewn binding.
10’ x 4’ 6”
Netanyahu and his far right war cabinet have been bombing babies for over five months now. 1 in 100 Palestinians in Gaza have been murdered. Our tax dollars paid for the 2000lb “bunker buster” bombs that flattened the strip. I’ve no words except the essential CEASEFIRE NOW, and thereafter a free Gaza.
This is only a quilt top. It functions as a banner. Quilting it will take much more time. In which, I hope the artillery, and drone strikes, and starvation-as-weapon, and aid obstruction, and targeting of civilians will end.
Far from a quilt. 🍉
This is Maisie, a nine-year-old Aussie Shepherd and Labrador mix, whose human companion is a @ucsc staffer, in solidarity, at the picket.
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#dogsofwagewar is a series of portraits of our fiercest and most loyal friends joining us on the picket line in the fight for fair labour practices.
@payusmoreucsc@uaw2865
