Fingerprints Quilt

Product Details

Fingerprints was born from an offhand comment made by my mother. I had dyed a number of raw silk cloths over a week at my parents’ homestead, planning to turn them into scrunchies for an upcoming market. When my mother heard this she exclaimed, “No, those are too pretty for scrunchies!” When I got home, I decided she was right.

I sketched out a design, centering the circular resist areas created by clamping mason jar lids to folds of cloth. Within 3 days, I had machine pieced a beautiful quilt top made from raw silk dyed with Yellow Onion skins, Rose leaf in iron, Goldenrod in iron, and two pieces dyed so long ago their origins are lost in my memory, although the pink is most likely Madder dyed over something. I tied these squares together with a border that had been bundle dyed with Rose leaves. The raw silk backing was dyed months later with Red Onion and iron to approximate the green of the Goldenrod/iron and the two were sandwiched with 100% cotton batting. I hand quilted with cotton sashiko thread dyed with Yellow Onion skins. Total stitching time was 75 hours.

While Quilting historically has been an art form that reuses fabrics and saved scraps, the pursuit of perfect points and matched seams can create quite a bit of waste, something that I have felt resistant to. Fingerprints was named from a piece I wrote grappling with the results of this resistance:

I am a human being, not a machine. I have deep reverence for skill and craft, and I also have a love and appreciation for beautiful and imperfect creations made by human beings. There is ancient pottery in this world that still shows the fingerprints of the ancestors who shaped them. Supremacist colonial culture teaches us to always strive for a toxic form of perfectionism. While I have internalized this plenty, in my fiber work I have been inspired by pan-cultural stories about the importance of human creators staying humble in their craft. I am not afraid of a Goddess turning me to a spider for bragging about my work, but I do often find vitality and charm in what others might deem as “mistakes”. I am not interested in erasing my “fingerprints” from my work, the quirks that will let people for generations know that a very human person crafted this.

This is why Fingerprints remains a couple inches wider on one end, instead of being cut to a perfect square (rectangle).

Fingerprints is approximately 60”x80”, a bit shy of a standard twin size quilt, but as you can see in the photos it fits on a twin bed just fine. It comes in an Indigo dyed storage tote.

If you are bringing them home, I hope it is a love affair for the ages and that they bring you comfort and joy for years to come!

How to Care For Your New Quilt:

Botanical dyes are just more changeable than chemical dyes. Many are sensitive to pH changes, they will fade with excessive washing, and even chemical dyes can be bleached when stored in direct sunlight. This quilt wants to be used, but keep in mind that botanical dyed hand quilted quilts will last longer with spare washing and kept out of direct sunlight.

When you do wash, handwashing with a gentle, pH neutral soap and air drying is always the best. But I very much understand how much labor that is. Second best is washing on a delicate cycle (still with a gentle pH neural soap), partial drying on low heat, and then finishing with an air dry.

Store the quilt on your bed or couch (or the wall if a hanging art piece is what you are after), or if you need to put your quit away for a time, use a cotton bag like the tote it comes with.