Rusted Garden

Decay #2

I made the second quilt of this year’s the Fifteen by Fifteen quilt challenge group. I called it Rusted Garden and I focused on how the contact with rust damages textiles.

A few years ago, I found myself at a blacksmith’s shop, surrounded by piles of rusty iron. It was the perfect playground for a rust-dyeing experiment. I left with a treasure trove of rust-stained fabrics and started turning them into quilts.

Rust is basically metal’s way of giving in to oxygen—it oxidizes, leaving behind stains that cling stubbornly to fabric. But beyond just staining, rust actually eats away at the material, making it fragile and prone to falling apart. Sewing with rust-dyed fabric is its own adventure—tiny metal particles get lodged in the fibers, breaking needles, especially if I try to machine quilt. That’s why I stitched Rusted Garden entirely by hand.

For the background, I chose a soft blue linen, and for the flowers, I repurposed cotton fabrics I had previously dyed with Procion MX and later rusted. The rusty stains take on a life of their own, becoming suns, clouds, and leaves. Flowers are hand appliqued.

I think this might be the ugliest quilt I’ve ever made. But I can’t make excuses—I deliberately chose to use decay itself, rather than just depict it. And somehow, that makes it beautifully authentic.

Recent trips

In March I traveled to Istanbul, and it made an unexpectedly huge impression on me. Everybody knows about Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and other architectural wonders—and there are many good photos of them on the internet. But what I’m talking about is not them, but the spirit of Istanbul. Every evening before sunset we would leave our apartment and wander around the downtown. There was that feeling of transcendent history, the spirit of the Thousand and One Nights. The golden light would spill over old stones and narrow alleys, the call to prayer echoing like a memory through the hills. Street vendors called out, cats slinked through ancient courtyards, and time itself seemed to pause, letting you breathe in a city that lives in both the past and the present.

My other recent trip was to the Brno Patchwork Meeting where I went as a coordinator of Wide Horizons IX, SAQA Europe and Middle East regional exhibition. It was my first time in Brno I liked the exhibition space with day light coming through windows and glass roof. I think the exhibition was a success.