Tried, True, Black & Blue is a quilt that I created to tell a visual story. The story is my family’s, well a few pieces of the story at least. I developed a visual language that reflects aspects of my family, seemingly random artifacts to outsiders, but a significant milestones and a few inside jokes to myself and family members.
I love marrying imagery and typography in this way. The letters and numbers can carry as much beauty in their form as photos.
The process starts by gathering the necessary reference material, i.e. photos, stories, and dates (one of my favorite parts of the process). Once I gathered what I could, I began the process of prepping to screen print, which includes narrowing down photos, creating patterns, choosing a color palette, as well as choosing typefaces and typing out the info I wanted to use in the quilt.
After all of that preparation, the fun part begins (in all actuality most of the parts are fun parts for me)! I screen printed one layer at a time and building up compositions, quite literally. It truly is the one of the most exciting part of the process, seeing compositions come to life, getting a few happy accidents, and of course a few not so happy accidents. Trial and error is the name of the game and that is why it is one of my favorite parts of the process.