Once in a while I'll have a textile that refuses to resolve itself in a timely manner, so I'll let it incubate while it makes up its mind of what it wants to be when it grows up. Light had a fear of commitment, so I had to give it space for a while. This was a fun piece to work with since I hand-stitched it from both front and back to alter the character of the stitches. I was inspired by looking at the backs of my quilts and wishing that I could display both sides simultaneously. Light remained pinned to my studio wall for a few years until I had one of those forehead-slapping Eureka moments. The solution came via a collage class that I was taking and a workshop that I taught. In the workshop, a student generously gave me a piece of tarlatan, a cotton open-weave fabric used for stiffening garments. From my collage class, I appropriated fellow student Kathy Renwald's philosophy: "if a piece is not working, slap something big on it." So I did and it worked well enough that it was included in the 2006 Fibreworks exhibition at the Cambridge Gallery in Cambridge, Ontario.
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