Susan Carlson: "Surprise Me" Shows Signs of Aging

hi this is Susan Carlson and welcome to my studio I have here my quilt surprised me it's a portrait of my husband Tom and two of his best friends Joe and Mike I made this quilt back in 1992 so it's now about 27 years old and unfortunately it is showing a few signs of age we all know that fabric can fade and it's something that it's an issue when we talk about and we ask you know what do you do to prevent fading and I have always been very careful about where my quilts are hung however if you were to look up at this fabric right here this is a batik that started out as a variation of sand color and blue like like a seashore sort of color and obviously it no longer is has any blue it's all sand now that was a nice batik and I purchased it from a reputable quilt store but it was back in the late 80s and boutiques were just starting to come out and they were you know really wonderful new look to fabric and to quilting fabric and I'm wondering if those early fabrics those early boutiques had issues you know maybe they had some you know colored the color was more fugitive than than what we find in those boutiques now because it was a good company and it surprised me what I noticed it's starting to fade and if you were to look in what I know what I makes me believe that it's the fabric and not me or where I hung this is that this fabric right up here is exactly the same now as it was then so it's not it wasn't where I hung it or the conditions it was hung in it just happened it was you know the luck of the draw as far as that fabric goes another sign of aging on this quilt is the fragility of the tulle now I have a layer of tulle over top the whole quilt as a shadow quilting technique and you can see here this has been snagged now tulle is always snackable from the very beginning when you put it on you could put your hand across it and the ring could snag it however it was when I was trying to do a repair on a tear that was happened on this jacket right here that I noticed how fragile it had become now this was a tear and I looked at it I thought well I will just put it back under the sewing machine and do some extra stitching to kind of make it look like a fold and then cut away the tulle the snag tool and it'll look like a shadow which is kind of what you see here and I ended up having to do a little more work on it than I expected because as I was starting to stitch 27 years later the just the act of stitching was was tearing the tulle and I was actually creating more of a break in the tool than I was repairing so it took a little finagling but I managed it to make it look alright but it just made it so clear that tool which essentially is a is a plastic right it's it's a polyester and I guess like all plastics they age they get brittle with age and that seems to be happening with this piece as well so the question I have is do we can we assume that the fabrics that we buy now and we use now today are those better than what we bought 30 years ago when I'm comparing fabrics of this piece I'm thinking probably the fabrics are better the dye Lots are better they're they're more colorfast than some of these earlier you know art quilt fabrics were what about the tulle in the netting you know I use that all the time in my pieces but this was a piece of fabric that I bought 30 years ago now and the other early quilts that I've used this particular fabric on it was from the same bolt those are showing some of the same issues but other tool that I used isn't so I'm kind of hoping that maybe things have gotten a little better now one thing that people ask me fairly often as far as longevity of my quilts and how I work goes are or is the use of glue now this piece I use a spray adhesive for soon after I started using the tacky glue that I still use now and with either of those adhesives I haven't seen any problems and there's no discoloration there's no seeping of anything it all holds well you know that's all good so I'm happy that that major part of my technique I can honestly say is doing just great you know 27 down years down the road so I guess time will tell how everything else goes I'm going to keep going the way I'm going and enjoying my quilts and just being extra careful with these old ones you know they've got some age to them they need a little tender care sometimes

Channel: Thomas Allen

Views: 1,497

Rating: 4.8823528 out of 5

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Id: -KlO5BIVRp0

Length: 6min 18sec (378 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2019