Wrack Line VII

This is the seventh quilt in my Wrack Line Series.  I've submitted some of the other quilts for jurying at shows where they prefer you don't publish them anywhere first, but this one was a quilt that I played with to enter into Visceral Gallery's Color Restrained II show.  None of the three pieces I entered got in, which is disappointing, but I think that the work I'm doing now is strong and innovative, and I'm not done with yo-yos yet.

I grew up on the panhandle for Florida near Destin.  My mom and stepfather's favorite beach was in Destin by the Back Porch restaurant.  Back then, the restaurant was a little A frame building, and you did indeed eat your food on the back porch.   The beaches were so white.  I started this series before the oil spill, but working on this series has made me long for the beautiful pristine beaches that I grew up with.

I could walk down the beach from the Back Porch and not see anything else for the longest time.  Now, it's condo after condo.  There is a lovely state beach on the other side of the barrier blocking Old 98, and when we go back, that's where we go, but once money found Destin, what made the beaches lovely to me (being an introvert and a bit of a loner) quickly disappeared.  Condos do one sort of damage, and oil spills take that damage up several orders of magnitude.  So far, Destin's beaches remain white and beautiful.  Check out the web cams on the Destin Homepage if you want to see what I mean.

I haven't been back to Destin in years, but the beach was so important to me growing up.  It was my wild place.  It surrounded me with healing water, and it reminded me that I'm one part of a really big world.  The way it made itself new every day also told me that all would be well, that a new day would bring the tide, new treasures, and would clean the footprints, leaving everything wide open again. 

In this quilt, I've included yo-yo's in the water wash section of the quilt under the sheer overlay, you can see them on the left hand side in this picture.   I also added seed stitching on the left in the water wash, in addition to the French knots on the sand area, the area not covered by a sheer overlay. 

Photos by Park Bench Photography, David Lorenz