Her dark materials

The new project - the "memory quilt" - is coming along. Sorting in the weekend studio found lots of dark fabrics, which I've been gathering since doing a "disgraceful discharge" course with Bob Adams years ago (2007) at Festival of Quilts -

With the room tidy, it was time to start. My first thought was to stitch down the newspaper strips, then put fabric round the square, but that ragged edge needed to be left. So I sewed some strips round a square of dark fabric, and applied the strips to that, using red thread instead of black -

More experiments with applying the newspaper strips to different sizes of squares, during which I tried ripping the paper during the sewing, and leaving some strips loose to be held down with hand stitch afterward (maintenance often involves mending, after all). Also with interweaving -

Interesting how some words jumped out, or happened to be on the strips in the first place. Pure accident, that orange strip (2nd left) which says "dad and me". I'm tempted to look for useful phrases, but that could be frustratingly unproductive - Plan A is to leave the details up to chance, but to use sections of the newspaper that are likely to have "memorable" words - the Family section, and the Travel section.

It didn't take long to make a few squares to be getting on with, some with bright centres and some with bits of brightness to be added under the strips of newspaper -

Perhaps the colours (representing the emotion that underlies memory) will be too bright or distracting. In which case........