Foundation Firm

Foundation Firm

My daughter, Molly, has a birthday today. One week ago, Nash, her husband, had his birthday. They live in the Bay area. I made them this wall-hanging and called it Foundation Firm. The bluish-greenish background is a beautiful piece of hand-dyed cotton made by a local Minnesota fabric dyer. The colors suggest the sky at sunrise behind a lovely cool forest. The center scrap depicts an old-world neighborhood, perhaps in Italy, set upon a hill. The whitish rectangular fabric underneath the neighborhood has a black, indecipherable, antique-looking script that appears to be written with a fountain pen. I think of it as bedrock. Underneath that, running above the bottom border, I placed a hand-dyed pink/lilac fabric with hints of warm orange and gold, which I imagine to be a subterranean river.

Foundation Firm is a double-entendre: a firm foundation is necessary for a marriage (good old-fashioned communication, with the text of the antique script known just to the two.) A firm foundation is also necessary for a house (solid bedrock.) The word bedrock is made up of "rock" and "bed."  Underneath the bedrock, the flowing river sustains and restores and, over time, water smoothes rough edges.

When pondering on a name, I thought of the old hymn, How Firm a Foundation. The piecing was pure stream-of-consciousness, the pieces slightly irregular in shape and placed slightly askew, like a dream. I machine-quilted the layers with a walking foot using metallic and variegated threads. I am very happy with how it turned out.

~Andrea