Justify the text: a wedding anniversary quilt
Two things about this lovely new anniversary hand quilt. First, its prompt was a poem by e e cummings read at the couple’s wedding. He, the commissioner, and I exchanged several versions of the final text – excerpted lines and phrases, sometimes grafted together from different parts of the poem – searching for an optimal phrase of 42 characters to occupy the final dimensions. This isn’t exactly what cummings wrote, but we think it contains the essence of his poem (intimate with sudden reaches for the cosmic) and our elision is therefore responsible. Justified.
Second, I have always centred the characters for Evensong and other typographic quilts. The French one, Ténèbres, taught me how much more successfully the text recedes or abstracts itself to pattern when there are more, rather than fewer, characters. And this is my aim; not a stridently legible banner, but a sub-optimally legible pattern in which the text is discerned with a bit of effort. Space was tight for this; very hard to rely on hyphenation to set such a phrase centred. What if I break it randomly in 5 lines of 7 characters and one of 6? Justified.
Carry the Wonder anniversary quilt patchworked from the bride’s wedding dress and the groom’s tie and piqué shirt front, in a meadow of spring green, jonquil yellow and hyacinth blue.
Linen, cotton and silk patchwork backed with linen, hand-quilted and bound with silk; 175 × 210cm.
