As a child, I studied each patch of my grandmother’s quilts identifying my father’s shirts, my mother’s and sisters’ dresses, and the clothes of my uncle, aunts and cousins. Together they formed a picture of my extended family and of the fabrics of the era. The quilts also embodied a frugal and sustainable past when every scrap was saved, valued and used.
As an adult mother of three, overwhelmed by the seeming limitless of laundry, I began to collect dryer lint which I carefully filed away by month and year. Each crumpled ball of lint is an historical archive. Embedded in each one can glimpse fabric, hair, skin, dust, fur, forgotten wrappers, threads and feathers. Together in their journals the balls of lint reveal the changing and seasonal lives of my husband, sons, daughter and pets. Lint images are here recombined to form a modern quilt - a testament to waste and pollution in our modern era.