Deborah Schwartzmann

Self-taught Deborah Schwartzman’s early quilts were full-size and functional. Later, she began to use the quilt as a medium for self expression. Her quilts have traveled to exhibits throughout the United States and Europe, and have been installed in galleries and private collections.

Deborah Schwartzmann Web site»

“I was going to be married and I picked up a Family Circle magazine. There was a quilt and I said, I’m gonna make this as a wedding present to my husband. I had never made a quilt. There’s no history of quilts in my family. I proceeded to hand sew 220 curved blocks called Drunkard’s Path and made this bed quilt for us. That was the beginning and that was 1974. Bsically I was in a little bubble. I didn’t know anything about quiltmaking. I didn’t even know there was a world of quiltmaking, let alone art quilts. So at the same time I’m a gardener and I love to garden. I bought a gladiola and I set it on my design table, and every day another one opened. I’m studying this bloom and in my eyes I see the shape of a hexagon. So I draw this grid. I used my graph paper and I draw all of these equilateral hexagons, and I start to try and create lines that look like the different petals of the gladiola.

Then I decided I want to use this technique called reverse paper piecing. The very first one was a very slow laborious process of having this very small to-scale image of what I wanted to create and then enlarging it to it’s actual size, section by section using carbon paper and working on the table. I needed two versions to work from—one that will show me what the quilt will look like in it’s right-facing view and the reverse, which is the part that I’m gonna actually sew on. It takes organization and it also takes turning your brain sort of inside out, because you have to see everything backwards in order for it to all end up on the right side. This geometric base gave me a structure that made it doable to me. I started at the bottom and literally the gladiolas just grew on my design wall. I knew that there was something going on here that had to be done again. So the quilt was completed. It actually won an award at Houston, which was amazing. It got an honorable mention. But oh my god, I was just astonished and I said, ‘Debbie you have a technique here, there’s something here worth repeating.’”