- [Randi] Hi, I'm Randi, personally inviting you to put the Greater Eastside Remodel team to work on your next remodel, renovation, or construction project.

Always above and beyond, it's our promise to you at greatereastsideremodel.com.

(bright music) - [Julie] Somebody said, "Well how come you're not a painter?"

I knew that I had run out of the traditional thing.

It was not expressing me.

I love to sew.

It's so tactile, and I want some beauty in my work.

I don't like pure abstraction that is too cerebral.

So I'm just gonna figure out how to express that through sewing.

I want it to be really pretty, not too pretty.

(gentle music) - [Brangien] Fidalgo Island was once barely an island at all.

Separated from the Skagit mainland by nothing more than a mucky slew.

During low tides, people could wait across this waterway until 1893, when it was dredged and straightened.

Now Fidalgo Island is bordered on the east by the narrow Swinomish Channel, which runs along the Swinomish reservation.

With Deception Pass at the south end and the Port of Anacortes at the northern tip, the island's perimeter takes shape.

The tall trees, farmlands, and seas beckoned textile artist Julie Sevilla Drake.

As soon as she laid eyes on this place.

After moving here from Alaska, she and her husband built a studio out of a kit barn.

Instead of animals, it houses stacks of hand-dyed fabric, spools of thread, and sewing machines, which Drake uses to make colorful contemporary quilts that hang all around the airy space.

- They say that color gets all the credit, but value does all the work.

So I work through a gray scale value system.

So if you were to put these on a gray scale, you would see that this whole rack, even yellows will show as light value, medium light, then mediums, medium darks, and then this is my dark darks and blacks.

And then these are my grays.

And grays are super, super important because they all have different personalities.

Green grays and purple grays.

And this is kind of a pinky gray.

- Drake hand-dyes every piece of cotton fabric.

There's a lot of math in the creative act of hand dying.

So she relies on a three ring binder of meticulous mixing formulas to make infinite variations on primary colors.

After creating large squares of color, she cuts them into smaller pieces so they're ready and waiting for the moment of inspiration.

When you were in Alaska, you were using a different.

- Like a different palette.

I love blues, periwinkle, crystalline, cold colors.

And that's what I saw around me.

So like this one here, that's all those greens.

I'm around greens.

I remember telling somebody, "I gotta learn how to work with green."

I didn't know how to work with green.

So I had to learn how to work with them.

Not because I'm trying to replicate what's around me, but because I look at it and go, "Oh my God, that's so beautiful," and I want some beauty in my work.

- Once Drake has pieced her colors together like an expert tailor, she brings the triple layered textile to her prized long-arm machine, a 12 foot long apparatus she uses to stitch countless lines of improvised patterns across each quilt, adding texture and movement.

Driving the machine is an intuitive process that looks and feels a lot like partner dancing.

So when you're coming up with the quilt, how does it feel different in the naming versus the inventing part of the quilt?

- Well, when I make something, despite my best intentions or sketches here and there, it's gonna do what it's gonna do.

(bright music) It just kind of comes out of your fingers and you're like, "Who made that?"

It is really mysterious.

So like these pieces here, I didn't intend to make that shape.

So then when it comes to naming it, then I have to think, "Okay, what is it really about?

What was I thinking without thinking?"

And that's when the wordiness comes in, because to me, it really does have to sound right.

- [Brangien] Quotes, poems, and postcards pepper her studio and influence her naming process.

A poet herself, she believes quilts are a form of poetry.

What's this one called?

- It's called "The Fog and the Beast" or just "Beasts."

Fierce beasts, there's something fierce about it.

Then I thought, okay, "Fog and the Fierce Beast."

"Fog, the Forest, and the Fierce Beast," which I think it's what it's gonna get called.

- [Brangien] How locally inspired are the fog pieces?

- [Julie] Oh my God.

- [Brangien] How often are you looking at fog?

- Well it's interesting here.

I never thought about this.

There's more fog in the summer here because the cold ocean hits the warm land and then the fog just will stand on our front porch and just watch it rolling in and covering the trees and it's like, oh, here comes the fog.

Fog eats all.

- Yes, exactly.

- [Julie] Alaska didn't have a lot of fog, the part I'm from, but this kind of fog is really new to me and it's really magical, I'm not used to it.

- [Brangien] As her fog phase lifted, Drake started sneaking magenta and yellow into gray-green pieces.

In more recent work, she has returned to bold colors that vibrate against each other.

In some cases, her quilts feel like a playful rejection of her surroundings.

A clap back against the Pacific Northwest's natural palette.

- That one's called "Mestiza Goes Walking" because I love to walk, and Mestiza is mixed race because I'm part Filipino, part everything else.

And I have lots of quilts that are called "Mestiza Goes Walking" because I could just name everything because they're from me walking through something.

- [Brangien] Stepping out her front door, Drake takes daily walks in the surrounding woods where she feels attuned to the longstanding presence of Samish and Swinomish people.

She often walks her dog Buster up to a viewpoint where she can take in all the trees, all that green.

(gentle music) - It's just spectacular here.

I've been working a lot trying to get the different personalities of the green.

Just look at the lichen out there sitting on the trees and how that gray, it's just like a dusty green.

When I come out here, it's to get that long view and see the sky.

Somehow that's inspiring.

It keeps you from being closed in.

There's no expectations out there.

It just goes.

- [Announcer] "Art by Northwest" was made possible in part with the support of Greater Eastside remodel.