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Front Porch: Quilting with a flair for details

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published March 25, 2005

The squares of color dance and meld like leaves falling from trees.

Debbi Ciotti arranges them on a large felt grid, moving them about as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

In a few weeks, when she perfects the color gradation and feels the way her quilt will court the eye, she will begin to sew.

Her "watercolors in fabrics," as she calls them, look like impressionist paintings, like the Renoirs she so loves. They are meant to be looked at not slept under.

In her own home, they hang on walls and drape over quilt frames, jubilant bursts of color like wildflowers popping in spring.

You might have seen them earlier this month at the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts, an event Ciotti promised herself eight years ago on her 40th birthday that she would somehow work up to.

As 45 loomed, she got serious.

"That was part of the impetus," she says. "I said to myself: If you want to play with the big dogs, you have to jump off the porch."

Ciotti lives in Odessa with her three teenage children and husband, Bob, an attorney with Carlton Fields, in a house with honey-colored hardwood floors, fresh irises in vases and folded quilts tucked on shelves. She sews her magic in the family dining room on a 1936 Singer Sewing machine that she bought for $50 a decade ago at an antique store in Hyde Park.

She likes the machine - matt black, attached to a wooden case, and once used on a battleship during World War II - because it basically just goes backward and forward.

"It doesn't zig zag, button-hole or have a computer in it," she says. "I just wanted to keep it simple."

Once a year, a woman who repairs sewing machines comes to the house to tune it up. The original light, plagued by an electrical short, hangs on by a piece of masking tape. It's all she needs, really, Ciotti says, because the machine remains faithful, mysteriously always working despite its advanced age. When she bought it, it came with its original instruction book and some sweet scraps of lace belonging to an original owner.

"I don't ever want to stop sewing with it. I love this old machine, it's so simple and sturdy," she says. "People always ask me what kind of machine I work on, and when I tell them the story, I think they're surprised."

Her love of quilting took root 15 years ago when she was pregnant with her daughter, Andrea. She saw a handmade quilt that called to her, and she decided she wanted to make one for her daughter.

"I took a class and never wanted to quit," she says of the weeks spent making that first quilt in whispery blues and pinks with her own handprint - and eventually her baby's - quilted into the design.

Ciotti works surrounded by clear boxes of fabric - beautiful florals mostly - that she cuts into 2-inch squares. Her watercolor style of quilting is a blending of hundreds of pieces of cotton fabrics. She can spend 45 minutes in a fabric store "auditioning different fabrics" for her bold borders.

She sells her quilt art in a range of sizes, from 19-inch by 19-inch to 37-inch by 37-inch squares. They range in price from $150 to $500.

"There's something very tactile about quilts, very warm. There's substance to them," she says. "The quilts I make can go into very contemporary or very traditional homes. They're very comforting."

A note here about her philosophy: Ciotti struggles with the notion of being called a quilter, because she sees it more as a fine art, no longer the province of women, ruled by utilitarian function.

Though once made to cover beds and warm the body, she says that her work just "scratches the surface" of the amazing things quilt artists are achieving today.

She works largely on commission, creating her soulful waves of watery pattern that rival the way light speaks from a painter's canvas. She likens her use of color "greens next to purples, yellows next to reds" to the random scattering of color in a meadow.

Her clients are drawn to them because of the warmth they offer.

"Everybody's got a grandmother, an aunt or a sister who quilts," she says. "We've all been touched in some way by quilting. It's relevant to who we are as people."

To contact Ciotti, call (813) 920-8315.

[Last modified March 24, 2005, 08:15:13]