Potato Blight

I must admit that I had never heard the word BLIGHT before. Just when I decided to start doing a research, an American friend told me that her ancestors emigrated from Ireland due to the so called Great Famine or Irish Potato Famine. The proximate cause of famine was a potato disease commonly known as potato blight.

I have been doing a lot of flour paste resist dyeing lately, and so I thought hmmm, I could do this also using potato dextrin. And so I decided to make some fabrics using potatoes in various ways: potato stamps (like we did in preschool…), photos of potatoes which I altered in Photoshop and text about the Great Irish Famine printed on cloth. Cotton. Machine pieced and machine quilted.