Janet Hughes, 61, has a recurring dream. It’s the oldest dream the fiber artist can remember, and it always begins the same way. She’s in a house — forever spawning new floors and passageways as she experiences a new iteration — and Hughes must find her way through. Every room reveals a mystery, many populated with moving figures, and atop the roof sits a goddess-like figure.

The reverie is so compelling that she’s fashioned a quilt out of it, straightforwardly dubbed the “Dream House.” It’s saturated with deep blues and greens, Hughes’ favorite colors, and finished with buttons and a trail of beads. She remarks that her grandmother used to call her “buttons and bows” as a young girl, and she acquired a fondness for fabrics from her seamstress mother.

“She always had a basket of fabric that I loved playing with,” remembers Hughes. “She would not let me use her sewing machine because she was afraid I would sew the needle through my thumb, so I used to just cut up the fabric and made doll clothes with them.”

Quilting was a skill and passion that came about much later. The popularity of quilts boomed after America’s Bicentennial celebrations in 1976 and Hughes admired many in art festivals and museums. After seeing a particularly striking quilt by Judy Lawrence, a local fiber artist, she inquired about purchasing it to find it wasn’t for sale. Therefore, she set out to make her own.

With her then 2-year old daughter on her lap, Hughes gathered some old fabric together and revved up her vintage 1900s sewing machine. Shying away from fashioning clothes, as they require many rules to follow, she much preferred the trial and error process of quilting. She says her first nine-patch quilt was riddled with mistakes, but practice and repetition made more perfect.

“My process changes throughout and I usually have an idea that starts with a sketch, although the quilt may end up looking quite different,” says Hughes. “Fabric has its own mind. It does dictate how the sewing goes because of how it shifts and moves.”

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