If artist Kim Hudson asks you if you’d like to see her garden, you should accept the invitation. It’s immaculately kept — a lush oasis with a patchwork of colorful flowers and plants. It’s one of her biggest inspirations for her hand-embroidered fabric collages.
“I also enjoy gardening and feel like that's really connected to my art,” Hudson tells Williamson Scene. “Not only is it an inspiration, but I feel like it's almost a big collage out there, with all the color and texture.”
It’s fitting, then, that her business is called Twisted Vine Stitches and is secured with a real twig and wire for hanging.
Kim Hudson sews a project for Twisted Vine Stitches.
On Hudson’s coffee table is a book of her father’s paintings and another of her mother’s quilts, so it’s not surprising that she has always had a penchant for arts and crafts. After working as a teacher for 34 years, she returned to that love in the latter years of her career, and now, in retirement.
In true teacher fashion, Hudson has a very organized sewing room, complete with plastic containers sorting fabric scraps by color. It’s an art to mix the colors and textures from different fabric stores collected over the years. She seeks to find balance in her collages, too — lights and darks, three areas to catch the eye, and other visual strategies. Once she’s placed the fabric pieces where she wants them, she uses a glue stick to stabilize them before hand-stitching them together.
She’s inspired by the seasons — flowers and butterflies in the summer, pumpkins in the fall. Her pieces featuring sunflowers and poppies and tomatoes have been most popular thus far.
“Oftentimes I can continue to add to it, or if there's something about it that I don't like, I can cover it up,” she says. “It's easy to cover. I can change things, so it's pretty flexible.”
Artist Kim Hudson poses with some of her pieces in her home art studio.
Hudson started posting her works on Instagram and had a few old friends reach out to ask to purchase a piece. Since then, she’s shown and sold her pieces at Williamson Public Library and the Tomato Arts Festival, among other artistic sites. She’s open to commissions, too.
She enjoys creating small pieces that she can finish quickly. After all, she doesn’t want to make this retirement hobby a full-time job. She can finish a piece in three to seven days and have it ready to give as a gift. Small pieces are also more practical because she can reach the center of the piece more easily.
"I don't want it to get to the point where it's a job and where I feel like I have a deadline to get something done,” she says. "I just want it to be more of if someone enjoys something that they see and wants to buy it, then that would be satisfying for me.”
Like she learned from her mother, quilts hold memories — being able to feel the softness of the fabric and the stitches a person made is comforting, nostalgic even.
“I do hope that my pieces do that — help people to have good memories,” she says.