I have been using old dishcloths in my work for years. These are from my own kitchen — stained and worn from cooking, from years of meals made with my husband. I want the cloth to have already lived a little before I start working with it.
I love coffee. I drink it every day. Just a bit of sugar, maybe. Always lots of half & half. During the first part of the pandemic, we didn't have enough coffee filters to last to some indeterminate time when stores would be open again, so I started to reuse them. They say you can't reuse paper coffee filters but they are wrong. You know what doesn't work? Cloth coffee filters. I tried it and it was a coffee disaster. That's when I decided to just reuse the paper ones. After a while I had a pile of them saved up. I didn't want to throw them away, so I started using them in my art making. Using used coffee filters seemed like a natural extension of working with the dishcloths. I stitched on them and sewed them together, but they lack the flow of the cloth, the staining that builds up over time. The threadbare essence of the worn out spots. I love those bits of the dishcloths. I love tearing them up and sewing them back together. Then you can really see the range of colors that a bunch of pieces of fabric that all used to be bright white can take on.
I may not use coffee filters in my work today, but it was a good experiment. I noticed that the stain on the paper started to look like passageways and I like how they looked sewn together. When they are in a grid, you can see how similar they are but also how different. You can see where the flow of water and the heat of brewing stained the paper. Everyday objects that turn into something else when you change the context and how you look at them.