I’m a proud pack rat,” says artist Sophie Stone glancing around her Long Island City, Queens, studio, which brims with stacks of fabric. There’s everything from 19th-century crazy quilts to vintage napkins, even a bag of stretchy strings. All are fodder for her intricate textile works, a parallel practice to her floral-design studio.
Stone, who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, always preferred unexpected surfaces to canvas, accumulating found objects, foamcore, cardboard, cloth, and more on which to apply brushstrokes. She wondered how she would ultimately put it all to use. Then one night, she recalls, “I had a dream about making big rugs out of bedsheets in my parents’ yard in Massachusetts.” She seized on that fantasy when the artist Jessi Reaves invited her to be…