working wall

And Yet Another Deadline. . .

2012-03-07T12:44:00.000-05:00

Last summer one of my suitemates at Quilting by the Lake invited me to join a challenge group she was forming. By November we had introduced ourselves to each other--there are six of us from various points in the US as well as Germany--and had decided on a name for the group: Art 1016, which references the Golden Ratio and the dimensions of the quilts we will be making (at least 10 and not more than 16 inches). One member provided us with our challenge word on January 1--"connection"--and we had until February 29 to make our interpretation of that word into a quilt.

And here is my version:

This "everything is connected" theme keeps showing up in my quilting, particularly in the Celtic knotwork I do, and, ultimately, the colors I chose for this piece could easily suggest natural elements.

This design began life as a series of smooth swirls:

But as I began to create these swirls in fabric, they began to look a little lifeless, a little too predictable and the more free-form edges I tried one day seemed to look more organic and interesting. I, of course, didn't take pictures of the fabrics in the smooth stage so you can't make a real comparison.

And I added other suggestions of connection to the final version when I braided the gold thread and wove the pearl cotton in the two open areas on the right and left sides. The dimensions are, of course, 10 x 16 inches. If you want to see how the other members of Art 1016 met this challenge, go to our blog.

And now, I am not going to think about deadlines but just spend some time with some of my bigger projects. Deadlines do get me moving, focus my attention, provide a time when the quilt is done and I can't add or change just one more thing, and add a small explosion of excitement as you see what the results are. But I need to wander my own path for a while at my own speed. Right now I am delighting in working on a project that has grown out of the Elizabeth Barton class I took. Perhaps it is because I am not following any rules except my own, but perhaps the delight is all the sweeter because of the contrast with the challenge quilts.

This will be a good test for the Zen attitude toward life that I am trying to cultivate--to see if I can focus on what I decide to focus on, be mindful of what is in front of me, when there are still more deadlines lurking in the future--one for the local challenge group (April 11) and for Art 1016 (April 30).

And if you are also still out there reading, thanks for the company!

My Favorite Color

2012-03-04T12:34:00.000-05:00

Green, green moss after a day of warm winter rain

Meeting Yet Another Deadline

2012-02-26T18:00:00.000-05:00

Years ago I started the tradition of giving my husband a small quilt top for Valentine's Day, and this year I almost broke the tradition. The 14th sneaked up on me, but luckily I only give him a top. So here is his gift for 2012.

I was trying to do some improvised piecing for the background, but unfortunately, I have been quilting so long, the rows turned out straighter than I wanted them to be, other than a decided downward tilt to the middle three. Even improvisation needs a bit of planning and adjustment and I was trying to work too quickly. Tom, of course, insists that he loves it so I am not sure whether to try again at the background before the quilting. But I will have plenty of time to decide since I need to finish up some other projects before I quilt this one. The size right now is about 14" by 18".

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Playing in the Snow

2012-02-19T16:39:00.000-05:00

Back in December when our local challenge group got together, we not only got to see how everyone interpreted the first challenge, but we also learned what our next challenge would be: using curved flying geese in a composition of our own choosing. Since I have been using a more free-form approach to creating a quilt in the past couple of years, I decided to combine this more structured element with something that was very unstructured. I have also become fascinated with finding ways to create texture and so thought this was the perfect opportunity to try a totally new technique--just scrunching and folding a piece of fabric to see the patterns that all these scrunches and folds would generate. Easier thought about than done, as I found out.

Like so many of us across the US, we have had very little snow this winter, and I find myself missing that magic transformation as the familiar colors and shapes and shadows of the landscape disappear--so cliched yet still so beautiful. So I went about creating some of my own, and my early visions of this piece involved the drifts and textures of a snowy field.

I paper-pieced my flying geese in the icy blue colors of a winter creek--actually the winter color of the creek on our property is icy brown from all the mud this year, but blue is more poetic--and sewed them to a plain white piece of fabric that would be the foundation piece for the scrunches. Now, for some reason, I wanted the snow to cross the geese at one point and that made my scrunching a whole lot more difficult since I had to begin sewing down the to-be-scrunched fabric around the geese with an estimated appropriate amount left free to scrunch as the snow crossed the creek. But after that it was pure play. And I had to keep the judgmental side of my brain tuned only to positive comments since the piece looked fairly strange for a good while. I had thought about putting fusible web on the back side of the fabric so it would be easier to hold it in place but decided that I could easily hold too much in place at once with a permanence I would have to live with. So I used judicious pinning and ironing of folds as I worked my way down, learning as I went how to shift the wrinkles to create little areas of pattern. I think it's time for a photo:

The machine quilting that held the scrunches in place were tricky as well since I needed enough stitching to hold the fold in place but not so much to make it entirely flatten out.

I added a golden sky and a glittery sun of two different layers of fused organza and I'm still not sure it works, but at one point I was sure it wasn't working at all (couldn't keep that frowning judge quiet for long) so not being sure is progress. Ultimately, I did have fun Playing in the Snow (and that's the name of this quilt) as I intentionally caused those puckers quilters try to avoid.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

The Rewards of Wasting Time

2012-02-13T20:25:00.000-05:00

I sometimes feel guilty about the time I spend on the Internet, particularly when I know I am putting off seeing if my great idea for solving a design problem is really going to work or when some part of a quilt is not going well and I don't want to face up to it. But then I happen upon something like the works of Hugette Caland, an artist whom I had never heard of before, and I know all this wandering on the web might just be contributing something to my life. Her works are on canvas and linen and she uses pens to make tiny little lines that look like stitches surrounded by colors so rich you can lose yourself in them. But even her dark gray pieces are worth spending time with.

And thanks to Deb Lacativa for pointing me in her direction.

Dyeing in the Cold

2012-02-08T21:10:00.000-05:00

Monday I broke another rule. In my online class with Elizabeth Barton I had gotten to the point where I was gathering fabrics for a project and realized I needed some other colors. The rules of hand-dyeing say that the room temperature should be in the seventies or above and, since my dyeing is done in an unheated basement, the only dyeing that gets done during the winter months in my house is snow dyeing. But now I really needed that fabric.

So I took a chance. Sun was pouring in the basement windows but the temperature was still in the fifties when I began. I did all the mixing and pouring in the basement but brought the fabric upstairs to batch overnight. And it worked!

I am of two minds about the results: it is wonderful that I have the fabric I need and that I now know I can dye all year round. But that forced vacation from dyeing was rather nice--one thing that couldn't find its way on the to-do list for a few months of the year. Nor during that time could I use dyeing as yet another way to put off making final design decisions.

But perhaps I should not stop analyzing, enjoy the fruits of my rule-breaking, and get back to working on my project. And if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

Warning: Rant Ahead

2012-02-06T20:13:00.000-05:00

About a month ago I found myself in Joann's with Christmas money in my pocket. I finally decided on a large cutting mat that, combined with the current one I have, would cover a good portion of my cutting table and eliminate all the adjusting I have to do when cutting a large piece of fabric. With many more errands to run, I grabbed a large (36"x 24") Olfa mat and headed for the checkout.

As I was unloading the car, I thought I smelled something strange but didn't pay much attention. As I put the mat on the dining room table, I realized what was smelling: the cutting mat was giving off a strong and unpleasant plastic odor. I tried to ignore it but an hour later I just couldn't stand it. The news on the Internet was not good as I found many people complaining about how the new mats smelled.

I have three other Olfa mats as well as a couple of tiny portable ones and none of them smell. And, granted my memory is not the most reliable part of my brain, but I do not remember any of them smelling so much that I couldn't be in the same room with them. Does anyone else remember an older mat smelling?

Another ominous sign: the FAQs section on the Olfa website actually addresses this problem. There they reassuringly state that if you wash the mat in vinegar and water, the smell will disappear, although you may have to do this more than once. I tried three times and even soaked the mat for a couple of hours in the tub with the vinegar solution. It still smells.

So I sat on the phone for fifteen minutes waiting for customer service and finally gave up and e-mailed Olfa that they had a very dissatisfied customer. A week and a half later, the day before I was going to make the hour-long trek back up to Joann's, I received a reply, saying that they apologized and, if I would tell them the exact size of the mat, they would replace it. So I sent the size to them, asked what I was to do with the old mat, and ended my e-mail, saying, "And I assume the new mat will not smell."

Five days later I received yet another reply:

Unfortunately, all of our Olfa rotary mats have a strong plastic smell.

Olfa recommends that you use a mixture of warm water and dishwashing detergent to wash your mat. Please use a lemon or other citrus based dishwashing detergent as this will nelp neutralize the smell. You may have to wash the mat several times.

You can also try laying the mat flat in a tub with a mixture of white vinegar and cool water; more white vinegar than water. Allow the mat to soak in the mixture for about 30 minutes. You may need to do this one more time.

Try wiping the mat down with Murphy’s Oil Soap or pine scented Lysol.

I particularly liked the recommendation to use pine-scented Lysol. You certainly would not smell plastic after wiping it down with that. I have not tried any more of these. And their other suggestion to just let it air out has not worked since it has been smelling up our basement now for a month.

I am disappointed that a company that sold what I thought was a reliable, quality product no longer does and angry about the way they have handled this since I am not sure Joann's will take the mat back at this point. My reply to their last e-mail contained this question: Why, if any of these methods work, don't you use them before you send out the mats to retail stores?

So that's the end of my rant, and, if you made it to the end with me, thanks for the company!

Poetic Piece

2012-02-02T12:12:00.000-05:00

"On a Sligo Hill" and the rest of the Deep Spaces exhibit has now traveled to Texas, but while it was hanging in the state of Washington, it played a role in the annual celebration of the arts known as ArtsCrush Weekend in Edmonds. As part of the festivities, a group of poets (Floating Mountain Poets--isn't that a great name?) wrote poems about each of the quilts and staged a poetry reading with the exhibit as a backdrop. Now I have never had anyone write a poem about one of my quilts so I felt a bit special when I found out this was going to happen--and curious about what kind of poem my quilt would generate. About a week ago, my curiosity was satisfied.

On a Sligo Hill

by Tom Nivison

From the giant's apron

Boulders tumbled

And rolled

And opened a road

Into the essence of earth.

Gathered round

To tomb and womb

The rock told tales

Of weight and waiting.

Deep beneath the dead

The white way rises

'Til it crowns

With stones and shells

The hollow hills

Of Sligo.

I'll have to see what other surprises this quilting journey has in store. And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Making Art out of Needles and Thread

2012-01-27T18:22:00.001-05:00

The forecasts of snow on January 10 proved once again illusory, and so I made the hour's drive to the gallery at the Pennsylvania College of Technology to meet an artist and her work. Anila Quayyam Agha was billed as a mixed media artist, but I knew one of those media involved thread--and, I assumed but wrongly as it turns out, textiles. She does her stitching on paper and uses the traditional associations of making stitches with women and also with mending and nurturing to imbue her works with meaning. One of her pieces took up a whole wall in the gallery:

Anila is originally from Pakistan and, while there recently, visited a necropolis, a huge cemetery where the grave markers for men indicated the careers they pursued while alive; those for women were beautifully decorated but identified them only as wives, mothers, or daughters, even though some may have been doctors or teachers. Anila created this wall of traditional designs in homage to these women, who even in death were viewed more as ornaments than as persons with identities of their own. To make each square she first drew a background design (you can see the faint flowers in the background), then stitched the intricate pattern into the paper, added black ink, and finally applied wax to seal the surface.

Another of her works is a series of nine larger black and white squares that deal with the devastating floods in Pakistan and the stitching symbolizes mending and rebuilding, the putting of things in order after the chaos.

Her most striking piece was difficult to photograph--it was about a ten-foot square created out of 870 pieces of thread hung on a grid from the ceiling, each threaded into a needle that hung just above the floor. About a foot from the ceiling a tiny silver piece was tied into the thread, giving the effect of drops of water--or tears. As you moved around it, your angle of vision caused the whole huge cube to shift impressively. Much symbolism here again with the needles suggesting the pain of injustice and oppression as well as the need for and hope of finding a way to mend the situation.

We talked about dyes--since she dyes the paper she uses--and about thread. She uses an undyed raw silk thread for her work and sometimes dyes it black, as she did for the stitching around the circle in the above piece. I am going to have to see if I can find that thread somewhere since it makes a very fine stitch with a bit of a sheen to it.

And if you are still with me on this journey to art nearby, thanks for the company.

Photo Doodle

2012-01-22T20:00:00.003-05:00

Snowy creek

Inspired to Work

2012-01-16T19:27:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted anything recently because I have been immersed in an online course taught by Elizabeth Barton. It's called "Inspired to Design," and it's--well--inspiring. Elizabeth Barton is way up there on my list of quilters I respect and admire, and I had wanted to take her course ever since she first offered it online through Quilt University a couple of years ago, but it would fill immediately whenever registration opened so I kept missing the opportunity. Finally I made it in and am now well into the second week.

Some parts of her design process are things I already do, but her basic approach is different from the one I use and that has proven challenging. Yet it is very stimulating to try a new perspective and her methods force me to look more closely at the focus of my design and at the world in general. I am seeing patterns and design possibilities even more than I did before, and I like that. It is a real gift to be able to open someone's eyes and Elizabeth has that gift.

I am not sure where this will take me and what, if anything, I will have at the end to show for all the hours I am putting in, but I feel it will have changed me and my approach to quilting.

And, if you are still reading, thanks for the company, before I immerse myself once again in design possibilities.

Of Wisdom and the Lack Thereof

2012-01-08T10:15:00.001-05:00

So it's January--that time of evaluation and re-evaluation: everything's new and everything's still depressingly and reassuringly the same. I was going to look back on what I had actually accomplished last year, where I had traveled in my quilting journey but got smacked by one of those why-am-I-doing-this and just-who-does-she-think-she-is moments. The project I was working on was not going well--not going well at all, yet there was a deadline looming, along with a couple of others that required me to get started on other projects. I had tried a new technique on this project, as I am so often doing, and had begun to believe that I had finally skated onto such thin ice that it was cracking under me.

Much of what I am doing is not in my comfort zone. I was never the popular extrovert when I was young and I became expert at following the rules in school. I did teach classes of eighteen-and-up-year-olds and hosted large gatherings in other jobs I held but neither involved the self-revelation that writing a journal blog or making art does. And I don't have an art degree that says that at least somebody thinks I am qualified at all this.

And why do I feel the need to break the rules? I even break the blogging rules by writing posts that are much too long. Perhaps, as I have gotten older, I have come to mistrust certainty and well worn paths that always come with lots of rules. Yet certainty sings a siren song.

My husband, who is a wise person (and also a wise ass, but that's another story), reminded me that, if I am looking for myself, I need to accept what I find, and part of me is the unsure part, the part that questions what I am doing and why I am doing it, and that also becomes part of the work I create.

All of this has brought to mind the two words I chose at the beginning of last year--dare and dance--which have worked magic several times and still have some usefulness left in them because I obviously haven't learned all their lessons.

There is always going to be a bit of daring in the next steps I take, if they are really my own--and I, being who I am, will question every step. That's the way it's gonna be. Just gotta learn to dance to those rhythms.

In the middle of writing this post, I took a break to take Terra on a walk and there in the middle of our path was this dandelion, blooming its little heart out. Now it has been a bit warm around here but it is still January.

--Poor deluded thing-- I said to myself . Here obviously was a sign from the gods about the foolishness of those who break the rules, who try to create beauty or meaning in the off season. But then I noticed this about two feet away:

Now that little dandelion may be laughing all the way to the gene pool at all those other dandelions who are following the rules and waiting for spring.

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

Photo Doodle

2011-12-29T17:12:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!

Puddle Ice

Change

2011-12-19T11:29:00.000-05:00

About a month ago I was driven to the basement by the increasing noise on the ridge immediately across from our house, but I managed at least to get some dyeing done as I fumed and inveighed against our fate and the gas drilling companies who were changing our beautiful, quiet county. When the noise lessened enough for me to emerge and work again upstairs, I knew I had to set other projects aside and somehow put what I was feeling into fabric. So I did some sketches, pulled out my hand-dyes, and "Fracked" was born:

And yes, those seams on either side of the black line are not meant to line up. I wanted the presence of the trucks to be one of the issues this quilt dealt with and it just so happened that a motor grader and some dump trucks had been working recently on our road and there were lots of tire tracks in our driveway and in the soft soil on the roadsides so I could easily find a track to copy. I finally settled on fused tulle for the tracks and it did just what I wanted.

The quilt is now hanging in the VESTA show at the Gmeiner Art and Cultural Center and I have heard many comments from a number of people, most of them feeling that I was providing an image for their own feelings of frustration, dismay, even despair over the changes that are taking place here. But it is a complicated issue. We heat our home with natural gas, and I had always felt gas was one of the cleanest forms of energy, although I am finding that this particular form of extraction significantly lowers its cleanliness rating. And I certainly do not begrudge the elation of those residents who can stay in the place they love and make more than a subsistence wage or those farmers who can now afford to take a vacation or replace a leaking roof.

And then there were the two women from Arkansas and Oklahoma (if I remember correctly) who were spouses of gas workers and who came to the opening reception and wanted to talk to me about my quilt. "But the gas workers are being very careful," they said, "and this area is still beautiful." I tried to explain the changes I was seeing, things they might not notice if they were used to living in a more industrialized area, and the dangers we feared from a spill or a leak that would suddenly take away our drinking water or poison livestock or wildlife or the air pollution that would increase the likelihood of chronic or fatal diseases. And they spoke of their concerns of being ostracized. I felt we had a good talk because we were both honest about our views; I hope they felt the same way.

Actually, I had an easier time talking with them than with the woman who came up and said she appreciated the humor in my quilt. "Hmm," I said, "I hadn't thought of it that way." "Well," she said," you could take the quilt either way--those tire tracks could be a good thing or a bad thing." "Hmmm," I said.

And if you are still with me after this longish journey, thanks for the company!

The Shortest Day of the Year

2011-12-19T11:03:00.000-05:00

A reminder to me today that Nature does not perform according to expectations like a well trained circus animal: a little snow was predicted for last night and I was going to combine a picture of that with one of Mary Oliver's insightful poems as a solstice post. But there was no snow and so I thought about a sunrise picture--too cloudy at sunrise. My last resort was to take my camera on my morning walk with Terra--too rainy to take the camera any further than the front porch.

So today we must find beauty in a puddle. . . .

and celebrate a cold December rain, the long darkness, and the coming light. Happy Solstice!

Challenge Finale

2011-12-14T22:19:00.001-05:00

Earlier this week our local challenge group got together to share what each of us had made out of the "challenging" fabrics we had each been given two months ago. And here is what I came up with:

My main inspiration came from the flaming red hand-dye Louise had given me. Of course, the one hand-dye would be inspiring! The rest were all commercial prints, something I haven't used much of in a number of years. I spent many days contemplating those fabrics, but one morning after coming back from a yoga class, where we always end with what our teacher calls the flame mudra--palms of the hands pressed together in prayer position and then raised and held over our heads, I looked at the fabrics and realized I could use this image in quilt. This is a meaningful pose for me, coming as it does after an hour of slowing down and focusing, and also reminds me of the flame hovering above the buddha's head on ancient statues.

I decided to try to create the flames with reverse applique and also to make the flames dark and the background red instead of the other way around. I made selective cuts from the Asian fabric that had a variety of gray patterns as well as some solid black areas and added some light gray of my own to create some value changes in the flames. I also decided to take a chance and make the flame off center by adding that strip of my own hand-dyed yellow down one side only. Those pesky checks, which I thought I was going to have trouble using since they were too dominant as flames, became part of the border. So I ended up using all four of the fabrics given me, although the actual challenge only required us to use two.

The quilting was fairly simple with an outlining stitch around the flames, and I wanted some texture on the yellow strip so I added some perle cotton in a different pattern from what I had used before.

This little quilt measures about 15" x 11 1/2" and just about used up all the four pieces of fabric.

And this week we got to ooh and aah over all the quilts. The fabrics were all different, of course, and the styles were amazingly different as well: Peggy's fancy circles that enabled her to use her circle stitcher on her machine, Louise's meditative Asian-inspired piece that became an homage to her mother, who had just passed away; Anya's successful venture into improvisational curves inspired by Gee's Bend; a clever barn by Nancy that will help her grandson learn to open various fasteners; Dori's frazzled and frayed circles whose raw edges represented her mood at this time of year.

Susan, our seventh member, had hung around her grandchildren too much and ended up sick, but you can read about her adventures with the challenge on her blog.

I would say our group is off to a great start, wouldn't you? And if you are still with me, thanks for reading.

Art with a Friend

2011-12-09T12:00:00.001-05:00

A month or so ago a friend who had just moved to the Syracuse area from Missouri invited me to come see her new home and go with her to the Art=Quilts=Art exhibit at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, an irresistible invitation. Now driving the two-plus hours toward Syracuse at this time of year is challenging (and the reason I never got to the show last year), and the weather did what it could to make me question my decision to go yesterday:

It had snowed a good part of the evening before, but I didn't see a single snowflake fall during my drive, just glorious landscapes as the snow highlighted the lines of trees on the mountains.

I often like to see art exhibits and particularly quilt exhibits by myself, moving at my own pace without having to worry about someone else looking surreptitiously at her watch as I stand contemplating a particular piece, but my afternoon with Mary Lou reminded me of the advantages of sharing this experience. Mary Lou is not a quilter and probably saw more art quilts yesterday than she had seen in the rest of her life, but she is a keen observer and does sew. She quickly caught on to my need to stand back and then move close to a work, even calling me over to see the tiny red stripe in what looked like white lines on black from a distance in one of Kathy Loomis' quilts.

And we looked for patterns together and tried to figure out techniques and commented on things that drew us to a particular quilt. We noticed different things and it made for a most enjoyable afternoon. Of course we were surrounded by strong works of art that were capable of holding our attention and worthy of the time we spent with them. I could have spent much more time there but the sun was continuing to move across the sky and I did not want to drive my entire trip home in the dark.

So thank you to the weather gods for allowing me to slip between snow storms and thanks, Mary Lou, for your hospitality and companionship!

And if you are still with me, thanks for your company as well!

Even More Local Art

2011-12-04T20:29:00.001-05:00

Every December VESTA, a group of local professional artists and craftswomen, gather some of the pieces they have been working on over the course of the year and create an exhibit at the Gmeiner, the local art & cultural center here. Its opening coincides with the town's big holiday festival, Dickens of a Christmas, when Main Street is closed to traffic and becomes wall-to-wall people ebbing and flowing around vendors set up on the sidewalks. I have no pictures of the crowd this year because I spent the whole day talking to visitors to the gallery.

We are an eclectic group as this shot of a corner of the gallery shows:

Here you see hand-dyed and hand-woven scarves by Ruth Ann Miller, baskets hand woven from willow Patty Dillman grows herself, aprons made by Barb Most with pockets made from old handkerchiefs and other linens or photographs from the thirties, cards designed and hand colored by Linda Hoerner (who also makes jewelry), a quilt or two, of course, and on the bench an in-progress lace project by Judie Mainus.

Kathy Cummings painted, among other pieces, a three-part series in oil, cleverly depicting a little girl's coming-of-age through her shoes.

And Alyson Leach, who also works in oils, included several pieces from her Vanishing Landscapes series in the show:

My photos of Alice Mickey's beautiful clouds done in pastels that you can see on the back wall of the gallery need a retake and will be added later.

And there was more: jewelry made from re-purposed elements by Ali Taylor, glass beads and jewelry by Kathy Riley and Jen Kuhn, who also makes felted art fabric from alpaca wool.

I think our diversity adds energy to this exhibit; it certainly adds it to our conversations when we get together.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

Local Art

2011-11-30T22:04:00.001-05:00

The best way to experience art, of course, is to see the real thing--to stand in front of the original and see the texture and color and line the way the artist put it on the canvas or created it out of fabric or stone or wood. Getting regular doses of original art can be a challenge for those of us who live in the less urbanized parts of the country and so I decided to take advantage of the opening of a show in the surprisingly impressive gallery at Penn College in Williamsport (about an hour from where I live) a couple of weeks ago. The art of Virginia Bradley and Chris Malcomson from Philadelphia was on display, two very different artists who happen to be married to each other.

Malcomson works on huge squarish canvasses taller than I am. He does a lot of underpainting (a technique that could be akin to overdyeing?) so that when he is finished his paintings glow with color. In his talk he spoke of his love of Rothko and other painters who suggest thresholds in their paintings, inviting us to go through the painted surface.

"Reaching" is one of the pieces he showed us and my image of it is from the publicity for the show.

He said his goal was to "paint stuff that was trying to add something to people's lives," and he said it in his British accent so it became even more significant. "As life gets busier, art should go slower" so it becomes a place "where people can stop and go inside themselves and then go anywhere they want." His paintings certainly slowed me down as I stood in front of them and soaked in the strong blues and reds with hints of many other colors breaking through.

Bradley establishes a dialogue with the images in her work and there is much activity in her pieces. She layers prints over a variety of backgrounds and then adds layers of paint and other media over them.

She created one very interesting layer by pouring molten pewter over a print of girls in classical Rome and then carving into it to create even more texture. Her fearless experimentation was infectious.

I came away thinking about art and its meaning and purpose as well as color and texture and experimentation--all making the trip worthwhile. The show is at Penn College until Dec. 11.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-22T22:06:00.001-05:00

To all my friends and mentors who make art with fabric or paint or paper or glass or words or pixels or a million other media, thank you for sharing your thoughts and your laughter with me, for giving me just the right word of encouragement when I needed it, for inspiring me with your work and creativity, for helping us all see this world and ourselves a little differently.

Ice Flowers formed by frost heave
From a walk with Terra Thanksgiving 2011

Féileacán 2

2011-11-21T12:39:00.001-05:00

Last year the little Celtic knotwork butterfly that I made for Ami Simm's Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative sold so quickly at the VESTA show that I decided to stage a repeat performance. Well, I did my part of the performance; let's see if anyone buys it. If someone does, the proceeds I get after the gallery takes its slice will go to AAQI; if nobody buys it, the quilt itself will go to the AAQI auction.

This one is the same knotwork pattern as last year but with some color, background, and body changes. I started this after the last one sold, thinking I would add the butterfly pattern I created to the Celtic knotwork class I teach and would use it as a sample. But, due to a long list of obligations, the class did not happen in the summer. Perhaps next summer--but that would mean I should get started on another butterfly.

These are, by the way, my hand-dyes, except for the commercial purple batik. I had a tough time making the body stand out from the purple and finally decided to edge it in two colors of couched perle cotton---light blue and dark purple and I think it works.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

Risk

2011-11-18T14:44:00.001-05:00

Since I had finished what had become my comfort quilting, I decided to go back to work on my Doodle Squares to keep up my free motion quilting practice. After all, the VESTA show is fast approaching and I have less than half the number that I had last year to sell. And decided to move from the safety of the well known pattern to the risk of trying something new.

Now if you know me well, you know drawing is not my strong point. But I have learned that if I really, really, really look at something, there is a much better chance that I create a good-enough approximation of it. And if I can draw it, I can perhaps quilt it as well. I have been quilting oak leaves and other smooth edged leaves for years, but I always wanted to do a free-motion maple leaf. I have been studying, i.e., really, really, really looking, at sugar maple leaves on my early morning walks with Terra for the past month or so and remembered reading somewhere that if you start with the veins, it's easier to draw a leaf. I tried a couple with pencil and paper and lo and behold! they each looked like a good-enough maple leaf. So on to thread and fabric:

Now, it's lucky for me that no two maple leaves look exactly alike so there is a great range of acceptability and I think I could use some more practice getting the shape a bit fuller but I was pleased that my first attempts did resemble maple leaves--closer than I have ever gotten before.

Usually my Doodle Squares are reversible and for the back of this one I had chosen a batik that I loved with these great green dots on it. But--repeat after me--a print or heavy texture hides quilting stitches. I know this from years of trying to hide my quilting stitches, but, for some reason, I forgot that cardinal rule when I was choosing the fabric. The leaves are difficult enough to see on the top but on the back they become an excellent example of camouflage, a Can-you-find-the-hidden-leaves-in-this-picture game.

I even outlined all the leaves in a dark purple that should have contrasted with the background. They still didn't show up. Oh, well. . .

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Safety

2011-11-12T15:11:00.001-05:00

During the past few weeks whenever I couldn't figure out what to do next on my current quilt project I have been steadily working on the background quilting for a largish quilt. When I decided on this pattern--what I call an interrupted meander--that would cover a large border section, I knew it was the right decision but thought I would become achingly bored with it.

Now I like this pattern and have used it before. It suggests a leafed vine to me, but only suggests it. But there would be so much of it this time.

Well, I finished it up last week and I am finding I miss it. It was safe and comfortable. I could do it easily and no decisions needed to be made. I just switched to my free motion quilting foot, put down my Supreme Slider, popped on the appropriate thread and simply quilted for a while. I didn't need to worry that the slice I was about to make through the quilt top would ruin it or the tulle I was about to fuse down wouldn't work or even figure out how I was going to quilt the little quiltlet I am working on.

While always living in a completely safe and predictable world is not healthy for artists and other living beings, it sure is nice to visit once in a while.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

And the lemonade

2011-11-07T21:50:00.001-05:00

Amazingly, we have had two blissful days of relative quiet up here on our hill--not as quiet as it was two years ago but a distanced background noise--until this afternoon when the noise levels began to ramp up again. But I did manage to get a lot done during those two days--including rinsing out the contents of those dye buckets from my last post. I will share a few samples with you.

Several of my pieces were overdyes, attempts to rectify a dye job gone bad for some reason or simply another planned layer in a process. I had dyed several gradations of a burgundy a while ago that turned out looking unpleasantly like dried blood and so I added a layer of ultra violet and those pieces came out looking like this:

And I jazzed up a couple of lifeless browns with a little yellow:

I added a green background--the green didn't photograph very well so just imagine this a bit greener--to one of my flour paste crackles and suddenly those lines began to look a little like trees.

I couldn't resist doing another of my lined dyes and made this one vertical:

And I am playing around with these strange little squiggle shapes that I am finding intriguing:

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

Making Lemonade--or new fabric

2011-11-04T10:53:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I couldn't stand it any more. Gas drilling has taken over our beautiful, rural county and, while I complained about the huge trucks on the roads and the number of fields sprouting bulldozers, water tanks, and drilling rigs and worried constantly about our water supply, I could always retreat to the relative quiet of our hill. Yes, we had wells drilled within hearing distance a year ago but the sound was muffled by hilltops and was only really a problem when all was quiet. But for the past month the pad over the hill has been enlarged to the top of the hill and now machinery noises bouncing off the hills sound like a motor grader is driving back and forth in our driveway.

I didn't realize how much I cherished a quiet space to work in or a quiet walk in our woods with Terra to start my day--they fire up their trucks and graders as soon as it's light out. Unable to work yesterday, I retreated to the basement to dye fabric where the machine noise was not so prominent.

And today I get to see what surprises come out of all my dye buckets and bins. I had a friend once who loved to say, "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade." In fact, she said it so often it became really annoying--perhaps that's why the noise surrounding me reminded me of her. Anyway, making lemonade out of these lemons that life has handed Tioga County is becoming increasingly more difficult.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

Unfamiliar Territory

2011-11-02T20:36:00.000-04:00

Finding your way out of a place that is unfamiliar is supposed to stimulate your brain and sharpen your problem-solving skills, and perhaps it draws out that elusive creative spirit. At least that is what a small group of local quilters is putting to the test in a challenge we have given ourselves. We each drew a name of another member of the group and then a few days later presented her with four fat eighths of fabric that were out of her comfort zone. She was then to use at least two of these fabrics in a quilt less than 16 inches square.

Now my comfort zone is clearly delineated since I have been using my own hand-dyes or commercial hand-dyes or batiks for a number of years so I knew some commercial prints were bound to come my way and so they did:

The upper left is a tiny floral and of course there are more flowers in the Asian fabric. That black check is going to really push my limits, but my challenge mate took it easy on me with that beautiful hand-dyed red. After the first few days of staring stupidly at these four fabrics, I began to try a couple of things and have to admit I'm having fun right now. We'll see how I characterize the process when it is further along. And things could have been much worse. You can check out what Anya, who loves bright colors, got, but it was hard to challenge Susan, who uses all kinds of fabrics in her quilting.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

The Emergence of the Butterfly

2011-10-26T12:31:00.000-04:00

Now that I am home again and am somewhat recovered from trying to pretend that I can keep up with bottomless energy of a three and a half year old I have put some serious effort into finishing that baby quilt. I had done quite a bit of the quilting and had even finished the machine part of the binding sewing--must have had some premonition that this baby was going to be early--before I left. So I was able to sew the binding down while I was away.

And the quilt looked something like this when I returned:

The butterfly actually had no antennae when I began work.and I had to make two attempts before I got them right. The first was a sparkly black heavy thread that I had begun couching when I realized that the thread was scratchy and a tender little baby cheek would not fare well rubbing against those antennae. But, as often happens when something doesn't work out, I found something better--that soft, fuzzy silk sari yarn.

I also quilted a spiral shape on the yellow sun circle and added some rays--or petals--around it.

But I kept being bothered by something. I kept telling myself that this was not an art quilt and that all those embellishments I kept wanting to add would not work on a baby quilt that would be washed and that this quilt needed to be done and sent off so I could get on with other things. Not being able to leave it alone, however, I decided to add another image and finally hit upon something that would be a complement to the lively flight of a butterfly and mirror the spiral in the sun.

I added a little snail and suddenly the composition was complete and I felt satisfied. It still isn't a complex art quilt--that's not what it's supposed to be--but I am much happier with it. It also now has gained some Aesop-like symbolism--a reminder that there are times we can fly and times we must slow down.

So what do you think? Am I just fooling myself that that snail improved the composition or did it add something? Or do you think it looked fine before? Of course, there is always the possibility that you don't like it at all and no matter what I added you still wouldn't like it. And ultimately, the most important opinion will come from Abigail.

Whatever you think, if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

October Leaves

2011-10-20T07:42:00.000-04:00

I don't know whether anyone else will think this is pretty cool, but on my walk with Terra yesterday I was keeping my eyes on the ground since, thanks to several rain storms, that is where the color is now, and right in front of me appeared a Halloween leaf:

I am at a loss as to what critter may have created these mask-like holes, but my three-and-a-half year old granddaughter could make a great story out of this.

And lest I be accused of writing too many non-quilt-related posts, I should let you know that I was actually looking at the leaf litter as a source of inspiration for the series of quilts I'm doing with leafy litter backgrounds like this one:

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

My Favorite Color

2011-10-16T14:43:00.002-04:00

Butterfly bush: no butterflies but a beautiful surprise in October in Massachusetts.

The Baby and the Butterfly

2011-10-11T09:42:00.000-04:00

Even as a child, I loved butterflies, and even though they have become rather overused and a bit too romanticized, I still am fascinated by them and their possibilities for symbolism. Rabindranath Tagore wisely said, "The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough," but time beat me on this butterfly project.

Thanks to my son and his wife, I had another grandchild due October 22 and of course a quilt was due as well. I had made her big sister a quilt with butterflies and tried out all sorts of possibilities but finally kept coming back to the butterfly.

I decided to keep the design simple since, as I kept reminding myself, this is not an art quilt but a quilt for a baby to use. You may notice that, simple as it is, this quilt is not finished. I had begun the quilting when I got the call on October 5 that Sarah was having some serious contractions, and the next day I was on my way to Massachusetts to help welcome Abigail--with an unfinished quilt in the car.

Right now I am piecing together the moments of holding a tiny new bit of life, who knows how to yawn magnificently and puts a yoga teacher to shame with her stretches, helping a very articulate three-and-a half year old figure out what this new title of big sister means, and making healthy meals and doing whatever else I can for two sleep-deprived adults. And there will be time enough for all these things--and quilting, too.

Postcards

2011-09-28T15:11:00.001-04:00

Look what was in my mailbox yesterday morning hidden among all the requests for support for worthy causes, the junk mail, and the catalogs:

Three postcards from the postcard swap I entered last month! They are all on the theme of "A summer's day" but each of the creators (Frieda Oxenham from Scotland, Julie Wolkoff from Florida, and Laurie M.) has a very different interpretation. They certainly brightened up a dreary fall day.

My Favorite Colors

2011-09-27T16:22:00.001-04:00

It happens every year but it still comes as a beautiful surprise to see the fields glowing with the yellow goldenrod with blue purple accents from the field asters.

PNQE Thoughts

2011-09-25T12:23:00.000-04:00

It's been a very busy week since I dragged myself out of bed at 4:30 AM to catch a bus for the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza XVI (In a contest for titles of quilt shows, that one would certainly not win a prize). And I treated myself this morning to a few quiet moments of looking over the photos I took there.

When we first arrived I started my tour of the quilts and was moving fairly quickly, noting an interesting one here and there but nothing that pulled me in until I happened upon the SAQA exhibit, Layers of Memory, and I found myself standing and staring for a long time at one quilt after another. There is a bit of the maker in any quilt and particularly any quilt that gets juried into a show but some seem to me to so clearly display the mind, heart, skill that created this piece that I just want to spend some time with those quilts, to try to give the meaning, intention, or whatever the maker was trying to put in this piece time to connect with me--and I found several of those in this show.

The theme challenge Bridge produced some amazingly thoughtful and skillful pieces from the Quilt on the Wall group. And the international quilts were a delight. New Zealand nurtures some very talented quilters, and the quilters in South Africa must eat the full spectrum for breakfast every morning. Did I say it was a very good day?

I have become more conscious about posting photos without checking with the artists, and I even looked for some e-mail or blog contact with some makers of my favorite quilts today but could find none. So I must settle for the inadequacy of words.

And, if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

Preparing

2011-09-15T11:56:00.000-04:00

This has been a week of preparation: gathering quilts for a talk I am giving at our guild on Monday, harvesting veggies from the garden since a frost is due tonight, beginning a quilt for the birth of our granddaughter sometime in late October (I know I should have started this sooner--seems like I have said that before), and gathering things to do on the bus trip tomorrow that will take me to Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza outside Philadelphia. I haven't been to this show in a few years, but I'm expecting to come back inspired and humbled.

Of Snow-dyes and Silks continued

2011-09-11T11:48:00.000-04:00

Sorry this took longer to continue than I planned. We got an extended visit from my daughter, son-in-law, and our two-and-a-half-year-old grandson as the flooded rivers in Pennsylvania and New York prevented their return trip home on Thursday and I was worrying about them on their second attempt on Saturday. But now they are safely back in their own territory and there is no one playing cars on the couch in our house when I come down the stairs in the morning. . . .

But back to my wall hanging that I left you imagining. I had thought about just sandwiching it and beginning the quilting, perhaps adding some kind of wandering pathway of quilting lines joining the three shapes with trees. But then I gave one more try at adding a pointy shape to all those rounded ones and knew I was on to something when I added a few triangles.

So here it is:

I finished it up by quilting around all the shapes and then adding some irregular horizontal quilting lines and some perle cotton on the triangles. It's about 17 x 27 inches and is called "Happenstance." And so I did find something to do with that wild snow-dye.

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

Of Snow-dyes and Silks

2011-09-07T14:30:00.000-04:00

I thought for sure I had sewn myself into a corner--or more appropriately, when you see the final version, a sinkhole. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of this wall hanging at this stage because I wasn't sure it would be worth preserving a memory of it. Someday I will learn to take more pictures. . .

I had just finished my goldfinch quilt, which created a design using reverse applique and I wanted to play around with that technique a bit more. I had also come across a snow dye from last year that was a bit wild and I wanted to challenge myself to do something with it. Ultimately, I decided to do a reverse applique where the fabric underneath had some texture to it. The only fabric that even remotely seemed to go with the snow dye was some blue-purple and red-purple silk. So for texture I pleated some squares that were around 10 inches and added some iron-on interfacing on the back to stabilize that silk that is always wanting to return to bits of thread and to hold the pleats in place. I created a template that was an irregular organic shape that fit each of the pleated pieces, cut the snow-dye in those shapes to reveal the silk, and machine stitched the edges of the opening. As I was finishing these up, I happened to notice that wonderful heavy thread made out of sari silk that I had bought in NYC and that I had been dying to work with. It was a perfect color and so I machine couched it around each of the silk shapes.

Now I had hanging on my working wall a piece of fabric with three fuzzy-edged blobby shapes on it and I had no idea where to go with it. And so it hung there for a long while. I would occasionally try something on it but nothing worked until one day I tried that sari silk (love the feel of that stuff) in a kind of a scribble shape and left it there over night. The next morning that scribble looked exactly like a tree and so three trees grew in the three pleated silk shapes. But it needed something more.

To be continued. . . .

Can This Be Saved?

2011-09-04T10:46:00.001-04:00

Last week, along with several pieces of fabric that I really like, I produced this:

I had been playing with flour paste resist that can produce great crackly images when it dries and has paint or dye applied to it. And here I was experimenting with adding shapes to it, obviously circles this time. The other two are ready for the next step of overdyeing, but this one. . . . My first thought was that it looks like moisture rings left by a glass on your favorite table. Aside from overdyeing it with black, I have so far not come up with anything to save this. Any suggestions?

It worked!

2011-08-31T14:03:00.000-04:00

So nobody is home to share my excitement--except for Terra, who rarely gets excited about fabric unless it has had chicken juices or some such splashed on it. I just ironed a piece of fabric that finished batching this morning. A couple of days ago this piece of fabric came out of the dye bath with these great stripes of blue green on it along with regularly spaced irregular lines of dark blue green. I liked it, but I wanted to add something more so I folded it again and over-dyed it with golden yellow in the hopes that heavier lines of yellow would appear between the green lines.

It worked!

And, if you are home and reading this, thanks for the company!

A Beautiful Day to Dye

2011-08-30T20:51:00.000-04:00

Since the trees here are just beginning to remind me that fall is coming, I thought I really should get around to that dyeing I have been thinking about all summer--before my dyeing studio, otherwise known as the basement, gets too cold for the dyes or me to work properly. And so for the past couple of days, I have been, like the trees, adding a bit of color to my world.

A Summer's Day. . .

2011-08-23T09:02:00.000-04:00

Thanks to a post from a blogging friend, I found the perfect distraction after the intensity of Jane Dunnewold's class and other projects I have been working on and discovered a great website--Lenna Andrews' Creative Swaps. Each month she posts a couple of possible swaps you can sign up for and the first one in September was a postcard swap on the theme of "A Summer's Day. . . ." If you send her three postcards on that theme, you will receive three back, each from a different artist. She supplies plenty of helpful guidelines about making art postcards, and they can be done in any medium, not just fabric. So I decided to give it a try.

For my first attempt, I used some little tree stamps I had made in Jane's class to add some paint to a hand-dyed pieced of fabric:

I obviously added some stitching and some fused shadows. On the back of the card, you were supposed to put your name, e-mail address and then finish the phrase "A summer's day. . . ." I added ". . .is all about sunshine and shadow."

I decided on butterflies for the focus of the next postcard, and just happened to have a butterfly stamp that I made in Jane's class as well. I played with transparent and opaque paint and then topped the painted butterflies with a fabric one and added some quilting lines:

And on to my third! I was having a lot of fun by this time and decided to give my butterflies another try since I had already made the templates for the one above. This time, instead of stamping I decided on a fused background of large circles.

The gold thread I couched on the wings and the variegated pearl cotton scatter stitches gave it a zing. On all of these the background fabric was fused to Peltex and then the edges turned over to the back and fused to form a finished edge. Then the back fabric was fused on, covering the turned over edges. In all three I made use of those leftover bits of my hand-dyes that I hate to throw away.

The back of this reads "A summer's day is not complete without a butterfly."

Something kept me from finishing the second postcard, perhaps because I was feeling that it needed something more. So one day I started playing with adding bits of color. See what you think of my addition of some small rough cut circles to my final version.

I added my theme statement, "A summer's day brings sunshine and butterflies," put a backing on it, and declared it done!

Now I just have to add plastic sleeves and postage and send them off to Lenna.

And, if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

Deep Spaces

2011-08-18T21:38:00.000-04:00

I received an exciting e-mail this week. The postcard for the Deep Spaces exhibit (which my quilt On a Sligo Hill will be part of!) is out and the schedule for the venues where it will hang has been finalized. Unfortunately, unless the state of Washington or Texas gets a whole lot closer to Pennsylvania geographically, I am not going to be able to see any of the exhibits in person. Sigh. . .

Deep Spaces
A Textile and Mixed Media Exhibit

Curator Larkin Jean Van Horn selected the theme "Deep Spaces" following a conversation with friends about the limits of space and the photography from the Hubble telescope. While it was clear that textile art dealing with the cosmos would be an appealing exhibit, the title implied so much more. Artists interested in participating in the exhibit were encouraged to interpret the theme in any manner that suited them, and the entries were outstanding. The artists went deep into space, deep underground, deep under water, deep into the woods, canyons and prairies, and deep into the mysteries of the heart. Each artist worked in her own style, whether photorealism or pure abstraction or something in between. Holding all this wide variety together is a common size (18 inches wide by 45 inches long).

The task of choosing the fifty pieces in the exhibit from the hundred-plus submitted fell to Larkin and two other highly experienced textile artists, Debra Calkins and Anne Niles Davenport. For one of the venues (Latimer), Larkin also invited several artist friends to create three-dimensional works for an existing display case. In the final total, we have 58 works from 19 states and two international entries.

In line with Larkin's desire to do good in the world wherever possible, a catalog has been created for this exhibit, and will be for sale in disk format, either at the exhibit venues or from the Deep Spaces website: http://www.deep-spaces.com, or in book form from Blurb: http://www.blurb.com. (A direct link will be available on deep-spaces.com when it is ready.) All proceeds from the sale of the catalogs will go to Doctors Without Borders.

Dates and venues:

September 5 to November 6, 2011
Latimer Quilt and Textile Center
2105 Wilson River Loop Road - Tillamook, Oregon
http://latimerquiltandtextile.com/
Opening Reception: Sept. 11, 2011, Noon to 4:00 pm
28 textile art and 8 special 3D pieces

October 20 to November 30, 2011
Edmonds Conference Center
201 Fourth Ave. N. - Edmonds, Washington
http://www.edmondsconferencecenter.com/
ArtsCrush Opening: Oct. 20, 2011, 5:00 to 8:00 pm
Art Walk Opening: Nov. 17, 2011, 5:00 to 8:00 pm
22 textile art

January 10 to March 12, 2012
Sam Houston University Museum
19th St and Avenue N, Huntsville, Texas
http://www.shsu.edu/~smm_www/GenInfo/
Opening Reception: January 19, 2012, 5:30 to 7:30 pm

March 28 to June 24, 2012
LaConner Quilt and Textile Museum
700 Second Street, La Conner, Washington
http://www.laconnerquilts.com/
Opening Reception: March 31, 2012, 2:00 to 4:00 pm

Due to the limits of space, 28 of the fifty pieces, plus eight 3D pieces will be shown at the Latimer while the remaining 22 will hang in Edmonds. The full fifty pieces will be shown at the other venues.

For more information on locations and hours, see http://www.deep-spaces.com

Discovery

2011-08-15T22:12:00.000-04:00

On my daily walks with Terra the past few days, I have been looking at the shapes of leaves. In my attempt to make more natural quilting lines and patterns, I have gone to the source, noting that, of course, no two leaves even on the same plant are exactly alike, but trying to get a feel for how much and in what ways they differ.

A day or so ago I began looking closely at milkweed leaves--big and fairly simple in shape--and decided to bring a couple back with me to continue my study. As I went to put Terra on the leash to cross the road, I realized my hand was sticky and, looking down, felt a momentary little puff of delight as I saw of bubble of what could only be described as milk forming at the end of the broken stem. My delight turned to chagrin at my stupidity as I realized, "Oh, yeah. That's why it's called milkweed."

Now I have lived among milkweed for over twenty years--and had encountered it on hikes before that. I know that its sap is bitter and probably is the reason why the monarch caterpillars, who love to chew on the leaves, don't taste very good to predators. I may even have been told the sap was milky. But it wasn't until I broke those leaves off that I made the connection with the name. So many things that I am ignorant about--or have forgotten. . . . .

Here's a picture of two differently shaped leaves--notice the sappy stems are not touching my cutting board. By the way, I washed my hands thoroughly when I got in the house. The sap was sticky enough that I didn't want to get it on anything else and luckily, I didn't swipe hair out of my eyes with that hand because I found out it can wreak real havoc if it gets in your eyes.

And if you are still with me and haven't run out to break leaves off a milkweed (but perhaps I am the only one who didn't know about the sap), thanks for the company.

QBL Part 3

2011-08-09T20:25:00.001-04:00

I am beginning to feel like I am writing one of those endless Hollywood film series, met with groans from those of us not entranced by the particular brand of violence, horror, or silliness depicted in the previous offerings in the series. I had, however, planned from the beginning to write not just about the details of the class, but the influence Jane's class has had on me because I feel that something changed during the course of that week.

That I was changed should not come as a surprise because, according to a book that is on my to-read list, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Demasio, our brains are changing constantly. As you read this, as a matter of fact, not only are you not getting other things done but changes visible to an MRI are happening in your brain, according to one reviewer. (Remember my brain has not yet been changed by actually reading the book.) So a week away surrounded by focused, creative people should have made a difference--that the change was big enough that I felt it is what I am trying to capture here.

But feeling it and articulating it are two different things. I know it had something to do with the Wednesday afternoon moment of panic. We had all been working hard and were looking forward to a quiet evening--a lecture by another teacher and then perhaps an early bedtime since many of us had been up rinsing fabric the night before. I was feeling as if the week was going well; I was not going to feel overwhelmed or inadequate and was learning some useful techniques. Then Jane said, " Well, I need to give you a little something to do tonight," and proceeded to outline three of the major assignments for the week. I was not alone in letting out a small gasp. "Oh, you don't have to begin tonight," she said, trying to reassure us, "but I know some of you want to move on to the next step." As we returned to our work, you could feel the pace pick up. We all worked until suppertime and many returned after the lecture; some even skipped the lecture.

By the next morning, the creativity in the room was fully displayed by the number of samples up on the design walls, and my inner critic was working overtime. A quick glance around assured me that everyone was being more productive and more creative than me, and, as I stared at the second assignment, I could think of nothing to do for it. Then, without my even putting effort into it, things changed. I looked up at one of my samples and realized that it wasn't bad. I took a sip of my morning cup of tea. I forced myself to look more closely at some of the other working walls and realized the variety of approaches there were. Some were working; some were not working as well. And mine were right in there with everyone else's. It wasn't a matter of whether I was creative or artistic or whatever adjective you want to plug in here; I just needed to keep working. And so I did. Yeah, yeah. I have heard this, even said this before, but this time I felt it. Perhaps it was because of the spirit Jane cultivated in the class or because of the talks I had had with another student I had become friends with or because of comments by other students--or some wonderful savory stew of all of these. By the end of the week I had not produced breathtakingly beautiful pieces and certainly had not finished as many samples as some of the other participants, but I had produced some pieces I was pleased with for a number of reasons. I'm still not sure I have competently captured what happened--sounds rather oversimplified as I read it over, but maybe you have a glimpse.

My work will change because of the techniques I learned from Jane Dunnewold and because of her attitude toward her own work. But my own connection with my work has changed and I feel I have taken yet another step on this quilt making journey.

And here's a picture to fill that mandatory picture slot in a blog post. It's one of those samples I did in class that is now in the quilting phase of things.

Well, I have changed your brains more than enough for one blog post and, if you are still reading, thanks very much for the company--and this is definitely the finale in the Quilting by the Lake saga.

QBL Part 2

2011-07-31T16:57:00.001-04:00

There are so many things I want to say about my week at Quilting by the Lake that I have been trying to condense into one reasonably sized post, but today I just gave up and started writing. Jane Dunnewold walked into class Monday morning and we were soon moving from the familiar territory of the basics of dyeing and fabric manipulation to dyeing silk and rayon and making stencils. By the evening of the first day the common room of our dorm suite--all three of us in the suite were taking the same class--was covered with color, all small samples drying for the next step the next morning:

My fabric is on the coffee table in the upper left of this picture. Most of these fabrics went through an another overdye bath and some even a second overdyeing, and soon some of them were becoming backgrounds for the stamps, stencils, and paint.

"Now is the time to experiment with a color you don't like," Jane said at one point, and so I tried orange with my sun stencil, a color I shy away from using.

This is a piece of silk, although the photo does not pick up the luster. I fell in love with silk during this class, the way it takes dye, the way it moves, the way it shimmers, the way it feels.

Another piece of silk became a beautiful mottled purple after three dyeings, and then took two layers of stenciling, the second layer with a metallic paint.

One of the assignments was to choose a background with a gridlike pattern and add shape/color to it:

This is a rayon fabric, and I began with adding the colored rectangles and later in the week when we learned how to apply gold leaf, I added that. I think I am ready to add some stitching and see how the gold leaf responds.

We also made stamps and then played with creating a repetitive background pattern.

While we were learning all these techniques, we were also getting a hands-on course in color theory since we had to mix paints to create analogous or complementary colors, according to the assignment. And I finally understood how a color wheel really comes in handy.

Another new technique I got to try out was screen printing, and probably due to beginner's luck, I really like the piece. We covered our screens with flour paste, let it dry, and then scratched something into the dried paste. For some reason, I was thinking of all the beautiful tall grass in the fields I walk through with Terra each morning and so drew four grass stems. Jane suggested I print several of the same image on the same sample fabric, just moving the screen a bit each time, and adding another color after a couple of prints. This is the original background that I manipulated and overdyed one more time to get the soft grid behind the grass:

And here is the printed piece:

It was calling for something more--a round moon that I originally thought would be gold leaf, but I waited until I got home to decide and ultimately added two layers of tulle so that you can still see the grass through it.

I am not sure what I will do with this sample yet, but it's good enough to take to another stage.

So here's a picture of Jane "wrapping up" the class, after a very stimulating, busy, exhausting, hot week. (Thank goodness for air conditioning as we broke 100 degrees one day!)

I'll save the analysis for the next post. And if you're still reading, thanks for the company!

Composted fabric

2011-07-27T17:38:00.001-04:00

So my little packets of compost bin fabric had been air curing in our barn while I was away and I couldn't wait to take a peek at them. It had been the requisite couple of weeks and there they were, looking rather......mummified:

The next step was supposed to be discarding the grass they had originally been wrapped around and hanging them out on a clothesline to cure a couple more days--no mention of what to do when they were desiccated and board-like.

So I soaked them in cold water for a bit and began to carefully pull them apart. And now I know what you get when you put fabric in a compost bin--composted fabric.

Perhaps our compost bin is just a bit too enthusiastic, but the fabric had begun to digest just like the vegetable peelings and weeds that had surrounded it. Cotton does, after all, come from a plant and should react the same way.

One site that I had consulted online had said that bug damage could be a problem, but she optimistically went on to say that a couple of holes would be acceptable for the kind of quilts she makes. This is way beyond a couple of holes. No pictures, by the way, of how her experiment turned out. As a matter of fact, I realize now that there was a curious absence of pictures of the finished products.

Anyway, the fabric fell apart in my hands, just as if it had been in a tomb for a couple of centuries. But when I looked closely at some of the bigger bits, there were some intriguing patterns of a rich brown color that made me wish this had turned out better.

Hmmm. Perhaps if I let it compost only a week, instead of a month. . . .

Oh, and if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

QBL Part 1

2011-07-23T15:45:00.000-04:00

I drove off to Quilting by the Lake last Sunday and Jane Dunnewold's New Complex Cloth class with plans to blog during the week. I even took a couple of pictures the first of my work-filled workspace.

But I never got even a few minutes to throw together a blog post. Jane kept us all busy--all the time. Got home last night exhausted and excited about the possibilities in what I learned. More details later but right now laundry and putting away all the stuff I took with me is occupying all the energy this swampy hot day has left me.

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company and hope it's cooler wherever you are.

Madalene

Warning! Yucky Pictures Ahead

2011-07-12T12:51:00.000-04:00

As I continue to tumble through this busy summer, quilting and blogging seem to have taken a back seat to visiting kids and grandkids, cleaning for overnight guests, and helping a fledgling growers' market take root, but I have not forgotten the grand experiment. I began to worry a bit about it since the weather has been quite warm and the compost, I was sure, was cooking away. It was actually a bit hard to identify the two packets of fabric and grass among all the rotting veggies, but after mucking about a bit, I was able to get a picture so you can share the entire process with me.

It did look like one corner of one of the packets had started to decompose so it was definitely time to move on to the next stage--letting the bundles cure for a couple of weeks. But since this whole experiment is more serendipity than planned, I had not thought about where this curing would take place. In case you didn't get the full glory of their rottiness, here is a picture of them lying on the ground.

I thought about just leaving them there, but we live in a rural area with raccoons, foxes, and even the occasional bear wandering through, any of which might pick up a strange bundle, not to speak of what Terra, our domestic lover of rotty things, might decide to do with them.

Strangely enough, they do not smell much--a good mix of ingredients in the compost should not smell as it cooks and I guess we were lucky this time, but there is enough of an aura about them that I did not want them in the basement. The barn seemed possible and Tom, who has been my intrepid helper, found some old open weave plant trays to put over them, held down by a heavy bucket. They should get enough air circulation to get the curing process going and yet won't be easily carried off by some curious critter.

So we are back in the waiting period again for a couple of weeks. And if you are still with me, even after those pictures--the next should not be quite so disgusting--thanks for the company!

Ew, Yuck!

2011-06-26T21:12:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago, I received in the mail an article from Betsy, a friend of mine, about compost dyeing. Said she was reminded of me when she saw it. (I'm hoping it was the dyeing part and not the compost that reminded her of me.) Although my first thought was that this was a thoroughly disgusting idea, I couldn't help wondering what kind of fabric it would produce. So one day I decided that all I would risk was a yard of fabric and why not give it a try.

The article said to wrap grass clippings and some other vegetation in the fabric, roll it up into a packet, and then bury it in the compost. I of course had to take a picture so you could share the experience with me:

And here it is decently buried in the most recent additions:

I am a bit skeptical about how much of the color the fabric absorbs will permanently stay because the article said nothing about treating the fabric with anything or adding a mordant and usually vegetable dyes need something more to make them stick. But the fabric packets are supposed to cook for a month or two and then air cure for several days so we shall see. It has now been decomposing for over a week.

And if you are still with me after that stomach-turning picture, thanks for the company.

Fiber 101

2011-06-22T21:37:00.001-04:00

Instead of staying home and working, I took a field trip today to visit The Fiber Factory near Alfred, NY, where Jen, an artist friend of mine, works and where sheep and alpaca wool is processed. At one point in my checkered career, I was a spinner, even hand carding a fleece (although that was the first and last one I ever did), and then knitting my yarn into sweaters and hats. Although I now work mostly in cottons and silks, all things fiber still interest me, and the afternoon at the mill became even more interesting when I realized that cotton probably follows a similar process to end up as fabric or the thread that I sew with everyday.

Our tour began where the dirty fleeces begin--in the washing machine. One does not want to investigate too closely what exactly is in the fleece.

Then on to the drying rack--still maintaining a bit of the home turf.

The dried fleece goes through a cleaner/fluffer-upper machine

and the now cleaner, fluffier fleece is placed on a belt that moves it into the carding machine. I know how much wrist-wrenching labor this machine saves and my chest and back muscles can easily start aching thinking about it. This was a very touchy, feely afternoon, by the way, since you couldn't help wanting to sink your fingers in this stuff and try out all the changes in texture that take place.

All those drums, and teeth and gears and belts produce roving

that is doubled or tripled in the next machine to make a bulkier roving.

And now, to really put the handspinners to shame, comes a machine that takes not one roving but four at a time and turns them into yarn.

The one-ply thread can be twisted with others to form two or three-ply on the above machine and put on cones. The yarn on the cones was wound around the arms of this machine

to make skeins that were washed a final time and hung up to dry. This is undyed alpaca, their specialty, since they own an alpaca farm.

Jen has been doing some beautiful work with felting and showed us one more machine--the needle felter. Remember that large carding machine? It can be set to produce not long, narrow roving, but flat batts. Here Jen is feeding three layers of thin batts--that were dyed in the wool--under the many needles of the machine.

and here's the finished product. It felt like a very soft blanket at this point and Jen will run it through several more times to join the fibers more tightly. Later--perhaps this is already obvious to many of you, but sometimes it takes me a while to find the light switch--I realized that a similar machine must produce the cotton batting that I use that is labelled as needlepunched.

Quite the day! And I got home in time to do about an hour's worth of stitching. And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Olympic Quilting

2011-06-16T09:58:00.001-04:00

If you aren't already looking forward to the skating, skiing, and sledding of the Winter Olympics , here is something to whet your appetite. The Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. in 2014 is going to look like this:

The Sochi Olympic Committee has chosen the patchwork quilt, based on traditional Russian quilting, as the brand for the games. See much more here.

That Russia has a long history of quilting came as no surprise to me because my friend Anya posted gorgeous photos from the Russian Quilters Association quilt show on her blog last year.

Oops. Forgot to thank my nonquilting friend Vic for bringing this site to my attention.

And if you're still reading this uncharacteristically short post, thanks for the company.

Seek and you might not find

2011-06-14T19:59:00.000-04:00

It's the morning of the first full day of quilting I have had for several weeks. I pick up the project I'm working on, grab the thread, reach for the scissors--where are they? Now I have lost scissors and other small necessary quilting tools enough to have spent some time trying to remedy this situation so I don't end up with an hour to spend working and then use ten or fifteen minutes of that precious time looking for something I need. I have made a little organizer for my sewing machine table that has reduced my frustration level quite a bit, but for this to work I have to remember to put things into their appropriate pockets. Being realistic about the way my life goes, I know the schedule--or lack thereof--gets full enough that things don't get put back in their places. So I had planned for that eventuality by buying, with the help of Joanne's 50 percent off coupons, FOUR pairs of little orange (should be easily visible) Fiskars.

This way I could have one upstairs near my working wall, one downstairs in my sewing machine room, one in a travel kit of hand work I can do in the car, and one floating around in case any of the others don't show up where they are supposed to be.

But on this morning none of the scissors were in their designated spots. I could not even find my little curved scissors that are wonderful for cutting both upper and lower threads on a machine sewn seam. Fifteen minutes later I finally spied a bit of orange peeking out from under a book on the coffee table and I settled down to work. But my early morning enthusiasm was a bit dampened by all the grumbling I had done and the increasing force with which I returned piles to their places as I searched.

"People don't change," a friend had intoned last weekend as she described an acquaintance who had made yet another ill-considered choice. Don't we? Am I going to be still wasting time in my disorganized workspace in ten years? I was doing better and I could plead exceptional circumstances with the number of colliding responsibilities that I have been dealing with in the past weeks. But then there's that authority figure from the past saying that challenging times separate the men from the boys. (Why was it never the women from the girls?--Oops, wrong tangent) And are we, as a species, condemned to continue to make the same stupid decisions that we have been making for centuries based on greed and selfishness and short-sightedness that hurt so many people and other living beings? I don't want to think so. I hope not.. . .but possibly I will be able to come up with a more certain answer if I ever find those other three pairs of scissors.

And if you're still reading, thanks for the company while I ranted.

Learning from Laura

2011-06-05T12:18:00.001-04:00

Laura Wasilowski, the Dean of Corrections of the Chicago School of Fusing, brought her particular brand of quilting humor to our guild this weekend and some members at the meeting Friday night laughed so hard they were wiping their eyes . She used her quilts, like "Gus Cleans His Room" and "Nude Blue Chair Reclining" to tell her "life" story, punctuated with parodies of popular songs.

I, of course, forgot to take pictures on Friday night, but I had another opportunity on Saturday at her workshop, and here she is urging us on in our creative endeavors:

We were all quite involved with our tasks:

and ended up creating an amazing variety of little quilts. The title of the workshop was "Four Little Landscapes,"

and this was the main example of what we would be doing. But Laura, excellent teacher that she is, made up several examples as other options and encouraged us to follow our own creative urges and so we weren't producing carbon copies of her work and were getting the hang of successfully working with a fusible. Most of them did resemble landscapes in some form--flower gardens, mountains, vacation destinations, cityscapes, peace-scapes, tropical isles, Pine Creek, lakes with sail boats-- but then there was mine. Her final option was to go totally abstract, and that was the one I chose:

Actually, there is a triangle missing from that bottom left corner that I discovered on the floor after I photographed these, but these are far from done. They are made from the 1 1/2 yards of Laura's intensely colored hand-dyes that came with the class fees.

At the end, as part of the graduation ceremonies, we all sang the Chicago School of Fusing Fight Song

and Laura declared us all Iron Maidens.

Since I was facilitator for Laura's visit, my mind was half in the class and half watching out for details like lunch orders and extension cords. I didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked looking at the examples of her work--beautiful, colorful, whimsical pieces with lots of tiny details and wonderful texture created by all her hand stitching that just doesn't show up sufficiently in photographs. I did, however, get to buy some of her beautiful hand-dyed threads that I have become addicted to:

But one of the perks of being facilitator is that I got to spend some extra time with Laura, getting her from her B&B to the lecture and workshop and taking her out to dinner. I have met several big name quilters over the years I have had this guild position, and I think Laura wins the award as the friendliest. She is genuinely a nice person, and it was a pleasure to spend time with her--and with her husband, who had made the trip with her, a little extra benefit. (Sounds a bit cliched here but the image in my head is not.) Making art is a solipsistic kind of endeavor--as Laura jokingly says, in both her lecture and her teaching, "Remember. It's all about me. Just about me!"--and it is reassuring to meet someone who has made art for so long and has maintained a sense of humor and enjoys connecting with other people.

I also envy the amount of energy these national teachers have. Laura had a several hour drive to get here but carried on a lively conversation at dinner and then sang and spoke for an hour at the meeting and talked with members of the guild for another half an hour afterward--and was still awake on the drive to the B&B.

Now back to the rest of my life. And if you're still with me, thanks for the company.

Time to Celebrate

2011-06-02T21:14:00.001-04:00

Our travels in Ireland last year took my husband and me to many ancient sites, and I came back with hundreds of images for quilts. One in particular kept rising to the top of my memories--a 5,000-year-old passage tomb on top of one of the Bricklieve Mountains in County Sligo. When Larkin Van Horn described, on the Quiltart e-mail list, a new exhibit she was putting together called Deep Spaces, I knew it was time to make that memory into a quilt and enter it.

Aside from the theme, the only other requirement was the size: 18 x 45 inches, a long narrow quilt, but I wanted to suggest the climb up to the tomb--it was a forty-five minute hike up the mountain; you had to work to get there--and I also wanted to emphasize the sky, one of those memorable Irish skies that you can lose yourself--or find yourself--in. The length gave me the space to include both of those.

So I had a general sketch of where I was going with this piece and my first hands-on decision was how to suggest all those thousands of stones piled by other human hands so long ago. I finally decided on hand applique, which took longer than other methods I considered, but gave the look I wanted. I still had some gray fabric left over from the chickadee quilt, but ended up dyeing another round, as I began to run out of a couple of the gradations. But, aside from the black and white fabrics, I was able to use all my own hand-dyes.

This was one of my major projects during the past year, but finally I put the last of the pearl cotton quilting stitches in, and the photos of "On a Sligo Hill" were ready to send off before the May 1 deadline.

And so the waiting began. Actually, I was so busy that I didn't have much time to think about it, but left it in the hands of the quilting gods and Larkin and her panel of judges to decide its fate. And finally the news came and it was good. The quilt was accepted!

"On a Sligo Hill" now goes to the state of Washington and will travel over the course of a year to three different venues. A catalog of the full exhibit will be available this fall, and the proceeds will go to a very worthy cause, Doctors Without Borders.

And, if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Back to the mountains of Pennsylvania

2011-05-28T14:59:00.001-04:00

During the past ten days, instead of working on my many quilting projects, preparing garden beds, or writing a blog post, I have been treating myself to scenes like this:

Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina

or like this:

Atlanta, Georgia

or like this:

Cedar Key, Florida

At the urging of my sister-in-law, who lives in Gainesville, Florida, we decided to see a part of the country neither of us have ever visited--the states from North Carolina to Florida, stopping to see friends along the way.

Pelican, Cedar Key, Florida

So we began in Charlottesville, VA, where friends took us to see Measure for Measure, admirably performed in the Blackfriars Theatre, a re-creation of Shakespeare's original Globe.
Then stopped in Brevard, NC, and hiked in the mountainous Pisgah National Forest, full of waterfalls and long vistas you can lose yourself in. We even survived the narrow road that wound its way up the side of the mountain with its hairpin turns dropping off into I didn't want to look.
Went on to the culture shock of big city Atlanta with its hundreds of cars moving seven abreast down the interstate.
And finally to Gainesville with its Spanish moss and palm trees and also a memorable Butterfly Rainforest. We also squeezed in a trip to Cedar Key, where we walked in gentle Gulf waves and had the best clam chowder I have ever had.

On the way home we handed the driving over to Amtrak while we ate, read, did some handwork, and slept.

So what does all this have to do with quilting, you may ask? Well, here are three of the many other pictures I took:

Atlas moth, Butterfly Rainforest

Elephant Ear, University of Florida Botanical Gardens

University of Virginia

I saw quilt patterns everywhere and came back with a long list of quilt ideas and an enthusiasm for getting my hands on some fabric. And of course, I couldn't resist making one unplanned stop on our journey:

So, if you are still reading, it's great to have your company again.

My Favorite Color

2011-05-16T15:20:00.000-04:00

Finding Time When There Is None

2011-05-10T15:01:00.000-04:00

In the midst of all my busyness during April I made the mistake of looking at the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. The focus was on the work of Andy Goldsworthy, who may be at the top of my all time favorite artists. The challenge was to use, as he does, natural elements to create rhythm and pattern against a background that is "exciting and different." I had to do something in honor of Goldsworthy.

For a long time I had had in my mind to try creating a quilt using sticks or twigs of some kind to see, first of all, how I could do it, and then how it held up. As I walked through our fields in the late fall last year, I poked about in the stands of dead goldenrod (and no, it doesn't cause allergies; it's the ragweed that blooms about the same time as the goldenrod that is the culprit. Ragweed flowers are green and low to the ground and hardly visible, but goldenrod is a showoff so it gets blamed even though its pollen is so sticky it doesn't travel much at all) and was surprised at how sturdy the stems seemed. So I harvested an armload and put it on the back porch. As the weeks passed and I didn't find time to follow my inspiration, the pile was moved to the basement and shifted from spot to spot and forgotten.

The challenge reminded me of that goldenrod, certainly nicely dried now, unlike other twigs that would be oozing spring sap. Much to my surprise I found it, neatly stored on top of a cabinet, and so I began to think about a background.

I decided to try to capture the feeling of frosted leaf litter on the woods floor in late fall so I began to piece a background. I could have fused the pieces and would have been done much more quickly. I could have machine appliqued the pieces, but I decided to machine piece these pointed shapes, which meant set-in seams. The first couple went fast and looked good, so I was encouraged and once I started with this method I was stuck. As time got tighter, the seams seemed to take longer. Stress changes perspective. But finally it was finished.

I cut the goldenrod and began working out a pattern. Wanting to add a color variation, I rescued some last year's hosta flower stems from my attempts to straighten up the garden and those became the short light pieces. I attached them to the already quilted background with several loops of thin thread near each end, and there it was. Even though it was not yet faced, I posted it on the challenge site before the deadline! I liked it but somehow felt it wasn't integrated enough.

I left it on my working wall and decided one evening to couch some gold pearl cotton in meandering pattern between the patterns of twigs.

And I like it quite a bit more.

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company.

Talking

2011-05-05T10:10:00.000-04:00

Meant to post earlier this week, but all my word thoughts were taken up with preparing a talk I had been asked to give to the Wellsboro Art Club. Entitled "Finding Myself in Stitches: A Quilter's Journey," I got to think about how my quilting has changed over the years and what I have learned along the way and how I could present the art of quilting to a nonquilting audience.

All went well, except for a minor glitch on a Power Point slide. We even had enough break in our perpetual rainy season for me to get my quilts to the car from my house and into the Gmeiner. The club turned out to be a very welcoming group of women, who took me to lunch and who were a great audience who listened actively and asked great questions.

When I was summing up, mentioning things I had discovered on the course of my journey, I commented that I am convinced more every year that I am focused on making art, that the arts are an essential part of an education, that to eliminate them because they cannot be easily measured like reading comprehension or math skills is to cut out the heart, the part that helps us understand who we are and what life is about. And I saw nods of agreement in the audience.

So, all in all, a most pleasurable step in my quilting journey.

Now on to enjoying the first spring day all week, getting back to my quilts in progress, and helping launch the Wellsboro Growers Market this afternoon.

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company.

Sandwiching

2011-04-30T13:20:00.000-04:00

Even after all my good intentions about making my quilting a priority, I find myself in a position where I have said yes to too many good causes, along with some unexpected and unagreed-to responsibilities being dumped in my lap. In my muddled brain that keeps spawning images, I have begun to see a quilt: a small person holding a large bag on a sinking ship that the rats are deserting. I could make some really disgusting rats at this point.

So I have had to content myself with sandwiching my quilting in between bouts of making flyers, attending meetings, writing e-mails, and creating websites. My quick job for the week was finishing the painted leaf I created in the Playing with Paint class I took. It was a Valentine's gift to my husband and I was worried about quilting it--that the leaf would no longer float quite so nicely on top of the bark, but all is well.

In a 2D photo you can hardly see the quilting, but it does add another layer of texture to this little quilt, and binding ultimately seemed more appropriate than quilting. I will add a small sleeve and a label in between other tasks next week. It's only 7 1/2 x 10 1/2" so it was a quick project.

And if you are still reading me, thanks for the company.

Poetry Month

2011-04-24T14:05:00.000-04:00

April is poetry month and I can't let it escape without a poem. This is a poem appropriate for the kind of spring we have been having--"Skunk Cabbage" by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets. You should read the whole poem but it ends

Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.
Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle
refinements, elegant and easeful, wait
to rise and flourish.
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

And sometimes what blazes the trail becomes pretty. Remember the coltsfoot from an earlier blog? Here they are now making their own bit of warm sunshine amid the chilly wet gloom of our spring.

Finished!

2011-04-22T16:34:00.000-04:00

It seems as though I have had many projects in the state of process for a long time. One of my big projects is done but not ready to be photographed yet. And so I turned to some of my smaller projects this week. One began as an exercise in the painting on fabric class I took last February, although it seems it's been sitting around much longer than that. I was trying a wash on wet fabric and the result was a great little piece with green fading into blue, with strong colors around the edges and light tints in the middle. It was about the size of a page, 8 x 11" but not quite squared up--these were practice pieces,after all. I loved the strong color on the edges and decided to leave it as is and create a small wall hanging around it. I, of course, forgot to take a picture at this stage. One day I will remember. . .

The colors strongly suggested a landscape and as I played with adding shapes to emphasize the blues and greens, I also began to see it as an old manuscript page or even a page from a book and so I added lines of color and surrounded it with a piece of my green hand-dyes. I liked the idea of combining nature, writing, and quilting. And here is "Text in Context":

It's now about 16 x 20" and once again I feel the real thing looks better than its photo. Perhaps that's just an artist's excuse, comparable somehow to "The check is in the mail," but the light colors are delicate and don't show up well nor does the texture quilting I did on the green fabric. But perhaps the photo is indicating a weakness in my work; perhaps it should have enough value contrast so that the elements are strong even in a photo.

Anyway, if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

Drawing Lines

2011-04-15T17:17:00.000-04:00

One of the many nonquilting hats I wear is that of a book sorter for the annual book sale at the local public library. As one of the perks of the job we are allowed to buy books early, and last week I came upon a book by Piero Ventura, whose books I had loved to read to my kids. This particular book, Great Painters, was a history of art for young people, maybe fifth or sixth graders, and I decided to add it to my collection of books for the grandchildren. At home as I leafed through it, my eye was caught by a strong black color that seemed to stand out from the page.

Somebody had given all those cavorting cherubs little black shorts. I looked further and saw that the same someone must have thought that in Spring Botticelli should have given the three Graces and Flora something a bit warmer to wear.

After that I was not surprised that Manet's Olympia had been given a little black dress:

But did the infant Jesus sitting on the Madonna's lap really need pants?

This book had been withdrawn from a nearby school district (not Wellsboro), and we will never know where the blame can be placed. An overzealous librarian? An outraged parent? It is hard for me to understand the mindset of someone who would go to the trouble to deface a book this way. Yes, Olympia did cause a stir in the adult world when it was exhibited so perhaps I can at least formulate arguments about that painting, even if I don't agree with them. But what exactly were children being protected from with the other embellishments?

I was eminently amused by all this. And given what's shown in our current day media, it was easy for me to smile at this as a relic of an earlier era--until I read a brief note in Time Magazine this week about a woman who was caught trying to take Gauguin's Two Tahitian Women off a museum wall because it "has nudity and is bad for children." Wouldn't it be great if so many children were showing up in art museums so often that what they saw there would change their lives?

So what does this have to do with quilting? Well, it does have a lot to do with art and with the difficulty we seem to have making a distinction between the beauty of the human body and pornography. It reminded me of the brouhaha created when Quilters Newsletter ran a story that included a quilt with an image of nude woman on it.

Now I don't usually put human figures in my quilts--I've learned not to say never about using any technique in my quilting--so it doesn't apply directly to my own work. But it does remind me of lines we all draw around things we find acceptable and unacceptable. I do not think that throwing out all boundaries and saying everything is equally acceptable is a workable situation, mainly because most of us would be lying to ourselves. We do have preferences, things that makes us uncomfortable, things that draw us into a work, but making those boundaries absolute and impenetrable could cut us off from an experience that might change our lives or connect us in important ways to the world and the people around us--or just make us better quilters or better artists. Hmm. Better artists?--I could start a new tangent here but should be getting back to making art, not just talking about it.

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company.

Back to Basics

2011-04-13T16:01:00.000-04:00

So what have I been doing that has kept me from writing blog posts and working on my quilts? Well, among other things I have been cutting out hundreds of squares and triangles.

No, I am not contemplating a scrappy quilt. I'm helping out my daughter, a children's librarian in Massachusetts, who, as part of Colonial Days, is doing a workshop on quilting for young children. They will be creating their own quilt blocks, fabric glued (alas, not sewn) to a background, and the basic squares and triangles should give them lots of opportunity to create patterns and to play with color. And it is always worth taking some time to introduce children to quilting. Of course, I also get to use up some of those bits and strips of fabric leftovers that keep piling up.

And even though I have aimed for brevity this time, thanks for the company anyway.

A Good Purchase for a Good Cause

2011-04-10T21:43:00.000-04:00

During my recent excursion into New York City to see the red and white quilts, our bus also took us to the Empire Quilters Guild annual exhibit and its vendors. I have learned to second guess that whispered "Buy me!" that I hear as I pass by fabric that I haven't seen before or the newest gizmo that promises to bind a queen size quilt with no hand sewing while it is clearing out the dishwasher. But when something shouts "Buy me!" I have to listen and so it was as I passed a booth in the corner of the exhibit. There on the counter was a basket filled with skeins of yarn beautiful to look at and heavenly to feel.

And I got to feel self-righteously good about buying it as well. This is silk yarn made from recycled remnants of saris from factory floors in India. A women's cooperative chops up the remnants and provides paid employment for women who spin them into yarn by hand using a drop spindle. As soon as I saw it I was imagining couching it onto a quilt top. So for twelve dollars I got to take home a beautiful source of embellishment and to do a good deed. Leilani Arts is the the group that sells this and other interesting yarns and ribbons.

Searching for Spring

2011-04-06T20:27:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I was feeling overwhelmed--all those organizations I couldn't say no to because they were good things to support have suddenly become very needy. And I have some deadlines looming for my quilting, which is, after all, supposed to be my main focus right now. I went to bed with a suffocating feeling--not for lack of air, but for lack of time--and woke up at 5 AM feeling much the same.

So as I put on my hiking boots to take Terra on her morning walk, I grabbed my camera and decided we would slow down for a bit and go in search of spring. Now for those of you who don't live in northcentral Pennsylvania, the foot of snow we had a little over a week ago is gone but we keep having these blustery snow showers that turn the calendar back a month or two, and that was the prediction for the afternoon today as well.

This morning, however, was chilly (29 degrees) but beautiful with a blue sky that went on forever. I collect sky pictures and didn't have anything like this one--nothing dramatic, just faint wisps of clouds that you might be able to glimpse if your screen is tilted the right way. They reminded me of quiet background quilting that just gives a hint of texture.

A quiet, joyous sky that was a perfect accompaniment to the calls of the red winged blackbirds that surrounded us.

And the grass is turning green! Finally freed from all that snow, it is definitely dreaming of sunny days. Once I noticed one patch I realized that the fields had flashes of green everywhere. I just hadn't noticed. . .

And the sugar maples, connected with a much deeper wisdom than those of us who live totally above ground, know it's spring. Their sap has been running for a while and now their buds are visibly swelling.

But I knew I had definitely found spring when I saw the coltsfoot. I usually don't notice them until they are full- fledged dandelion lookalikes clustered on the edges of the road. But this year, because I was looking, I got to see them at a whole new stage with the yellow of the flower-to-come just peeking out of the top of the shaggy stalk.

Perhaps I like these flowers so much because they don't follow the usual rules. You notice that they have no leaves; those arrive after the flower has died back and they are in the shape of a horse's hoof, hence the name. Many people think they are dandelions but they bloom earlier than dandelions and are among the first, if not the first around here, of the wild plants to bloom in the spring.

Terra and I returned from the walk, both of us relieved of burdens. Terra found a good place for a nap, and I picked up my quilting. Got one of the big projects I've been working on trimmed (wow! did that take a long time--must have measured five times before I cut into it because the show I am entering has an exact size rule and one miscut and I wouldn't have to bother entering), faced, and turned as the snow fell outside the dining room windows. The facing still needs to be sewn down and of course there's the hanging sleeve and the label, but it's almost ready to be photographed. And I was only on the phone four times with my other duties as yet another crisis developed (the phone call from my daughter doesn't count).

My morning ramble had cleared my mind and gave me a full day to savor. Perhaps that saying "You've got to spend money to make money" applies to time as well. After all, we speak of "time well spent." Does time well spent make us more time?

I wish all of us a good night's sleep and, if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

A Rose

2011-03-31T10:12:00.000-04:00

The magic and beauty of "Infinite Variety," that magnificent exhibit of 651 red-and-white quilts that I described in my last post, owe their existence to the woman who collected these quilts over the years, Joanna Semel Rose. And after I read the story of how this exhibit came to be I had to know more about her.

Her husband, described as a scion of a wealthy real estate family, asked her what she wanted for her eightieth birthday this year, and she said, "Something I've not seen before and something that would be a gift to New York City," and that something became the gift of seeing all her red-and-white quilts at one time in one place. Further contributions from family members meant that no admission fee was charged to see this exhibit. This woman clearly does not bank at the same place I do.

Joanna Semel graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1952, at a time when a tea set was on the list of required items the young ladies were to bring with them to college and there were maids and porters waiting upon them in the dormitories. She was an English major and seems to have continued to value things intellectual throughout her life since for thirty years she chaired the board of the Partisan Review, an avant-garde literary and cultural journal well known for fostering the likes of TS Eliot and George Orwell. And I even came across a rumor that she might be a member of that super secret group who decides on MacArthur Genius Grants.

A brief Google search also underscores her generosity as her name occurs again and again in connection with donations. Arts and cultural events and organizations seem to be special favorites---she and her husband donated a rehearsal studio for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, but a foundation that bears their name also made a major contribution to the Natural Resources Defense Council, another worthy cause in my own list of worthy causes.

In 2002 in a talk she gave to her classmates at her fiftieth class reunion she says, "We might adopt the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, taking pleasure in natural things, a recognition that beauty is fleeting and imperfect, a reverence for simplicity and the spiritual essence of things. We know it is nourishment for the soul to spend hours reading in a hammock, savoring a Brandenburg Concerto, meandering through a museum. Millicent Carey Mcintosh . . . claimed that it is important for each individual to order her life so that she becomes a happy creative person."

Wabi-sabi, again thanks to Google, involves a Thoreau-like embrace of simplicity, of a joyous poverty, if you will--an ironic connection for someone who has more money than I can even imagine? Perhaps. But she did indeed value these quilts, many of which draw their beauty from their simplicity and which are from the hands of women who probably were not wealthy or privileged in any significant way.

I did not find any everyday details about Joanna Rose's life. There is a suggestion that she might have children in her talk, but only a suggestion. I could not find a single photo of her anywhere, a sign she is not hungry for publicity. Has she ordered her life so that she has become "a happy creative person"? I hope so.

I am sure someone with more time and more skills at searching could uncover much more about her, but I am happy that so far she appears to be an intelligent, curious, generous person who values the arts at a time when they are no longer included in the official list of "the basics," who values knowledge for its own sake at a time when far too often only skills that can increase income are valued, and who can, at the age of 80, come up with a zinger of a great idea. I have added her to my list of those I would love to sit down and have a cup of tea with--although she would definitely object to my ending that sentence with a preposition.

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

A Quilted Piece of Art

2011-03-27T13:15:00.000-04:00

I have had a good night's sleep after a very long day yesterday, but I still have wonderful images dancing in my head. After pulling out of the driveway to 4:45 AM when the temperature was 12 degrees and boarding a bus in Lewisburg at 7 AM, I and the rest of my fellow busees walked in the doors of the Park Hill Armory in New York City at 11 AM. And this is what we saw:

And it got better:

Six hundred and fifty-one quilts were displayed, not in lock step order around the walls or in a maze of cubicles all over the armory floor, but in this magical set up that was a tribute to the creative skills of some designer at Thinc Design, the winner of the design competition for hanging this show.

The quilts were displayed in individual columns

that floated in space. They were hung back to back so that you entered the column and looked up inside to see ones on the interior. They must have spent a lot of time (and money) on the lighting because each quilt was lit so that even the highest quilts were visible in some detail, obviously not as much as ones on the ground but enough.

Near the center, but not of course exactly in the center was a magnificent spiral of quilts that rose almost to the very roof of the armory

The back of the exhibit signaled closure with a curved wall of quilts:

There were many individual quilts that caught my eye

but it was not the individual quilt that made the experience unforgettable. It was being able to stand in the midst of so many quilts all similar in color but so different in design (no two were alike) and literally stand in the midst of them--with quilts surrounding you on all sides and floating above you at so many different angles. Each time I changed my position the sight lines changed and it was a whole new exhibit. Like, any art experience, you had to be there.

All of these quilts are owned by one person--an idea I have difficulty getting my mind around--named Joanna Semel Rose and I have become fascinated with knowing more about her--and will write more about her later. You're probably ready to move on to other things as well.

So briefly--we arrived in the early afternoon at the Empire Quilters Guild annual exhibit. I think I was expecting too much from this guild of New York City Quilters, and I was probably too tired to fully appreciate the show. Yet there were some beautiful quilts and many quilts where I could see the hand, the mind, and the spirit of the quilter in the work, quilts like Willow Pond by Carol Goossens.

And I can now say that I have shopped at a New York City quilt shop:

Finally at 12:30 AM I was climbing into bed back home. And if you are still awake and with me, thanks for the company.

The Early Bird Catches the Bus

2011-03-24T14:00:00.000-04:00

So is this worth getting up before 4 AM, driving an hour and a half, and then getting on a bus for another 3 1/2 hour ride? I think it will be. This exhibit of 650 antique red and white quilts in New York City is getting lots of publicity so I am sure I will be shoulder to shoulder with thousands of other quilt lovers in search of a memorable quilt experience. In the afternoon we will visit the Empire Quilters Guild annual exhibit, which holds many promises of beautiful new quilts.

The bus trip is hosted by the Packwood Museum in Lewisburg, where the Quilt Study Group I belong to meets and where I have already spent many pleasurable hours looking at and discussing some of their large collection of antique quilts.

More after I have had a good night's sleep on Saturday night.

Ready for Spring

2011-03-17T11:34:00.000-04:00

Curvilinear perspective--that was the end-of-February challenge from the online Fast Friday Fabric Challenge group that I belong to. The examples were intimidating, as usual--quiet lakes with a curved focal point or lovely layers of converging curves. So I continued on with my day, mulling possibilities in the back of my mind and rejecting most of them outright, until I found myself at the window at one point, watching the birds happily foraging at our bird feeder as snow fell yet again. The goldfinches who were just beginning to show a tinge of yellow in their gray winter feathers were particularly active, and then I knew I had the idea. I had abstracted chickadees into a quilt and I could abstract a goldfinch but this time using curves and capturing its glorious late spring colors of gold, black and white. It would be great to think beyond this cold, snowy winter anyway.

Observations on a Chickadee
25" x 25"

I tried my hand at machine reverse applique on this. I could have used fusing but I didn't think I would like the raw-edge look for this piece and I am not sure I would have liked the look of satin stitching around the edges either. The gray stitching around each curve just about disappears so I think it worked out all right.

I quilted the background heavily, but I am now thinking I may take some out to make some islands of nonquilting. I have been facing a lot of my most recent quilts but this one seemed to need a binding.

For a while I thought I like this orientation better:

but then went back to my original orientation with the "bird" "flying" toward the upper right corner.

This quilt is dedicated to Carol Schwartz, who loved the birds of these north central Pennsylvania hills, and to all those living through nature-made and human-made devastation.

And, if you are still reading, thanks for the company. No green in this quilt but Happy St. Patrick's Day anyway!

Hope

2011-03-15T16:19:00.000-04:00

Celebration!

2011-03-08T22:05:00.000-05:00

After a year of not worrying about shows or commissions or selling my quilts, I decided it might be time to enter a show or two. And today I got a large envelope from American Quilt Society with a letter that began "CONGRATULATIONS!" A Toccata of Chickadees is going to Paducah!

Ups and Downs

2011-03-04T19:31:00.000-05:00

I had had great hopes for this week since little other than quilting was scheduled, but Tuesday things began to fall apart. Early in the afternoon I learned that a friend, an artist only a few years older than me, had died in a car accident the day before. Now this was not one of my closest friends--she was not easy to get close to--but I had known her for over fifteen years and her death jolted me. I had not talked to her since before Thanksgiving last year and that was a chance encounter, and I sometimes would not see or talk with her for many months. But when we did talk it was often for an hour, meandering over topics of art, politics, education, dogs and cats. I will miss her clever, caustic wit that made me laugh so many times. I loved her paintings of the fields and farms and gardens of northern Pennsylvania. She is one of the reasons I aspired to be an art quilter.

An hour after this news I learned about a New York Times story about waste water from the gas wells that are multiplying in our county being used by our townships for dust suppression on the roads. The water is laced with radioactive and carcinogenic chemicals. As if they aren't doing their darnedest to destroy the quiet beauty of our hills, the gas companies now seem bent on destroying the people here as well.

The next day I sent some e-mails, made some phone calls, and then tried to return to work. But life seemed too fragile, too unpredictable, with too many large forces bearing down on us--and what meaning did sewing one piece of fabric to another have in the face of this? But I have been working on making my work schedule a priority over the past year and almost a half, and so I mindlessly began sorting through my yellow fabrics for the right shade for a new project I had planned out on Monday. And as I worked I began to feel the warmth of the yellows, as I often do. And, having found the perfect golden yellow, I moved on, without hesitation, to choose the background. Now don't imagine here that the birds started singing and the sun came out of the clouds and I suddenly had the meaning of life revealed to me. The background is probably a bit darker than it would have been if I had chosen it on Monday, but, if the piece works out to my satisfaction, I will dedicate it to Carol, and even if it doesn't, the process of making it is already dedicated to her.

And, if you're still reading, thanks for the company.

Reflection

2011-02-21T21:25:00.001-05:00

It's great to have a deadline. Participating in the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge has pushed me to work quickly and to work smaller so that it doesn't take a year to finish a piece as it has on three of the other projects I am working on. One of the latest challenges involved a style of abstract painting known as the color field movement. Mark Rothko with his large swathes of color is perhaps one of the best known examples, but others included a natural element with the hint of a horizon line and other line gestures drawn from nature. This challenge came out right before Christmas, and I was going to ignore it but was intrigued by the focus on color and letting color make the impression and tell the story.

So I thought as I wrapped presents and then packed for a trip to celebrate with the children and grandchildren. I began to focus on a beautiful piece of green fabric that I had dyed last fall and thought it could be the major element for the piece. But water is never far from our thoughts here in Pennsylvania as the gas drillers pump rivers of water tainted with all sorts of nasty chemicals past our water supplies, and the same chemicals seem to be evaporating into the atmosphere from the holding ponds. As I thought about that horizon line I realized I could connect, with color, the sky and a river just as they are connected with the natural water cycles.

So this is the outcome of all my ruminations:

Piecing the river and sky took the most time, and then I did a lot of close quilting on the green fabric, which you can see better if you enlarge the photo.

I named it Reflection and just finished sewing down the facing so decided to share it with you. It's about 20 x 28 1/2 inches.

And if you're still reading, thanks for the company.

Playing in the Snow

2011-02-18T15:53:00.000-05:00

Now I know from my own experience that you just might be able to tell what kind of a day I am having by how my quilting stitches look. If I'm uptight or just generally in a grump, they look different from when I feel like I am dancing in a pool of sunshine. But it wasn't until this week that I realized you could tell something about people's personalities by how they piled up snow.

On Monday afternoon three artist friends (non-quilters) came over to try their hands at some snow dyeing. The snow had been on the ground a long time, was wet from a freezing rain cycle that froze into a hard crust and from the melting (sigh of relief ) that was going on, and was wetter still from a brief rain that morning. In other words, it was good packing snow. We commented on the lethal snow balls it would make as we piled it on top of the prepared fabric. "Just make sure the fabric's well covered with snow," I had said as we went out the basement door.

Inside again,we placed our bins on a table side by side and started laughing. Linda, the careful, detailed graphic artist, had shaped hers into a perfectly smooth bread-loaf mound:

Jen, with her loads of enthusiasm, had created a veritable Everest of snow:

Kathy, who is generally laid back but with a wicked sense of humor, had created a happy in-between:

And then there were mine, kind of lumpy and free form. Not sure what they say about me . . . .

We found much to laugh about the rest of the afternoon, and I am not sure that the way the snow was mounded impacted the results much, although Jen did cut the top off Everest before she applied the dyes. The wetness of the snow may have made a difference, diluting the dyes more than usual, since my fabric was not quite as vibrant or petal-ly as it usually is, but still interesting:

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

My Version of a Valentine

2011-02-16T12:17:00.000-05:00

For a good number of years, probably since I realized how important quilting is in my life, I have given Tom a little quilt for Valentine's Day. Well, usually it is a quilt-in-progress, a.k.a. a quilt top, that many times adds to the height of my quilts-in-progress pile. Last year I did manage to finish the quilt

This year, instead of hand-dyes, his quilt top was hand painted:

This is one of the pieces that began life as an exercise in the fabric painting class I talked about in my last post. Our instructions were to try printing with string on a brayer and that technique produced the original blue lines that looked like bark to me. I did a brown color wash over that and finished it off with the leaf print.

At first I thought the print had not worked because the house was dry as the furnace fought the arctic temperatures we were having, and any paint on my palette or on the leaf itself dried almost immediately so the print was not as clear or "complete" as others I had done. But when I looked at it the next day I realized I liked it--and that it would make the perfect gift for my tree-loving husband.

I have not quilted it yet and that may change its look a bit so I thought I'd share it with you now. And, if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Out of My Comfort Zone

2011-02-02T20:00:00.000-05:00

One of my complaints about taking some quilting classes is that I end up going to a great deal of trouble and money buying some items on the supply list that I use for about ten seconds or not at all. Jacquard textile paints are an example: I bought a set for a class several years ago and used exactly one brushful of one of the jars and they have sat on my shelf ever since. So when I noticed that Lyric Kinard was offering an online class called Playing with Paint at Quilt University and the supply list included Jacquard textile paints I thought it might be time to try to get these off that shelf and do something with them. Besides, it is definitely too cold to spend much time in my basement dyeing fabric, aside from the occasional snow dyeing, so this would be a way to create some interesting fabric even in the depths--and this winter has been particularly deep--of winter.

Now painting is not my strong suit; in fact it wasn't even in the deck of cards I played at quilting with, unless you include the Setacolor sundyeing I have done now and again. But I knew Lyric was especially gentle with those students stepping outside their comfort zones.

So here are some examples of some of the things I have been working on the past couple of weeks:

This is a simple scrunching technique that makes a great background.

These three are all prints done with various things around the house--poinsettia leaf, orange, and cranberries. I will probably go back and add more color to all of them, but I particularly liked the orange--and who would have thought there was such a neat pattern inside a cranberry!

As you can see, we are not painting pictures in this class, thank goodness. The nearest I came to that was this doodle page I made where we were trying out a dry brush technique with some other techniques thrown in for good measure. Van Gogh has no competition here, but I learned a little about holding a brush and how it feels to apply this paint to fabric.

Since I knew so little about painting on fabric, I have indeed greatly increased my knowledge in that area. Some of the techniques are similar to ones I use in dyeing, and some I will try when I get out my dyes again, but I have changed my mind about using painted fabric in my quilts. I used to think that paint stiffened the fabric so much that I wouldn't like working with it, but Lyric's class has convinced me otherwise. When these textile paints are heat set with an iron, they become quite pliable and they can add great texture to a background or an area I want to highlight.

I still have two more weeks to go and lots more to learn, but the playing I have done so far has only encouraged me to do more.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

Stickwork

2011-01-29T18:27:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had promised myself that the whole day, a precious day at home, would be devoted to working on my many projects. And I was doing very well until the mail arrived right before lunch with a small box piled on top of the junk mail and catalogs. Inside were two books that I had discovered earlier in the week as I was taking a wander around the Amazon bookstore. I have forgotten the goal of my search because I became completely distracted by a book of works by Patrick Dougherty, an artist who weaves sticks into imaginative architectural installations.

His work reminds me a bit of Andy Goldsworthy's intriguing natural creations, and since I had been ignoring my bookaholic urges in the past couple of months, I decided to give in to this one. And I made a good decision. I spent a long delightful lunch break with Stickwork, dipping into the introduction and paging through his wonderful whimsical and inspiring creations--and managing not to get spaghetti sauce on my brand new artbook.

Perhaps I like his works so much because he connects them so often with trees, one of my favorite subjects, or perhaps the woven, swirling nature of these structures reminds me of the interlacing of Celtic knotwork that I love so much. Whatever it is, I am looking forward to getting to know his work better.

More on the second book at another time--and if you are still reading, thanks for the company.

In Progress

2011-01-26T18:32:00.000-05:00

Around Thanksgiving just as the holiday season was gearing up, the online challenge group I belong to issued a new challenge: create a quilt using one shape only and not in a traditional repeated block pattern, but in some abstract design. As usual, this was supposed to done in one week. With hundreds of things on my to-do list, many of which involved preparing for the VESTA exhibit or the holidays, I couldn't get the challenge out of my mind. And during a few free minutes I cut out a shape in various sizes and colors and began to play with it. And this is the result:

Now this is unfinished. For one thing, it is cropped, not bound yet. But I did try some new things with it--couching the blue lines of heavy thread and narrow ribbon and quilting the center swath heavily with a variegated thread that has some yellow in it. Each shape also has a pattern of quilted pearl cotton on it, although none of the quilting shows up well in the photo. Enlarging may help. Right now the piece is about 32" x 20".

I was trying to keep the piece abstract so that it didn't have one obvious meaning. In other words, it could suggest several possible interpretations but was primarily a pattern that was hopefully pleasing. The reactions from the critique group were interesting. Several of the commenters tried to make something out of it--a particular animal, rocks--and were frustrated because it didn't look enough like what they thought it should be. And perhaps the piece is flawed because I am playing with suggesting a meaning and undercutting it at the same time. I named it "With the Flow," connecting with the liquid-y nature of the piece and implying the slippery nature of pinning it down with one interpretation, but that could be a problem as well, pointing too clearly toward one direction. Naming a quilt, as I pointed out in an earlier post, can be a help or a hindrance.

Now that it is no longer part of a challenge that only allowed me to use one shape I am thinking about whether to add another shape and perhaps whether it is worth spending more time on it, but decided to share it with you before I changed it.

So I welcome your thoughts and, if you are still reading, thanks for the company.

More Snow Experiments

2011-01-20T21:39:00.000-05:00

Well, there has been snow on the ground for a while and so I had to put it to use. It is a rather dry snow since the temperatures have been quite cold around here, and I kept waiting for a wetter snow, but finally gave in and started gathering my bins.

This year on the QuiltArt e-mail list, someone with the voice of authority wrote that to create fabric that looks significantly different from the regular low immersion dyeing, you must freeze your fabric before piling on the snow so I decided to give it a try, and here are the results:

The first is a mixture of cerulean blue and navy, the second dark brown, gray, and a bit of gold

Some diluted cerulean plus safari gray

And then I did another batch a couple of days later with unfrozen fabric:

This is kilt green (an older dye) with some ultraviolet and the next is kilt green, cerulean blue (a newer dye and more dominant) and a bit of gold

And here's my favorite: ultraviolet and cerulean blue

Actually, I like them all and they all seem a bit different from my warmer weather dyes. I'm not sure you can see it in the photos--perhaps clicking on them to enlarge them may help--but the unfrozen batch has this petal-ly, crystalline quality that I love in the snow dyes and the frozen fabric did not give that result, although that batch had these lovely lines of darker color so I cannot decide which batch totally wins out. I did get more white spots with the frozen fabric. To be honest, I was supposed to set the fabric out to freeze overnight again after I poured the dye on, and I forgot to do that. So I guess that gives me a clear excuse to do some more snow dyeing. We seem to be having plenty of nights cold enough to freeze wet fabric.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Character

2011-01-18T15:12:00.000-05:00

There are many interesting people who touch my quilting life in various ways and I think this is a golden opportunity to introduce some of them. I am honored to call Kelly Jackson my friend--at least I think she is my friend. She may have gotten a bit pickier about whom she associates herself with now that she has the ear of Alex Anderson and Eleanor Burns.

Anyway, Kelly was the speaker at our local guild, the Mountain Laurel Quilt Guild, last night and, as expected, was great entertainment as well as a source of important information about the latest quilting tools and gizmos that she sells on her online store, I Have a Notion.

Now Kelly is a very useful friend--she is the reason that I know about the UV version of Misty Fuse that takes care of the yellowing effect that comes with some fusibles as they age and the reason that last night I bought this cool little tool called the CutRite Bind Up. I can't wait to try it because it promises to take some of the contortions out of mitering the final joined seam in the binding around a quilt.

But she is also inspiring. When Kelly walks into a room, you notice her--and no, it is not just because she is tall. She is blessed with an enviable amount of energy that is actually catching for those of us who tend to move more slowly through life. And just being around her is a great motivator to go back home and accomplish something. To say she throws herself into whatever she is doing with enthusiasm is too much of a cliche because her enthusiasm is intensified by attention and a strong desire to know everything she can about a situation. The trait I probably covet the most in her is her ability to ask questions. Kelly asks those questions that we never think of asking or are afraid to ask because we are afraid we will look ignorant. But she ends up looking and being all the wiser. Her products sell so well because of all this open probing she has done, and people have learned to trust her assessments.

Kelly is a character in the sense that you never know what she is going to say or do (You end up laughing a lot around her--add that to the list of reasons why I like her), but she also has character. (Guess that's what I value in a quilt as well--originality combined with a deep integrity that gives it meaning.) If she doesn't totally know who she is and where she is going, she is a lot further along that journey than many people.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company

Words to Quilt By

2011-01-13T11:54:00.000-05:00

My friend Kelly Jackson dared me to have my "Words for the Year" up on my working wall by today. Guess I can't ignore a challenge so here they are:

This showed me clearly that of course I can wedge one more thing into my already full schedule. It helped when I realized that I could do this in the evenings when it's too embarrassingly early for a good book and a soft bed but the creative energy has definitely left for the day.

That's also a good time to iron dyed fabric and that beautiful snow from my last post has given me some interesting fabric. Pictures later.

And thanks, once again, for the company.

Snow Art

2011-01-12T11:48:00.000-05:00

This morning nature was mimicking Andrew Goldsworthy,one of my favorite artists who creates, among other things ephemeral art, making striking patterns on rocks in a stream, for example, with sheep's wool that will blow or drift away eventually. Overnight we had had about six inches of snow and, as I stepped out the back door on the daily walk with Terra, I looked up and saw the leafless dogwood tree in full snow bloom. The bits of snow caught in the crotches and twig ends looked very like the small white flowers that light up the tree in June.

Now my photography is no match for Goldsworthy's so you're losing a bit of the effect here, but it is more obvious, perhaps too obvious, on the azalea, which is covered with flowers in early summer:

An hour later this was gone and the tree and most of the bush were back to their winter austerity.

Thanks for the company on this little detour and the next post will be back to the topic of quilting!

Focus

2011-01-05T11:43:00.000-05:00

Ahhhhh. . .yesterday I spent my first day after the holidays working for an extended period of time on a quilt. I had also planned to begin a blog post but the list of possible topics just kept growing and I was having trouble picking one. That in itself became a possible topic--the explosion of ideas that often follows a complete break from what you're working on, but that path is a little too well worn.

At times when I have too many quilts in my head that I want to make, I have found myself locked in a state of hesitancy and have to consciously tell myself (as I do to our dog when it is 15 degrees out and she is in search of the perfect spot in which to do her business) just choose one--well, in the case of quilts, maybe two or three. So I took a deep breath and focussed on: a Word for the Year.

This is always a hot topic around this time on the Quiltart e-mail list that I am part of, and many of the participants share their chosen words and then actually put them up on their studio walls in some form, while others comment on the silliness of the whole concept. I felt I agreed with the silliness side last year but in quiet moments found myself playing the game of what word would I choose if I didn't think it was silly. Typically I came up with not one but two related words: Dare and Dance. I even thought of a way, if I made them into a quilt, to make Dare morph into Dance.

When I remembered them, these actually helped me out a few times during the past year and so, silly or not, (we all need a healthy dose of silliness, anyway), I am going to come clean this year and declare that I do have a Word (or Words) for the Year. They will be the same as last year because I think these have enough meaning left in them for me to work for another year.

"Dare" is important because at times--fewer than when I began, but still some times--I find myself frozen by a myriad of fears about my quilting: What if I can't do this? What if I can't do this well enough? What if I spend all this time and it just doesn't work? What if I choose this idea and there is a much better idea just around the corner? What if there is something more meaningful I should do with my life? What if everybody laughs at me? At times I need to connect with the courage to lace up my ice skates and take that first step onto the ice (total metaphor here--haven't had the courage to skate in about ten years). There are plenty of safe quilts I can make, but growth involves risk, and even though I know this like a cliche, the word "dare" reminds me of the excitement and value in taking that risk.

But once I take that first step I need to let go, to find the joy in what I am doing, and "Dance" perfectly encapsulates those qualities. When I get into the jaw-clenched, shoulders-raised state, I need to remember to dance--and maybe be a bit silly at times. Early in our marriage, my husband and I took some ballroom dance lessons, but we never got beyond mechanically following the steps, much to my chagrin because I had dreaming of waltzing effortlessly across the floor. I had pretty much given up until, about five years ago, I talked Tom into taking a swing class and after a few lessons, we were somehow dancing. We certainly will never win any contests, but I do know what "Dance" feels like.

Perhaps this year I will even get around to putting these words up on my working room wall. Or perhaps not.
Anyway, if you are still reading, thanks for the company, and Happy New Year!

Christmas!

2010-12-23T13:29:00.000-05:00

The bathrooms are clean, the vacuuming is done, the guest room prepared, and now it's just cooking and lots of good conversation! My daughter and her husband will be arriving soon.

The gift bags are all made again this year:

and that's about all the sewing that's been done around here for the past few days. But I love those bags. Not only do they save paper, but it's so easy to wrap those strangely shaped presents for grandchildren, and I don't need boxes for clothing. Just stopped in to our local quilt shop, Needles, to stock up on their Christmas fabric sale for next year's bags, although some of them do come back.

And this year we even have a low-carbon footprint Christmas tree since Tom and I cut one we planted over ten years ago. Unfortunately, it was about as far away from the house as we could get so we had to drag it downhill, across the creek, and then drag it up hill again with the help of a sled and a little snow.

It couldn't have grown any bigger.

So Merry Christmas to you all! It's time to celebrate!

Pushing the Limits

2010-12-16T21:56:00.000-05:00

When I began dyeing, one of the few rules that I heard from many sources was that dyes needed warmth to work and therefore the room temperature should be at least 70 degrees. My dyeing "studio" is in the unheated basement, where, even on the warmest day in summer, the temperature rarely reaches above 68, so I have already been fudging on that requirement a bit. But normally as the weather turns toward winter I reluctantly curtail my dyeing activities and focus on turning that fabric into quilts.

Last winter, however, I discovered snow dyeing, which involves pouring dye solution over snow-covered fabric, which I am fairly sure is nowhere near 70 degrees. And so late in November this year, with a few free hours, I decided to see how hard and fast that temperature rule for regular low-immersion dyeing was. The temperature in the basement was below 60 while I was working and was around 50 by the time the fabric was finished batching.

To complicate matters further, I decided to play with some overdyeing and folding so here are some of the more interesting results:

These were two old dyes: first a dark brown poured over a diagonally folded piece of fabric and then with fabric folded on the other diagonal. a deep yellow. The dark brown turned a little purple but was still an interesting color and the yellow seemed strong even with the colder temperatures.

I loved this piece. It was the last minute attempt to use up an end of fabric that I had cut off one of the larger pieces and to use up that dark brown dye, this time used with a greater concentration than the yellow piece. I simple folded the piece quickly, dumped some dye on it and let it sit--and got lots of little texture bits along with the stripes.

Then I tried some shibori. When I had done shibori before I had chosen a wide diameter piece of PVC pipe, carefully wrapped one layer of fabric around it and sewed it together so that it fit tightly around the pipe, and then scrunched it, but I had read about just folding the fabric, wrapping it around a pipe as many times as it would go and then scrunching. My wide diameter PVC pipe had disappeared with some plumbers who were working in the basement a few months before and I only had a smaller pipe so I wrapped and scrunched, then poured dye around it. And this was the magical result. This was old dye, however, so I decided I had to try this with some newly mixed dye concentrate. And here is the result of that:

The final analysis: first of all, there were too many variables for this to be truly a scientific experiment, but nevertheless, working in cooler temperatures produces usable, interesting fabric so my dyeing season is definitely longer than it was. I am hoping to have some time to dye this week after the nighttime temps have been in the teens and single digits for a number of days and the basement is even colder. Then again the dyes may work when it is that chilly, but I and my fingers may not.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

VESTA 2

2010-12-07T21:09:00.000-05:00

My plan was to take a picture of the Doodle Square display from a better angle before the opening Friday evening to replace the picture in the last post, but five minutes after I got there to help set up the refreshment table, the first of the early birds asked if they could just look around, although they knew we weren't officially open yet, and that seemed to open the floodgates: the gallery was busy all evening. The same thing happened on Saturday morning so there was no time to take--or remember to take--pictures. By the time things slowed down at the end of the afternoon this is what the Doodle display looked like:

I sold some other pieces, including my little Celtic butterfly, Féileacán, and the person who bought it liked the name so I guess it wasn't so pretentious after all. It was quite a weekend, followed by two glorious days of quiet quilting on Sunday and Monday.

Féileacán

2010-12-06T17:16:00.000-05:00

That Celtic knotwork butterfly that I took to Ireland with me is now bound and officially complete.

As I was preparing for the upcoming exhibit, I was scouring the house for any new work I could add to my share of the show and came upon this little quiltlet. Not too many people had seen it since it didn't make it into the September guild show so I decided to add it to VESTA, and then, instead of putting Not for Sale on it and sending it off in January, I priced it and indicated the money I received for it would go to the Alzheimer's Quilt Initiative for Alzheimer's research, since its original destination was Ami Simms' online AQI auction.

I had named it Féileacán, the Irish word for butterfly. Too pretentious for a 9" x 12" wall hanging? Perhaps. But I have great fun naming quilts, sometimes in the middle of making them, but more often near or at the end of the process. Although some quilters eschew (another pretentious word but I love saying it--sounds like a sneeze) naming their work--the traditionalists because they feel their work is too utilitarian to be named, the nontraditionalists because they feel their work transcends the need for any name other than "Study" or a number, I like names because they add yet another dimension to the work.

There are pitfalls to naming, of course. A name can actually limit an interpretation of a quilt, pointing in only one direction so it is tricky to find a name that says something significant about the piece without limiting the ways a viewer can connect with it. And I have to admit that often when I go to shows I try to look at the work first before I look at the name so I can react to the piece before I get that little nudge from the artist. Sometimes I nod agreement with the title--Oh, yes! Perfect choice--but other times I go back and look again at the work and see something more, something subtle that I missed before. Then, of course, there are those names that elicit only puzzlement--Huh? Where did that come from?

Anyway, this little quilt is stuck with the name Féileacán. You may see it in another incarnation as I prepare for classes next summer since I may add this to the patterns for the Celtic knotwork class I teach. And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

VESTA

2010-12-01T15:35:00.000-05:00

The VESTA show is officially up. We got it done in what looked to me like record time, finishing up by 3 in the afternoon. Since we are a disparate group of artists who, for a number of reasons, may have more or less work on any given year, we always worry that we won't have enough "stuff" to fill the space, but this year we had no problem. The gallery is full of beautiful things--baskets, oil paintings, photographs, weavings, magnetic paper dolls, cards, scarves, hand-fired glass beads, jewelry, lace, pastels, silk flowers, and, of course, art quilts.

Displaying my Doodle Squares presented a challenge, since I wanted to indicate that many of them were double-sided. I finally decided on hanging a few from a small, interestingly shaped cherry tree from our woods and putting the rest on the wall behind.

Friday night is the opening reception, which continues all day Saturday, so once again we will be watching the weather. Right now we have picture postcard scenes out all the windows with a couple of inches of snow sitting on top of mud from the two inches of rain we had overnight. It will be interesting if it freezes tonight.

Preparation

2010-11-26T20:24:00.000-05:00

On Monday VESTA, the artists' group I belong to, sets up its annual month-long exhibit at the local art and cultural center, and so I am busy with preparations, the non-creative part of being an artist. I don't have that many pieces in the show--just nine smallish wall hangings and quite a few doodle squares, but the number of things that must be done seems to keep multiplying.

Yesterday I discovered one piece without a hanging sleeve and another without a sewn-on label. Then there are the hanging tags for all the doodle squares that must be made and attached and, after I decide what to put on each wall label for the bigger pieces, including a price for those I am selling, I need to print them and cut them up. I am, of course, still binding a couple of doodle squares. And I want to photograph all the pieces just in case any of them goes home with a new owner. And the list goes on. I haven't even mentioned the time spent helping to set up the show.

There is a certain amount of excitement to all this. The exhibit opens the weekend of our local Dickens of a Christmas celebration, when three blocks of Main Street are closed off and hordes of tourists as well as current and former residents descend upon our small town. The art center is at the edge of all this activity but still benefits from the increased numbers of people.

Since sales are far from guaranteed, money is definitely not the force that drives me to put in the hours of preparation. So why do I do it? Perhaps a strong case of egotism, a desire for attention? Always a possibility, but I can think of many far easier ways to get attention. And since I usually have to take a couple of deep breaths before I even show my work at the guild meeting, I am not sure I am that intent on trying to grab center stage. But, although I am not usually trying to convey a message, there is a certain amount of communication involved in my quilts, perhaps of the beyond-verbal variety (or sub-verbal, if you prefer), and that happens more easily if someone actually sees them. So an exhibit like this with all the time it takes can be a natural part of the creative process--at least as I am looking at it today. Now back to sewing on that sleeve.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Enthusiasm

2010-11-22T21:14:00.000-05:00

I have been working regularly on two projects, but by the beginning of last week I realized I was dragging. On my way toward the stairs to my workroom, I would notice the computer and check e-mail, even though I had done that less than half an hour before. I even spent one morning getting a window open and washing the accumulated dust and spiderwebs off a storm window that hadn't been cleaned in--well, let's just say a long time.

I'm liking where these projects are going so I was certainly not ready to abandon them, but I kept thinking about the most flamboyantly colored and most unstructured of those art quilts I had seen at the Packwood House, and these were far from what I was working on. One section of one of the projects--that one I am working on now--involves lots of little pieces in various shades of gray, and I had worked with a lot of gray this summer in my chickadee quilt. While the other project was more free form in conception, the execution of it requires some concentration and detail work. I needed some color and some freedom!

So I went in search of a good background--a deep purple hand-dye seemed appropriate, put it up on my working wall and then started cutting out variously colored roundish shapes.

I have no idea where exactly this dotty piece is going at this point, but I smile every time I pass it, and I am not only back to working on my other two projects as well, I am working on them with enthusiasm. It's amazing what a little color will do. By Friday I even had to force myself to take a break to vacuum and finish putting a meal together in preparation for dinner guests that evening.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!

Something Old Something New

2010-11-10T15:40:00.000-05:00

No, it's not a wedding, but I got to satisfy my love of art quilts and antique quilts this week. On Monday I attended another session of a quilt study group I have joined, hosted by the Packwood House Museum in Lewisburg, PA, about an hour and a half from where I live. The Packwood House has acquired a growing collection of old quilts, many from the nineteenth century and most probably from Pennsylvania. At the study sessions several old quilts are brought out, spread on a prepared table and we talk about the pattern, color, stitching, binding, batting (if we can see any), possible age, and anything else that seems appropriate.

This week we began with a peek at a dazzling pieced silk quilt from possibly the 1840s--too fragile now to even take out of its box. Then we got a good look at a crazy quilt from around the 1890s and this was a beauty. The range of fabrics kept us busy for a long time. My favorite was an ombre that shaded from almost white through a pink to a darker red but also moved from flat weave to a fuzzy weave that looked almost like fake fur. Didn't know there was fabric like that at that time. There were tiny paintings on pieces, embroidered silhouettes and animals, initials to wonder about. And of course, the traditional spider for good luck. This quilter was taking no chances because, as one of our leaders warned us, the quilt was "crawling with spiders."

Then on to a patriotic quilt of appliqued tan eagles around a red medallion center--not a very striking quilt until one of the leaders reminded us that the tan was probably green, which, because of the fugitive nature of the dye had lost its blue component and turned tan over time, and this was actually a traditional red and green quilt. And so the afternoon went.

In the morning I had gotten to feed the other part of my artistic soul. The museum was featuring an exhibit (click on Artists Series) of art quilts from two local art quilters, Paula Swett and Cathy Stechschulte, as well as part of a small travelling exhibit from Studio Art Quilt Associates, and I arrived early to spend some time with these quilts before the meeting. Paula Swett plays with line, color, and quilting stitch to create glowing masterpieces. I particularly like the piece she made from a vinyl tablecloth that had for years protected her table as she painted. She cut it into strips, wove them together and then sewed them into a totally abstract piece complete with pearl cotton quilting that demands your attention. Cathy creates layers on cloth with dyes and silk screens and thermofax that look three dimensional from a distance.

I have no photographs to show for my day in Lewisburg since photos were not allowed. I could have taken a photo of the outside of the museum, but I didn't think of that (probably just got a D- in blogging school for that oversight). But the whole point of that day, of my driving for three hours, is that virtual reality has its limits. Looking at a picture of a very old quilt is just not in the same category as standing over it, touching (albeit with white gloves) this fabric that a quilter worked on 150 years ago, or spending time looking for the place where she joined the cording that she used instead of binding. And a photograph can never replace being in the presence of fabric art where you can see how moving closer or further back changes what you see in the piece or how the light changes the texture of the piece as you change your position.

All of this is not a startling new discovery on my part. In fact, it's probably been said so much it's become a cliche, but it doesn't hurt to reexamine the cliche, particularly in a world where people are equating online access to information with knowledge and, even worse, with wisdom. Sometimes you just have to be there--and spend some time there.

And if you are still spending time reading this, thanks for the company.

Light

2010-11-04T12:27:00.000-04:00

It's raining in northcentral Pennsylvania--one of those cold, constant November rains.

And while I am not motivated to take the dog on her long walk of the afternoon, I have been motivated to quilt. My husband teases that my studio is actually our whole house, which is not exactly true, but, when I think about it, every room except for his study and the guest room has been the site of some quilt-related activity--and even the guest room is a great place to store quilts when it's not in danger of being used.

Today, since one of my projects involves a lot of hand sewing of bias strips, I am seizing the opportunity to work in one of my favorite spots: a bay window that takes up one wall of our dining room.

Years ago we picked up an old rocking chair that ended up in that window. It has gotten older and uglier over the years, but fits the space perfectly and circles on its base so that you can turn to face the room or to look out at the valley and fields outside. It is also perfect for handwork.

In the summer the angle of the sun is such that it doesn't heat up this area, and it is the next best thing to being outside to sit here and work with both windows open on either end. One of the things my aging eyes love about this spot is the light, and, even though my quilts are a bit different from theirs, I feel connected with all those generations of women who quilted with natural light.

These windows face south, however, so in the fall and winter, they do their job of heating the house as the sun moves further and further into the dining room. You can have too much of a good thing, and the sunny days become too hot and glaring to work in this space. It's one of those paradoxes that I need light to follow the marking lines but too much light obscures rather than reveals.

Today the light is perfect, and I am enjoying sitting quietly with Terra, as I slowly move this quilt along. So I will return to my work, and, if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Something New

2010-10-27T09:25:00.000-04:00

In one corner of what I call my workroom, where my working walls are, was my old cutting table--a small teacher's desk made out of oak that we had picked up years ago at some sale or other. The top was big enough to accommodate a large 23x35" cutting mat, and, while I often wished for a bit more space so that the folded yardage would not slip over the edge, pulling the end I was cutting with it, I made do. There just wasn't room for a larger table in that room if I wanted any space to step back and look at what was on the working wall.

Then there was the height issue. I'm 5' 2 1/2" and so I like a low counter in the kitchen to cut veggies or knead bread dough on, but I was leaning over too far to cut for long periods of time on this desk. Yes, I could have put something under the legs, but I just never got around to finding that perfect gizmo that would be the right height and would be stable as well.

Then in August as I searched for fabric paints at Joann's I happened upon a cutting table that could fold up and roll into a corner; it was on one of those Joann super sales and I couldn't resist. It sat for a long time in its box leaning on my workroom wall as I figured out what to do with all the stuff in the four desk drawers, a formidable task.

The assembly process was not an easy task either, and I am glad my husband was eager to take it on. And here it is with lots of room on its 36x59 3/4" top for holding that extra yardage or whatever else I need to put on it:

Yes, I could have straightened up a bit more to take the picture, but it is a workroom. That outer leaf goes down very easily by sliding the two front legs in toward the center so most of the time it looks like this:

It can fold even smaller into a 36x16" size but it will no longer roll. It turned out to be a bit high for me--no heightist comments here please--but eliminating the wheels made it just right. The individual little feet are adjustable, however, a real advantage for eliminating wobbling on our less than level farmhouse floors.

Not only did I get a new table out of this but clearing out those desk drawers forced me to take the time to organize the shelves in that room so that things are much more findable. And if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Fields

2010-10-20T22:10:00.000-04:00

The work I just finished is a quiet one. It doesn't have that visual impact that draws you from across a room. First of all, it is small--just 9 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches. The fabric is some of my less dramatic snow dyes and the pattern depends mainly on machine quilting and hand stitched pearl cotton.

I got the idea for this piece from one of my Doodle Squares. I was just playing with filling the center groups of curved parallel lines and liked the final pattern--looked like hills or perhaps plowed fields or a contour map.

So I pieced the background and quilted three slightly different-sized squares and filled them with the curved parallel lines using a different variegated thread in each. Using three different skeins of Laura Wasilowski's beautiful hand-dyed pearl cotton, I added V-shaped stitches to the top, little French knots with tails to the second, and then random short straight stitches to the bottom square.

Obviously there is change going on in this work. Seasonal? Low to high elevation? My daughter said it reminded her of cherry blossoms.

This little wall hanging looks better up close and personal in real life. Hmm. And what does that mean? I like looking at this piece, but is it of lesser value because it is not as photogenic as other works? My immediate answer would be: of course not! but perhaps the question is something I should keep in mind for a while as I look at other quilts.

Anyway, if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

The Blank Wall

2010-10-11T21:19:00.000-04:00

Often when I am quilting I am working on several projects at once with each at various stages so that I can move from one to the other according to the time I have available or my inclination. On a particular day I may not have the energy or hours it takes move a design along, but I could easily do some stitching in pearl cotton or sew on a facing. This system also makes the transition from quilt to quilt easier and avoids that emotional valley when a major project is over.

But in my rush to complete the two pieces for the guild exhibit I lost sight of the big picture. For a while the excitement of hanging the show and then the subsequent opening distracted me from those final stitches that I had put in two major pieces and from the blank working wall looming in my workroom. I kept myself busy during September on a small piece that was a joy to work on (more about that next week), but as I started to sew on the facing, I became aware of that gray, slogging feeling whenever I thought about quilting (which I do quite frequently) that made climbing the stairs to my workroom too much of an effort and made many mundane tasks like pulling up the green bean plants or cleaning the bathroom preferable to planning a new project. And all those rich colors on the hills around me didn't help.

Years ago when I first felt this, I was in denial--even when my husband commented that I was a bit testier than my usual testy self, a comment I am sure I greeted with equanimity. How could finishing a quilt, which I was supposedly doing for "fun," affect my outlook on the world? But it has happened often enough that I recognize it as real now. Guess I am emotionally tied to the feel of fabric in my hands and the zing of making something I saw in my imagination take shape in the tactile world. I am sure one of my psychologist and/or medical friends could start talking about addiction here and is it possible that the urge to create, discover, invent is a cousin--distant cousin?--to addictive behavior?

Anyway, I am happily engaged in a new project now, running up and down stairs from sewing room to workroom and have added beginning yet another project to my to-do list before I get too far along on this one.

If you are still reading, thanks for the company--and I'd love to hear about your feelings at the end of big projects.

Chickadees

2010-09-22T21:39:00.000-04:00

Have you ever seen a shy chickadee? I haven't. I have admired their fearless spirit combined with a large dose of curiosity and a cheerfulness that is undiminished even by an empty bird feeder. They are tiny birds with a commanding presence, due as much to their coloring as to their personalities. That strong black and white head atop all the gray on the wings and the ruddy blush of their breast makes them stand out in any season. And I had thought for a long time about how to use that color and that ceaseless activity as the basis for a quilt.

Last summer, spending a lot of time sitting around recovering from foot surgery, I began to try some sketches for a block that would abstract the essence of a chickadee. My attempt was not to imitate reality here but to capture the idea of a chickadee, which as the blocks repeated would merge into some kind of pattern.

When I finally got a sketch that looked good, I redrew it as a block in Electric Quilt so I could play with various layouts, finally settling on a basic layout and as usual leaving the ultimate color and detail choices to the fabric phase of my design. And here it is:

This is the quilt as it hangs, complete with large label, in the Mountain Laurel Quilt Guild Exhibit 2010, proving that I did get it done in time for the show, (but just barely).

You may notice that these are not square blocks set on point, but diamond-shaped blocks so that the birds change shape depending on whether they are oriented vertically or horizontally. But I liked the setup with the birds on the outer ring taking off in all directions as chickadees do and the birds turned toward the center disappearing into a crisp black and white pattern surrounded by an interwoven ring (had to get interlacing in there somehow) formed by the wings.

I chose commercial black and white cotton, particularly since I know how hard it is to dye a strong solid black, but I set about dyeing some gray gradations for the wings--and found how many different shades of gray exist. Chickadees are neither green gray nor blue gray but a middle of the road gray gray that I finally got after several failed attempts. That ruddy blush on the breast was even harder to capture.

With the fabric ready I began to contemplate actually piecing this block and realized it was an excellent candidate for paper piecing--another good reason to have drawn the block in EQ6 because I could print out multiple copies. I divided it into sections, figured out the order of stitching, dealt with the problem of the set-in seam at the bottom of the head section and made a test block to see if my plans would work. Soon--well, actually a few weeks later, I had twelve chickadee blocks up on my working wall begging for a suitable background.

I had been envisioning a sort of free wheeling background, some sort of random curving patterns to contrast with the very symmetrical, structured blocks, but when I tried a corner of this I realized that the contrast was too great and the result was chaos rather than contrast. Instead I chose the more orderly curves that you now see, but that still provide a bit of contrast with all the straight lines of the central part. I ultimately decided to use two gradations of grays in the background with the middle sections being just slightly lighter than the corners.

The quilting is a mixture of machine quilting and randomly stitched hand quilting using pearl cotton that also provides some texture contrast with the highly structured birds.

And then there were the edges. I decided not to face the quilt because I wanted to keep those tiny yellow points very sharp and finally (you can read the story of the binding fiasco here) chose a black binding. It's official name: A Toccata of Chickadees.

If you are still reading and have not given up on this long listing of details and gone off to make yourself a cup of tea, then thanks for the company!

A Challenge

2010-09-11T09:33:00.000-04:00

For each show the Mountain Laurel Quilt Guild exhibit committee comes up with a challenge for the members and this time they chose a great one: create a quilt that is less than 36" in any direction and is "Out of the Box," i.e., it cannot be a rectangle or a square. The result was a lively potpourri of styles and shapes, with several members using the challenge to try a technique totally new to them or to just design their own free form wall hanging. Pictures are no substitute for seeing these works in person, but pictures will give you an idea of what the challenge section looks like:

I was one of those members who chose to do something entirely new--a quilt that moves and changes as the air currents spin the individual pieces and as the viewer changes his or her perspective.

I call this Turn, Turn, Turn, for obvious reasons and it measures about 30" x 32". I had wanted to make a kinetic quilt for years and had been sitting in a Thai restaurant over a year ago, waiting for Tom to park the car and staring at a chandelier made of off white disks hung on strings that moved when the air conditioning came on. --Ah--I thought--I could perhaps use the same concept to create a quilt with different parts of a pattern on long strips-- When I began to think about the guild challenge, it seemed the perfect opportunity to see if I could actually create such a quilt.

The project began with my drafting a variety of designs that would create a new design when flipped from one side to the other and deciding which ones created some kind of harmonious pattern. Of course, the process of selecting colors was the same as in any quilt, but here my procrastination paid off as I had some beautiful fabrics that I had bought at the Lancaster quilt show that had been sitting on my buffet for a few weeks because I loved looking at them. One was a hand-dyed fabric from Ghana that complemented a deep emerald green and a deep teal that had been hand woven in Bali and had the sheen of silk even though they were cotton. I added a couple of other batiks and I was on to solving the batting problem, since my usual cotton batting would not supply enough shape. Luckily I had made fabric bowls a few years ago and so decided to try Peltex, a perfect choice, since it provided some stiffening but I could still stitch through it.

After some trial and error, I managed to successfully sew the back and front onto the Peltex and the designs even matched up. As I finished my fifth strip, however, I began to worry about the next step. How would I mount these to make them turn. Would they turn? Would they line up enough to make patterns? Before I invested more hours and more of that wonderful fabric, I had to find out. After running heavy quilting thread through the top of each, I taped the thread to top of a doorway and stood back to see what happened:

They lined up beautifully and turned now and then in the breeze from a ceiling fan! This was getting exciting. I now had the energy to finish the other fourteen strips.

Of course, when they were done and I had added some beads to the bottom of each, I had to jump the final hurdle: how to mount all of them so that they could hang on a wall. I finally decided on a piece of wood about 1 1/2" square with two small hook and eyes screwed into the top to which fish line would be attached. On that I stapled more Peltex that would be sturdy enough to hold the thread.

To cover the wood and Peltex I quilted another piece of the Ghana fabric and then confronted another moment of truth: Would it hang on the wall?

Indeed it did!

And here is one last alternative view at the exhibit, since this quilt does look different every time you see it:

And if you're still with me, thanks for the company!

Pictures at an Exhibition

2010-09-04T11:42:00.000-04:00

The Mountain Laurel Quilt Guild Exhibit 2010 opened with a crowded gallery last night. This is a shot down the left side in the quiet before people starting arriving. And the next one shows the center grouping:

To be successful, an exhibit like this takes a great deal of work and many volunteer hours. None put in more hours for this show than Susan, the exhibit chair, who, with her great organizational skills, managed to keep all the plates spinning, the committees on target, and everyone reasonably happy throughout the two years of preparation time for this event. She was aided by a number of generous hard workers in our guild.

But the big percentage of the success has to be attributed to the quilters willing to put their work on display. For some this is easy; for others of us it is difficult and the more of us we put into our quilts the harder it can be to send them out there for all the world to see and comment on.

So here's to the hard work of Susan and all who helped her and to the hard work and courage of all the quilters whose work is on display. Together we all made something beautiful!