Beyond

One of the nice things about falling in love with a new technique is that it can keep you going even when there are a thousand delightful distractions like long conversations with our grown children, reading and rereading a new book with a grandchild, deciding on how to replace an old bathroom vanity top with something that suits us, walking on the beach with an enthusiastic Golden Doodle. Even as the holidays sped by, I kept working on a small piece that used my scrunched texture technique combined with untextured bits on top of the scrunching.

"Beyond" is 7 x 10 inches and made of various hand-dyes hand-stitched to batting and backing with perle cotton. 

And thanks for the company on this brief ramble!

Resolution

Snow falling has that mesmerizing effect, that pull toward contemplation, that makes us think of newness, beginning again, the possibility of real change, and with blizzard conditions approaching our Massachusetts home, there is plenty of snow to watch.

Add the fact that it is the second day of the new year and I begin to search for pencil and paper to write down some resolutions.

But I don't often do well with resolutions:

RESOLVED:
I will spend more time with friends and family
                         AND
I will spend more quiet time in my studio.

I will take my work more seriously
                   AND
I will laugh more often.

I will post more regularly on my blog
                          AND
I will spend less time on the computer and more time on my work.

I will believe in myself
                AND
I will question myself.

I could go on. My resolutions often take the form of paradoxes and I become like someone trying to walk in two directions at once. But no matter how absurd or antithetical the two parts of a paradox become, according to the classic definition of the word, it can suggest a truth. And so perhaps my best resolutions on this snowy second of January 2014 are not to ignore all the contradictions and seeming impossibilities of my life but to see where they can lead me--and to keep the bird feeder filled.

Happy New Year!

Photo Doodles

Our snow is melting but has not lost the ability to delight:

Warm solstice wishes to you all!

Had to Find Time to Do It

What a joy to take these beauties out of the washing machine on a cold, gray, wintry day!

It had snowed two days before--just a couple of inches but enough to call it the first real snow of the season and I realized I had to seize the moment before the sun melted it. I prepared the fabric but when I found a place that had enough snow to scoop up I realized this was the light, fluffy stuff, the kind that did not usually produce the typical petal patterns I love. So I created an experiment--the green/blue one was covered with the fluffy snow and the purple one got snow from the car windshields that had melted and refrozen a bit so that it packed better. And you can see the difference: while I will easily find a use for the first one, the purple one is definitely more dramatic and petal-ly.

Of course, neither had just one color. The top one had very dark green, with a bit of gold, strong navy, azure and better black added. The purple one had, of course, purple with added bits of gold, azure and better black. I mixed a new batch of purple (and this may of skewed the results, but I don't think so) but all the rest were old dyes that I needed to use up.

Definitely worth taking time out to do this! I am two yards of fabric richer for doing it.

Art Trade

From a quick survey of the Internet, it looks like just about everybody has made artist trading cards, called by those in the know ATCs, but I had never tried my hand at them until one of the members of our local art quilt challenge group suggested we make them to trade at our meeting this month, a suitable challenge for the gift-giving season.

I first of all had to figure out how to make one, easily finding the dimensions (2 1/2 x 3 1/2") thanks to Google. I knew they should be somewhat stiff and thought Peltex would make a suitable batting only to discover my leftover Peltex was in MA and I was in PA. But in my search I uncovered some Roc-lon that had been on my shelf for several years and in my quest to use something up rather than buy something more that must be moved I discovered an excellent backing for quilty ATCs. I still added a bit of thin cotton batting but the Roc-lon gave stability without stiffness to the cards.

I decided to go with the exploded shapes that I have been playing with the past couple of years and opted for basic circles or squares cut from hand-dyes on a pieced background. Originally these were going to be raw-edged attached with hand stitching but the Thanksgiving weekend was fast approaching with the meeting immediately after and fusing them down was a surer guarantee I would have something to trade. The hand stitching with perle cotton was added during the long drive to MA for the holiday.

What took the most experimentation was finding an acceptable way to finish the edges. The Roc-lon was just thick enough that a close zig-zag stitch did not cover the edge well and a full-fledged satin stitch was going to take too much time. So I opted for couching perle cotton around each edge and tying the corners. Luckily I only had to do six.

But in return for my work I got six lovely and totally different ATCs, along with a bookmark from one member who felt she did not quite follow the rules and was assuaging her guilt.

So I got to add one more thing to my Thanksgiving list of things to be thankful for--gifts from creative friends. And, of course, I am grateful for your company, as always.

The Fruits of Denial

So here is this innocent-looking iron.

Hard to believe it could wreak such havoc, although I'm afraid I bear the brunt of the blame. About two weeks ago I pulled out a piece I have been working on for a couple of years in order to quilt a section of it. Since it had been rolled for a while a couple of small wrinkles had grown right in the middle of the piece that a quick ironing would remove. When I turned the iron on I noticed a couple of drops on the ironing board but I had just cleaned it the day before and I thought those drops might be left over from the steaming process it goes through and would be fine when it got up to temperature. Wrong conclusion! The quick swipe with the iron that removed the wrinkles left two small ever so slightly discolored circles of water on the white/light blue fabric.

I ran for a dampened paper towel and began blotting and sighed with relief when I held the piece up to light and the stain seemed to have gone. Two hours later it was almost dry and I was not so happy.  The small circles were no longer there but the stain had migrated to the edges of the larger blotted wet spot so the edges of two beautifully shaped circles were faintly inscribed on the piece about three times as big as the original small stains.

After considering abandoning the project--it is an experiment but I have spent quite a bit of time on it and it could turn out to be something interesting--I decided to try one last thing. I would wet down the whole light blue section, hoping the migrating stain would just migrate right off the edges of the piece. Several hours later I breathed a sigh of relief.  The stain was gone except for one small bit that I must not have thoroughly soaked and that will end up in the top seam allowance.

But I was still in denial about the iron, assuming that the whole incident was related to the cleaning process and moving on to the long list of things that must be done before the holidays.  I had used the iron several times on minor jobs and it did leak a couple of drops as it was heating up but seemed to work okay after that UNTIL my son-in-law came to visit.  He was working on a white worsted wool waistcoat that he was sewing by hand (he is a National Park Service ranger and wears this kind of 18th century stuff on the job) and asked to use my iron. I showed him how to turn it on, waited to let it get up to temperature before he used it and left, only to hear my daughter say, "Oh, no" a few minutes later. And, to my horror, there were two small stains on that beautiful waistcoat.

Our first blotting effort did not even completely remove the stains and migrated part of them to the edges of the blotting circles. Jim was handling this better than I was but we were both upset.  My daughter suggested a little soap on the original stain and I suggested wetting the whole thing down, hoping the wool and the silk lining would handle it okay. By the evening it was looking good and by the next morning it was dry and clear of stains!

And the iron began to regularly leak just a little. So am I ready to swear off this brand forever and write a nasty blog post about the company--or am I ready to swear off steam, as Ricky Tims has done because "all irons become incontinent"?  No to both of those. I still find steam very handy in a number of situations and about eight years ago I did extensive research when an iron failed shortly after I purchased it and I read some words of wisdom from a consumer researcher who said that the average life of any iron, no matter what you pay for it, is 2 1/2 years. His advice was to buy a medium priced iron that does the things you want.  I love the Black & Decker Digital Advantage--it heats quickly and well, has lots of steam, and is a good weight for my hand and shoulder.  And this iron (ordered Oct. 29, 2009) that costs about $44 lasted over four years! I have just ordered another.  Not sure what I can do about my ability to deny reality. . . .

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

Legacy

My grandson decided he wanted to be a raccoon for Halloween, for reasons that only a four-year-old can appreciate, and my daughter, armed with a vision of the many raccoons she has seen in her life and some fake fur, set to work:




















I am proud to say that I taught her how to thread a needle many years ago and supplied her with lots of bits of fabric that were sewed together into innumerable animals, dolls, and elves. She doesn't focus on quilts (although she has made some), but I could be an enthusiastic supporter when she started a small online business several years ago selling clever draft stoppers in the shape of cows, dogs, whales that she had designed and sewn.

Her older sister also has made a small quilted piece or two but her love affair is with 18th century period clothing that she makes for the interpretations she does as part of her job as a national park historian:

That's her husband next to her, who is also a national park ranger and who now, thanks to her influence and instruction, makes most of the clothes he wears on tours he leads.

It is interesting how our passions/obsessions get passed down. The kind of stitching I do is often a solitary venture but it is reassuring to see such strong connections. 

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