Detour

I now have a clear excuse for not making major progress on my artistic journey this year. While visiting our children during Christmas, Tom and I bought a house. This, of course, was not a spur of the moment decision but the product of much discussion and soul searching and then six months of house hunting with several adventures along the way.

But now that a real house is in the picture, I am realizing all the physical and emotional energy this transition will take. We will be living in two places until Tom retires and then will move completely into the new house. We will be moving into a house we love and into an area we are excited about getting to know, but we are leaving a house we love and a place where we have put down deep roots.

And the two places are polar opposites.  We now live among mountains and farms in rural Pennsylvania on 24 acres.  We will be moving to a city setting north of Boston, where we are a ten-minute walk to downtown in a house with a tiny backyard--but it is a backyard full of trees that terraces down to a "pond" that is more like a small lake.  So we will have close neighbors on either side but only water in the back.

While I am telling you all this to explain why the amount of my posts and my work in general has not lived up to my expectations in the past couple of months, it also is a rather circuitous way to introduce a quilt I finished before Christmas.

Perhaps you might remember what I, for want of a real name, called the dotty quilt, begun after I had been working with lots of grays and blacks on a very structured piece and felt the need to just abandon myself to color for a while. So I made lots of somewhat circular shapes--didn't even want to force myself to make nicely rounded circles-- from a great variety of hand-dyes.

I finally put it up on my working wall last summer and decided to devote some time to making something out of it. As I played with arranging the dots, I began to visualize a more structured, more dense central section with perhaps only a few dots on the perimeter. For a while I even had the outer dots escaping or fleeing the over populated center.  But soon I began to see this quilt as a reflection of the choices Tom and I were making and the two sections became perhaps more balanced in my own attitude--as if the value of each is still being weighed.

The quilting as well emphasizes difference:

The quilt has developed other meanings for me as I have worked on it and I ended up christening it "Many/Few" to keep all those meanings as possibilities.

The dots are hand appliqued and the blue frame is hand couched.

And now my main New Year's resolution is to somehow keep experimenting with fabric, thread, dye, and paint while life descends into chaos.  Can she do it, ladies and gentlemen?  Stay tuned.

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

Transformation

Commissions can make me nervous. I find myself trying to create something through someone else's eyes and that is extremely difficult to do.  I had avoided them for a couple of years, but when my son-in-law, who was looking for a unique gift for friends of his who were getting married, called to ask if I would make them a small quilt, I was flattered enough to take it on. The fact that he is a great guy probably entered into it as well.

Aside from the size-- twelve inches square or thereabouts, he also requested that the quilt be an image of a volcano: the bride, who was from Australia, and the groom, who was from California, were going to celebrate their wedding in Hawaii among the volcanoes. And so I set to researching exactly what volcanoes looked like.

When I determined that he also wanted the image to actually be recognizable as a volcano, I put aside my more abstract sketches to pursue later and chose one that was definitely volcano-like but more quilt-like than completely realistic.

The gold and lighter purple are hand appliqued and the dark purple is fused raw-edged appliqued.  I wanted the quilting on the rock pieces to suggest the aboriginal paintings of Australia without directly referencing them.

Naming this little quilt was a challenge since there are so many catastrophic words associated with volcanoes that are not exactly appropriate for a wedding quilt.  But then our Art 1016 challenge word for February was announced: Transformation--and I shamelessly stole it as the name of the quilt! It was perfect for a volcano and a wedding. Alas, this quilt is not 10 x 16 inches so I still must come up with a piece to fit that challenge. 

Anyway, my son-in-law was pleased, and I was pleased.

And if you are still reading about this small step on my journey, thanks for the company!

Happy New Year!

This morning I slogged with Terra through the foot high snow into our woods, looking for a good picture and found many.  The snow spirits had been at work--with much creativity, fearless in their techniques and delighting in their work. May we all find such joy in the New Year!

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

After a three- or four-year hiatus, I was inspired this year to make ornaments again--but only a few and mostly for family members.  And because I limited the number I enjoyed making every one.


One of my favorite parts of the Christmas celebration is the journey of the Three Kings--three obviously intelligent human beings who find themselves wandering around after a star and who are driven by such curiosity that they can't send a servant or an annoying brother-in-law to check things out but have to see for themselves what is going on. So my inspiration began with the number three.



I then decided to use some of the hosta flower stems I had harvested in late fall. For some reason they had turned a beautiful mahogany color this year--or perhaps they do this every year for a brief time since the ones I neglected to harvest are now the usual faded tan color. And they turned out to be hollow!

Fabric was next and I rummaged through my drawer of African fabric that I love, but I have rarely had the courage to cut it or the project to use it in.  And now I had a project: a patterned background would be a perfect contrast for the plain stems. One of the cool things about African fabric is the damask-textured fabric they start with before they dye or batik it. (This shows up a little in the purple but not at all in the blue.)  The blue fabric came from a project, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, to give very poor women a skill by teaching them batik.  More of the fabric can be seen on the back of the ornament.

I made the fabric squares first with batting sandwiched in the middle.   Then came the tubes and beads.  And it was done!

Hope you have had much to celebrate this year!

Peace. . . .

Thoughts

I planned to take a break from Christmas preparations today and write a blog post about one of several projects I have finished recently, but every time I sat down to write something I found myself thinking about the devastating events that took place in Connecticut.

When 9/11 happened I was working on a quilt that will forever be associated for me with that event and became a kind of affirmation in the face of evil.  Now I am working on a quilt with a light in darkness theme and at first I thought, Of course, this will be a way of working through this.  But the darkness of my quilt is rich and warm and full of mystery, not the jagged, cold, terrifying darkness of this event.

Unlike those parents and the families of the slain teachers whose world has been forever changed, we will all somehow absorb this shadow into our lives, along with all the other shadows we have experienced and we will continue on. Like moss covering a fallen tree, daily life will cover over the strong emotions we are all feeling right now.  But will we have learned anything?  Will we actually move from just emotion into action?  As a nation, we must consider two questions:

• If Adam Lanza did not have semi-automatic weapons capable of spraying hundreds of bullets, how many of those children would still be alive? 
• Do ordinary citizens need to own such weapons?  

Can we remember the violence that was the last image those children saw and hold on to the painful horror of it long enough to answer these questions?

Being Green

Our word theme for the most recent challenge for Art 1016 was "green."  I was going to choose the obvious and do another monochromatic quilt that I really enjoyed for the my local challenge group, but then I got to thinking about the "save the earth" kind of green and set out to make an earth friendly quilt.

The fabrics had to be recycled, of course, and what leaped to mind were pieces of silk from parts of Japanese kimonos I had bought several years ago, mainly sleeves.  A morning's search uncovered where I had stashed them away, after carefully taking out the hand stitching. One of them just happened to be green--a very complex green with a hint of dark shadowing and small regular dots that appeared and disappeared in different lights.  But even more important were the delicate leaves hand painted on the fabric with a surface sprinkling of tiny light green dashes.  I had discovered this fabric in the lining of one of the sleeves I bought, supposedly a bit of beauty that only the wearer would know about. I finally screwed up my courage to cut into this fabric and I began to lay out my challenge quilt:

Usually I use some kind of iron-on stabilizer when I work with silk, but this time in keeping with the green theme, I gave up the additional chemicals and electricity and worked only with the fabric. I love the way the silk drapes and flows anyway.  I also did all the piecing, appliqueing and quilting by hand, although I did cheat and use the machine to attach the facing since I was running out time and wanted a sturdier edge to the piece than my hand stitching would give it.

Although I love my hand-dyes, I have to say that working with fabrics with a history adds another dimension.  At one point when I was quilting the bottom right black square I noticed a tiny white mark on it and thought, Oh, no--the fabric has a flaw in it.  But it turned out to be a tiny white thread from the hand stitching someone else had done on this same piece of fabric.

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

Tired

Today was the end of an exhausting week. A few days ago I and seven other members of Vesta, a group of professional artists and craftswomen, had set up our annual show at the local Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center. Last night began the opening, which continued all day today, coinciding with our annual town extravaganza called Dickens of a Christmas, when a good chunk of Main Street is closed to traffic and is taken over by vendors, strolling musicians and performers, and a gazillion tourists.

My stint at the Gmeiner means hours standing on my feet and eating way too many cookies but it also means seeing people I haven't seen in a long time, spending time with my fellow artists and artisans, answering questions about the pieces I have in the show, selling a piece or two, and engaging in some interesting conversations about art in the abstract and in the particular.

And now I am in that delicious state where I can do nothing more and nothing needs to be done.  Without guilt, I can choose to do or not do anything.  Of course, I can also choose to go to bed. . . .

And if you have chosen to read this entire piece, thanks for the company!