Christmas!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!