Seeing

Why do you, we, I make art is a question that comes up now and again when artists get together over a cup of tea or over the Internet--and sometimes when an artist is by herself and having a bad day. The other day as I sat stitching at the window I was reminded forcefully of one of the things creating art has done for me--it has taught me how to see, observe, be aware, wake up.

I looked out the window and smiled to see all the red-winged blackbirds below the bird feeder (our official sign of spring here in northcentral Pennsylvania) and then realized there were more grackles than blackbirds in this flock of almost thirty birds. Grackles are truly birds of many colors, as I discovered when I made a quilt last year based on a dead grackle I found in the yard after a windstorm and thus had the opportunity to see all the purples, blues, greens, reds, even yellows that the feathers of this seemingly black bird contain.

I looked for all those colors on these living, moving birds and was seeing glints of purple changing to blue when the sun came fully out from behind a cloud and what a show! Colors changed and danced from one bird to the next as they pecked and turned and bobbed and as the sun and clouds changed the light.

This day came in the middle of a chaotic week--and all that was forgotten for a few glorious minutes. Later in the day I took this picture of part of a group but a photo can't capture the myriad colors or changing sunlight.

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

It's All About--Me!

Last December it was my turn to suggest a theme for the local challenge group that I belong to and I finally decided on a letter or letters of the alphabet used as some kind of design element. I had what I thought was a good idea at that point but by the time the holidays were over and I actually sat down to do some sketching, something entirely different leaped into my mind. I had been having some discussions with friends and with myself about identity and egos and so I started playing with a "Me" concept and here is what finally came together:

Once I had gotten the idea I had to come up with a way to translate it into fabric before the March deadline, and after rejecting fusing and hand applique, I decided to start with the E's and see if I could piece them.  When they seemed to work, I set about putting the top section together. And then, in case you missed it, there's the tiny addition:

I, of course, had to call it "It's All About Me."

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

Transformation

The word for our Art 1016 challenge this time was "Transformation," a word that, as the member who chose it pointed out, can be applied to just about any quilt since we are all taking fabric and thread and whatever else strikes our fancy and transforming it into a whole quite different from the sum of its parts. But even with that wide interpretation I almost didn't work on this challenge due to all the other transforming that's taking place in my life.

But, as I begin my goodbyes to this place that I love, I keep being reminded of times and scenes that I want to hold onto--like walking in the fields with Terra on a late autumn day and suddenly I am aware of snowflakes falling, just a very few drifting silently down. And there was the idea for a quilt--the very beginning of a transformation.

This is a small piece--the rules for our challenge group state that the quilt should be no larger that 10 x 16" (although we have begun to relax our rules somewhat) and so I was originally going to make the quilt 10 inches wide but split that 10 inches into three panels:

This layout was bothering me, however, probably because the middle panel needed to be more obviously the focus and the three pieces seemed less unified than they could be. So I finally happened upon the idea of putting that center panel on top of the other two as it appears in the first photo. Do you think the change made a difference?

 There are also very quiet snowflakes on that panel that may not show up so well on your screens:

And now that you've seen what I've done this week, you might to check out Off the Wall Friday at Nina-Marie's blog to see what others have been creating.

The Colors of Snow

After a couple of wimpy winters, we are back to the real thing--with a reasonable amount of snow and enough cold temperatures to keep it around for at least a bit.  I wasn't going to bore you with my snow dyeing adventures this year. My first round from a deep snow a couple of weeks ago yielded the usual results:

And then we had three or four inches last week and I almost didn't even try because the snow was very light and dry.  The first one I ironed was very nice but fairly monochromatic and I should have learned by now that I need contrast to get the best effects-and the blue I dripped by mistake on the bottom right side wasn't enough contrast:

The blue mixed with black was more exciting:

and then there was the jewel!

This has lots of the chrystally, petally texture that I associate with the most successful snow dyes and the colors are magical.  Unlike my usual technique, which involves pouring already mixed dye concentrate on the snow, this time I sprinkled dye powder on the snow.  Now there are problems with this because the  dangerous time when working with dyes is when they are in powder form--and sprinkling powder on the snow does tend to get more powder in the air than I like.  I may try using the two colors--sapphire blue and plum--in concentrate form and see if it is the colors and not the technique that produced these results.  Of course, the quality of the snow is another variable and that I will not be able to reproduce.

Venn Valentine

I have always loved Venn diagrams--those intersecting circles that we played with in math--perhaps because I could more easily find meaning in these connected graphics than in 2x + 3y = 10, and I have always wanted to use them in a quilt. This year when searching my visual inventory for an image for the mini-quilt I make for Tom each Valentine's Day, those Venn diagrams popped up.  What better image of intersecting lives where the place of intersection becomes even richer for the combination of two entities! And so I began to look for an interesting fabric for the background.

I had just about decided on a nice pale yellow green with the hint of vertical stripes that I had made while experimenting with folding fabric when I pulled out a piece whose personality pretty much overwhelmed that shy, retiring green. The energy in the piece was the result of pouring two different colors over a piece of fabric, a red purple of some kind and a cerulean-type blue on opposite ends of the container. As the two flowed into each other and combined, they produced some wild results. Parts of that fabric were never going to play nicely with other fabrics in a pieced quilt but they could make a great whole cloth. And besides, the turbulence of this fabric would be just another part of the symbolism, since our lives together have never been dull and we are facing a particularly challenging year of change.

So after much contemplation, I cut the fabric, opting for a 10 x 16" format, sandwiched it and began to quilt:

As I was halfway done, I had a twinge of worry since I often make quilts for Tom in greens, golds, and browns but it was too late to turn back.  Should have listened to that intuition.  My always supportive husband struggled to be enthusiastic when he first saw the quilt and finally admitted that he had trouble with the colors. I, on the other hand, love these colors. But I haven't entirely given up hope that this quilt will end up in the intersecting portion of those two spheres because he spent some time looking at it again today and decided he was beginning to like it.

And if our two spheres have intersected in the reading of this post, thanks for the company!

The Beginning

What, you may ask, is this dirty, sorry-looking piece? It is my very first entry into the world of quilting! One of the perks of preparing to move and having to rummage through rarely disturbed spaces looking for things to recycle or throw away is that I sometimes find a little surprise. Sometimes that surprise is the body of some long dead insect but today, hidden all the way in the back corner of the cubby in our dresser was the little quilt top that I made so long ago (1979?) and then turned into a pillow--a pillow that was used for many years, as the stains and wear attest.

I made this top in a class at a quilt shop in Pittsburgh, where we were living at the time (I can't remember the name of the shop or the teacher), and it was both pieced and quilted by hand.

There was nothing complicated about it, but something about creating pattern with fabric and thread began to turn my world and my view of it in an entirely new direction.

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company on my little trip back in time!

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!