Piecing along…

Piecing takes a long time, especially when every seam makes me rethink an entire area.  The two layouts above and the one to the right are earlier versions, from last week.  Today, I decided my polar bears will not be wandering around on ice, but swimming.

Already, large and completed sections have flown off the table into two other separate quilts.  The last large Global Warming Quilt that I made started out about this size and ended up as three smaller quilts.  I am still hoping to integrate the bottom section with the polar section and to create a large-ish piece (3′ x 4′), although it is not yet clear that I’ll be able to make the hot and cool sections work together.

Today was a good sewing day, with only one call to go out.  I took Jack to Wellesley for errands.  We shopped for apples, bird seed, and sand and salt.  The walkways have thawed a little in the last day or so, but it is still pretty treacherous out there.

In spite of much effort, though, I did not progress very far on the quilt.  This business of making the pieces, which become larger pieces, all work together, is not as easy as one might imagine.  I have never done this process on the kitchen table before. As much as having my work upstairs (instead of down in the cellar/studio) gets aggravating on account of the mess, it is useful to be glancing at the design at different points of the day.  A different part of the brain can get engaged.  Also, I am happy to report that I woke from a nap today with a novel idea for how to attach the bears. Yet another part of the brain!

Changing viewing orientation or scale can be useful in design.  If the colors and patterns are well laid out, they will work in any direction.

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Gratitude List #2

Chinese New Year, collage, 2.5" x 2.5"

I am grateful for:

another snow day, a long walk with Jack in the quiet and snow,
the patterns that strewn salt makes on fresh-fallen snow,
a fixed furnace and the funds to pay for it, a fixed bath valve,
and the thought of a hot bath later, Trader Joe’s Summer Curry Sauce
(dinner in a jar), dinners in front of the TV, messes that can be cleaned up,
dreams, boiling water for coffee, C.’s new haircut and the memory of his very first
haircut at age 4, food in the fridge, food in general, plans for lunch with friends,
emails from friends, phone calls from friends, dinner invites from friends,
winter robins eating holly berries near the side stoop,
Graph II finally done (7th grade science), and
the first tug toward gardening (which during the early parts of the winter,
I never expect to feel again).

I am also grateful for the little piece shown above.  It is about 2.5″ square and excites me because of the newness of the direction.  It is two photo-shopped digital images of cabbages, sandwiched together with a zigzag stitch, with a Chinese flash card in between.  The back cabbages were printed onto cotton fed through my inkjet printer and the top cabbages were printed onto a sheet of transparency fed through my printer.  The cabbages were photographed at Angino Farm, Newton’s CSA.  (The yellow border is not a part of the collage).

I also love this two and half inch square because it came together by way of some of the best parts of the creative process, and they are:

• Scavenging/collecting
• Resurrection
• Serendipity.

The gathering of things is a big part of what artists do.  It is part-shopping, part scavenging, part receiving of gifts. I have no idea who gave me the Chinese flashcards and I have nearly given them away a half dozen times because they lived next to the Pledge and rags in the front closet, instead of somewhere more accessible and logical like with my rubber stamps and decorative papers.

The piece (by its mere existence) speaks to redemption (it is just some scraps stitched together, I know!).  It was cut off an earlier failed attempt at something along these lines.  Often the attempts to make something work are marked by struggle and frustration, and ultimately you may produce something semi-worthwhile, or even very worthwhile, but the process is heavy.  Perhaps too much about the desire to makegood on a failure… too much about the refusal to let something go, instead of the upswing of invention.  But when a snippet becomes a pleasing visual treat just by being in the right place at the right time, one can celebrate.  It doesn’t happen that often.

Lastly, whenever and wherever serendipity pokes its playful head, it is worth taking note.  In this case, the flipping calendar with Chinese words on the side found its way into this collage a few days before Chinese New Year (today!!) and on the day I wrote my check for this year’s farm share.  Can I parse any particular meaning from this? Not really. Not this time. But that doesn’t make it any less delightful.

The collage does seem to resonate with my friend J., who is alive and well, blessedly, although probably not up to making the several dozen dumplings she usually makes this time of year.  Perhaps this little collage should make its way to her house as a New Year greeting!!  Happy New Year J, M & M and adopted Chinese daughters everywhere!!!

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Inauguration and Ichor

Journal Quilt Week 4

This week’s Journal Quilt HAD to reference the Inauguration, of course.  I started with the idea of pairing drab gray with splashes of bright color to capture the contrast between how I feel about Presidents 43 and 44.  A dark gray piece of bark cloth that had maroon foliage the color of dried blood was a good starting point.  It wasn’t quite big enough, though, and the ‘correction’ of using a corner to enlarge the piece introduced the idea of wounds.  I used last week’s straw-colored linen (satisfying my Journal Quilt Rule of carrying over one fabric) to create X’s and sewed them and red floss (more dried blood) like sutures on a cut.

The central window was a new trick learned from the most recent issue of Quilting Arts Magazine.  Initially, I had the obvious and perhaps corny idea of using some bright Hawaiian fabrics for the interior, but instead placed a recently-purchased piece of Australian blue-dotted fabric, which I realized when I stepped back, resembled cells seen through a microscope.  So now, rather than referencing Obama directly, I let the quilt speak to healing more generally.

The dotted print is embellished with beads.  The gray surface is embellished with sequins and a button. This process put me in mind of the recently learned word (thank you John Banville!) ‘ichor’ – which means both discharge from a wound and ambrosia — a funny contradictory combination that seems apropos to this particular changing of the guards…

I selected the window frame fabric because it fit my notion of hope — bright, cheerful images of spring flowers.  As it happens, the fabric came from the dress I wore as a bridesmaid in my sister-in-law’s wedding and so further resonated with the week — nothing lavish and formal like what was seen at the inaugural balls, but still a fancy-ish dress worn to a big, happy event.

The sense of change is so welcome!  Look!  Lights are on out there!

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Gratitude List

A week’s worth of Gratitude Lists
(from one of my many notebooks!)

I am grateful for:
pajamas, bubbly water, a good book, Monday mornings, sleep, coffee
blankets, work in the house, food in the fridge, wool sweaters & scarves, Jack, fabric
hot water, cashmere, wool, humor, this page, face creme, C’s track success and Ken’s ability to share in it, coffee
books that challenge me (“The Smoke Tree”) and books that don’t, Saturdays on a 3-day weekend
my two Berninas, email, offers for D. to snowboard, coffee, Sundays, eye glasses, Billy
Jack’s company, Ken’s shoveling, clean bathrooms, Obama, ice water, our collective hope, pride
& the democratic process
popcorn, this page, soup, the thought of a bath, the bath itself, canned peaches
a breakfast invitation, quiet, an iron that works, a grocery shop done, sunshine, Jack

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Keeper of Dreamtime

I spent several mornings last week creating decorative pieces for students playing Native Americans in a local Peter Pan production… Afterwards, I decided to continue using black fabric with Heat Bond to create this week’s Journal Quilt.  In keeping with Native traditions, I allowed a dream to dictate my choice… last week’s dreamscape produced a black bear.  I cannot tell you how many Novembers and Decembers found me wishing that I was a bear, so that I could purposefully, rightfully load up on carbs and fat in anticipation of a long, long nap!

Journal Quilt Week 3

Bears are associated with the North, with winter, and with wisdom and introspection.  Native Americans call them the “Keepers of Dreamtime”. Their energy is considered feminine, both because of the womb-like cave of hibernation and the duration of mothering time for cubs (as long as 7 years).  We have so much snow this winter, it’s no surprise that Bear Energy is strong!

(To satisfy my Journal Quilt Rule of carrying over a fabric from the previous week, I used strips of yellow-ish linen — found on the right side of the bear).

And speaking of bears, for a long time I’ve known that the fourth quilt in a series on global warming would have polar bears in it.  The thought of polar bears drowning as they swim in search of ice is heartbreaking.  The first three quilts in this series featured hot, saturated colors, with wavy lines signaling heat and circles representing suns and unrelenting radiation. I am not accustomed to working with the pale palette that I’ve collected for the polar imagery and find it challenging — which probably means this is a good exercise.

I am also trying to sort out a more streamlined way to go from the initial collage-phase to the finished quilt.  If I piece almost everything, I get bogged down by the slow tempo and lose much of the initial feel of the design.  Someday I may just slide a big piece of canvas underneath and gesso the thing together!  My recent idea is to create four smaller quilts that I will join.

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