progress in white

Slowly getting the hang of our updates. There definitely are improvements in the offing.  For now, I am just moments shy of a good, long walk in the spring air, then it will be time to walk to the periodontist for the insertion of an implant (yes, sympathy is welcome!)

In other words, this post will be quick. A report in pictures. WH = “White House”, the very original name for this piece.

WH – scraps laid out

WH – seamed, with some embroidery

WH – pre-whitening close up

WH – same area, both whitened and layered (the silk had color and pattern)

WH – sheers pinned over whitening white running stitch (grey splotchy roof does not stay)

WH – sheers pinned on the other side of the roof

WH – more whitening with the addition of white running stitches (grey roof is gone)

WH – celebrating the shredding orange silk by tacking it down; one sheer had embroidered loops on it, seen here

WH – getting there

WH – hanging

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trued, aligned, pressed

Technical jargon offers specificity.  Like any vocabulary, it often resonates with multiple meanings, meanings that don’t have much to do with the task at hand.  Every time I ‘true’ a quilt top, for instance, the other senses of that word ‘true’ are present.

Aligning a design’s intended sight lines brings deep satisfaction – perhaps satisfaction that is very tied to the processes of  ‘aligning’ and ‘righting’.  Maybe the more we recognize how much of life is beyond our control, the more satisfaction these miniscule attempts at order are (enough said! enough said!).

The final six or seven seams of a mid-sized or large pieced quilt top require more precision than comes naturally to me.  Since I know what the pay off is here (for pinning, for cutting straight lines, for re-working the crooked), I settle into a slightly different rhythm and mindset.  In other words, I don’t mind.

‘Re-working the crooked’.  There it is again! Language that describes both the inner and the outer.   If I had to describe one inner crooked line that could use some re-working?  That strange belief that holds one person can change or fix another.

Barn II.  The final six seams of the quilt top were machine-stitched and the seams pressed, on Monday.  I won’t go into what yesterday entailed.  On to quilting!!!

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stamina

I am back to piecing a big ole barn.  Some windows are pieced.  Some will be appliqued.  The sky will not remain all one fabric as shown, and the foreground will extend downward, some.  It is cold in the basement now, so I won’t last too long, but it occurs to me that one to one and a half hour increments of effort on this is probably about right.  The first barn, some of you will remember, is now in the quilting pile.

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November arrives

My thoughts and prayers are with the folks in NYC and NJ and elsewhere, suffering with clean up, destruction, and deprivation.  I hope temperatures stay mild.  It’s gotten a little cold here (outside of Boston) in the last couple of hours.  Here is one of the Berkshire barns, as of this morning.  It is a completed quilt top.

I’m not sure why it turned out to be such a struggle to assemble, but it was.  It’s about 32″ wide and incorporates some of the more successful indigo cloths from this summer.  The indigo worked particularly well for the mountains.  I’m calling it, “Waiting for Snow”.

I created a ‘side bar’ quilt on the work table, taking little breaks from the Barn.  It has a totally different feel, and therefore constituted a visual contrast.  This was refreshing for some reason.
In this one, the structure is merely hinted at, and the landscape has been granted license to be wild and dominant.  Not a surprising choice, given the rampaging punches that Sandy delivered over the weekend, while I was safely working down in my cellar studio.  This composition features some more of my indigo dips, as well as silk from my upholstery-design-contact, quilting cottons, batiks, and that Lonni Rossi broccoli/tree fabric that I so love.
I am hand quilting this little composition today, as the sky greys and a cold rain starts to fall.  Its working title is: “Long Island Blues” (Jude Hill online class project).  In this case, the usual horizon line has been broken up (submerged?!!) by the wandering watery lines of shibori.

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Middle Passage reveal

This is ‘Middle Passage I’ after dunking the lower edge into the indigo vat.  By adding more resists, I managed to retain more of the original fabric than I did with the other Middle Passage piece (where I turned the bottom four inches of the quilt into a solid band of dark blue).
I like how some of the dye concentrated on the stitches.
I also like how some of the indigo visually ties into the hand-dyed fabric that I had purchased and pieced right above the yellow-dunked print (they’re the ivory, ecru, and blue rectangles).  But, overall, this experiment might have proved more satisfactory had I dyed the cloth prior to attaching the three layers together – the batting absorbed a lot of the dye that might have otherwise saturated the quilt top.  Some of the indigo streaks don’t appear to fully saturate the threads. Below, is a view of the quilt that did NOT get immersed.
This morning, I twisted and dunked yet ANOTHER Middle Passage quilt (III?).
I can’t show you how it looks yet, but it is the least successful of the three by a lot.  Here’s how it looked prior to submersion:
Because I liked the red batik border on this one, I folded the quilt and immersed the mid-section.

Because I’m unhappy with the result, tomorrow I will probably go ahead and dunk the entire lower half.  I wish I knew how to apply a rice paste – I would use that to preserve some of the red.

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