All tied up

I  happily work on six, seven pieces at a time and then ALL OF A SUDDEN, the need to finish something becomes urgent.

I am the same way with housework… looking with neutral disregard at piles of clutter everywhere until one day, I CAN’T STAND THEM ANYMORE.

This piece was a dream-sketch quilt and it is taking waaaaaaaaaay too long to complete — as are my three Easter Cross quilts, a poppy piece, and a pillow commission.  So forget about the torture depicted in the piece.  The thing torturing me right now is the unfinished state of things.

(but I have been all tied up — kids on break, garden attention-grabbing — just in the last few days I removed the dead inkberry, attended two track meets,

potted up a bunch of sedum, raked the side beds, planted some basil seeds, used garbage-snagged pieces of glass (– someone’s old fridge components picked up yesterday –) to make a casual cold frame,  swept the side porch and readied it for summer morning reading, swept the bluestone, got the houseplants outdoors, grocery shopped twice, cleared up the south bed, made the garage passable again by moving shit around, started a new compost heap)…

During the construction of this quilt, which I am calling “Witness”, the artist Barron Storey — whose work I really love — started a “women and ropes” series.  My “ropes” look more like threads, and lack the paralyzing tension that I had hoped to depict, but this quilt is, nevertheless of a “woman and ropes”. The cloaked witness is partially shown here:

On a lighter note, I am finding this business of having middle-aged eyes is adding a new dimension to design — the looking with glasses on, the looking with glasses off — something I never knew about because I had never worn glasses until middle age.  Last night I noticed that the batik of the Witness’s face, if you blur your eyes, really looks like a face.  I like it when things like that happen.

Finishing small things

Here is the word added to the small Journal Quilt.  I think of ‘freedom’ as something robust and tawny (who knows why), and yet here it is in a whispery pink. . . freedom as something subtle and fragile.

This is the finished piece.

The moon gave me a few problems.  The chenille vine upholstery fabric was thick, and seamed, even thicker.  Next time, lay flat and don’t seam?  In any case, to cover the bump, I added lace.  And, to balance things out a little, I tore some of the blue netting.

The lower lunar section reveals an inkjet fabric print of an antique map of the constellations.

“Free” has been on my mind in the wake of handling all of my free fabrics.  “Free” is on my mind thinking about what holds me back.  Something about spring sets a little piece of me free.  So grateful.

scratches

Almost done with this one… some of the stitches need better anchoring, because it was hard to control the tension pulling through fabric that had been gessoed.

The little single chain crochet that is couched on the edge was tinted in a pot with onion skins and one lone black walnut shell which appeared in the kitchen the morning I had the pot going.

What I notice — There is a tension pairing marks made by me (the script, the stitches) and ‘found’ marks, as printed on commercial fabrics (those little vegetal shapes — which look like a primitive form of writing and those pink upstrokes on the linen, which I repeated with my black marker).   What I want to see now is a piece that ONLY has marks/writing made by me.