All the fruits are finished, and applied to the background this week.
I tried three different centers, from white daisies on red (no), a double plaid (no), a beautiful radish print (no).
Dots. That’s what worked, was dots.
This was my first tentative step forward. As I peeled the fruits from their parchment paper backgrounds, I would occasionally find a place where the light crept through, so I reached for my bag of scraps and cut another tiny angular piece to cover up the holes. I have now learned that obsessing over these scraps is a fool’s errand.
I’ve got a good start, but the needle keeps gumming up. I looked for anti-stick needles, but they don’t make them for the big quilting machines (I have a Handiquilter Sweet Sixteen) so I’m resigned to changing out the needle often and in between, swipes with nail polish remover. We run a high-tech shop, here.
When my mother was 90 years old, just the seven children hosted a luncheon for her, celebrating her life, which led me to think about mothers.
Mothers come in tall, medium and large. Mothers come in grumpy and happy. Mothers come in tired. Mothers come in a combination of adoring their children, frustrated with their children, and when will this kid ever go to college. Mothers love flowers, stroking babies’ cheeks, catching them when they dash through the mall as toddlers, pining for them when they go off to college, usually never to return home. Mothers come in all colors. Mothers come in street-smart, book-smart, and not-so-smart, but they all come in surprised at the task that lies before them and hope they will make it. Mothers mostly do, and if and when they don’t, other mothers somehow find their way to us, to teach us, bring us up, and leave us with memories.
The terms are popularly used when discussing how we interact with the internet. We receive Push Notifications, which means that someone, somewhere is sending us information or things that can be helpful. Or not. We can choose where we go, pulling information to us in terms of blogs (like this one, thank you). We can also pull information from bank sites, news sites, school and medical sites so we can gather information or read for pleasure.
We are familiar with push-pull in our own lives, aside from the internet. For example, when I go to a Guild meeting like I did this week, and have to show up early to set up the book sale, take minutes, make sure the substitute photographer is squared away (because the regular one didn’t show up), serve on the Nominating Committee (hallelujah — we got our President-Elect!), it is a push because NONE of those jobs are what I officially do (I run the website). Some activities in our lives are push-pull: volunteering, for example. Or paying attention to the weeds in the garden because you want to plant flowers.
But if I can plan an appliqué project, take a 3300-mile road trip visiting family (and grandson Alex, below) and enjoy time with my husband, I’d call it mostly a pull.
This idea of push-pull on the internet was discussed in a radio interview of Kyle Chayka with Ezra Klein. During their discussions about the nature of the internet these days, as well as Chayka’s newest book, Filterworld, I became interested in this idea. What is pushed onto me, and how does it affect how I feel about the quality of my life? And what is the effect of all that pushing? Chayka feels like it changes how we view things on the internet, and why — perhaps — our eyes glaze over quickly:
CHAYKA: “I mean, most of the encounters we have with culture online are pretty bad, I think. We do have much more choice in what we consume and all of these other possibilities surround us. But what we lack is that kind of museum-like experience or movie theater-like experience where you do have to sit with something and think about it and puzzle your way through it without flipping to get an answer.”
EZRA KLEIN chimed in: “And the problem with the push internet is it’s not really under your control, right? It’s about what the force pushing is doing. But as that became bigger, people stopped doing the things that allowed the pull internet to exist. There aren’t so many blogs anymore. Not none, but there are fewer. People put their effort — because it’s the easier way to find audience and eventually to make a living — into the algorithmic spaces. And so there’s simply less of this other thing there to explore.”
Top finished: April 2024
CHAYKA: “I think a feeling I’ve been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning. When you’re surrounded by infinite possibilities, when you know around the next corner is another video that might be funnier or more to your liking, you’re never going to sit with the thing that’s in front of you. You’re never going to be forced to have the patience, or the fortitude maybe, or the kind of willpower to fight through something and figure out if you truly like it or not.” ~ Kyle Chayka
Sitting with the thing in front of you. Museum-like experience. Algorithmic spaces. Push is not under our control. Scarcity creates meaning. Puzzle our way through it.
How much of our life is a “push” experience? How much of our activities and interests are “pull”? Do we value our time at the machine, or with cloth, or with the needle because it is a “scarce” activity? Or because we had the patience and stick-to-it-iveness to finish the stitching, the quilting, the cutting?
I guess it could be both. I guess it could be all.
Final image: Made in the 1600s for one of the popes, this smallish curio cabinet is a classic example of sitting with the thing in front of you until it is finished. Although I have to admit that if I were the cabinet-maker on the other side of the centuries, it might be feeling like a push. And that’s how it goes, right? I saw this in the Getty Museum in March.
Faith Baldwin said that quote, and I’ve saved it for ages, waiting to use it as a quilt title.
I started this with a whole new stack of colors than my last temperature quilt, and then even though I’d been fussing about it since January 1st, the intense sewing really didn’t get underway until about March — I was waiting to see if we would have an interesting year for weather. We did, with snow one day and hail another and many rain storms.
While I didn’t want to replace the earlier version, I did love love that quilting. Jen was able to do the same pattern on this quilt, too. It’s more square, has a temperature quilt key on the back, along with a linen tea-towel calendar to show the year. I also added a square denoting made in California. Which it was.
This is quilt #286, and it’s 61″ wide and 70″ tall. Or long. Or high, or whatever.
No surprise that I chose this title for this quilt, as these patchwork triangles mark the passage of time, and by their very color, alter the face of the quilt top. I’m not sure I’m as generous about the marks time has placed on my physical body, and sometimes the alterations of who I think I am can sometimes be pleasant, and other times, painful. I want just enough spice and change in my life to make it interesting, but I don’t want sustaining relationships to wither or change or wilt. Some you can’t get back, like when my father died earlier this year. Other relationships take a bit more stitching and cutting and late-night sewing to become the beautiful garment (or quilt) they were meant to be. Y’all know what I mean, and I’m guessing the marks time leaves on all of us can be wearying. Or gratifying. Or somewhere in between.
A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller, said Paul Klee.
John Lithgow: Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
Theodore Roethke, a favorite poet, noted that, Time marks us while we are marking time.
Try pausing right before and right after undertaking a new action, even something simple like putting a key in a lock to open a door. Such pauses take a brief moment, yet they have the effect of decompressing time and centering you, wrote David Steindl-Rast
We’re planning a trip to see the Eclipse in April, and are trying to find those moments where we can pause time, as Stindl-Rast suggests. And hopefully not in dive hotels, or out of gas at the side of a road in West Texas. Seeing the eclipse will, in its own way, pause time, and will make its mark, bringing a fancy bit of stitching to this thing called life.
I hope the Dressmaker-called-Time makes you the finery you hope for–
Sometimes the title for these posts can nudge toward the trivial, but the first thing I want to talk about was anything but trivial.
My family.
Our four children do not live near us, for some, the far-away is very-far-away, and for others, it’s a bit closer. My husband proposed taking me out to dinner for my milestone birthday, but to “prepare for photos.” And “maybe don’t wear your sneakers.” We went to our local Fancy Dining Place, The Mission Inn, which was still decked out in holiday lights. When I rounded the corner to our table, the kids were all sitting there. Oh, My! I was quite touched that they would come to celebrate with me, and they spent the next day with us, too. Quite the loveliest of birthday surprises. By Sunday, they had all gone home, and the house was very quiet.
When an opening became available, I rejoined the Gridster Bee. It was one I’d started several years ago, but I’d bowed out last year. Patti, ever capable, took over and has been a steady hand in keeping it going, as many bees dissolve after a short time. We had our kick-off Zoom call at the beginning of the month (one positive from the 2020 pandemic is this technology):
I loved seeing Carol’s Christmas quilt, one done in an earlier iteration of this Bee.
I finished this. It’s a free pattern, here on the website (keep reading). I’d started writing it ages ago, but who knows where time flies? Inside is the color key for both this 2023 (softer) version of Painter’s Palette fabrics, as well as the (bolder) version used in 2019:
I haven’t yet finished the 2023 quilt; for one, I’m still embroidering the temperature range numbers onto the Circle of Geese block that I’ve used for a key.
And about this geese pattern. It was originally made by Kelly Liddle of JelliQuilts. If I could find her again, I’d link to it. She seems to have vanished without a trace, and it’s a pretty good pattern for this sort of thing. I’ve even written to the last email I have from her, when I paid for and downloaded the pattern: Zip. Nada.
Which brings me to the podcast I listened to this past week, where Ezra Klein and his guest, Kyle Chayka, talk about how the internet isn’t fun anymore. Boring, too. And part of it is what Chayka calls the SEO-ification of the algorithm. Everything resembles everything else, as we use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get a wider reach. While this can have benefits, Chayka and Klein argue that we seem to be homogenizing our world, as every website looks like another as the robots send you to whatever you’ve liked before, and assume you will like again.
I’m fine with that, especially when I do a search on Temperature Quilts on Instagram. But I’m also not fine with it as it seems to have flattened out what we see. Like hashtags used to be an interesting way to get a range of images, from temperature quilts that began as crocheted blankets to the most recent version of houses, leaves, and birds. Now we just get the “TOP” images. Are they the top “eye-ball-getting” images? The most colorful? The most interesting? And how will we ever know what the robots, aka: algorithm, have come to choose what they are showing us.
Chayka says he misses the curated web, where various people wrote random things, like a writer went flying through a rainbow and put the colors up on a blog. A blog!?! Who writes those anymore? Well, I do. Maybe that is why I also write about quilting, but also more-than-quilting, trying to avoid being boring, and maybe to avoid having to clean up my sewing room:
(from 2020, but it still looks the same)
One more thing: this week is Road to California, a local, national quilt show. I’m signed up for two classes: one from Lori Kennedy (FMQ on Monday) and one from Annie Smith (Design Your Own Appliqué on Thursday). I’ll also go one more day, Saturday, so I can stay to get my quilt that is hanging in the show: Aerial Beacon.
I would take a closer photo of this, but it will have to wait until next week, when I get some pictures of it hanging in the show. If you are headed there, find me and say hi!
Here’s the Temperature Pattern download. It will stay here on my website for a bit, then move over to my Pattern Shop on PayHip. Enjoy!
Matthew Potts’ book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account holds this thought up to the light so the rays shine through in a multiple different ways, but the premise is always the same: “Even if we could completely undo the effect of what has been done, we cannot make it so that “the thing that was done never happened” (Jankélévitch, quoted in Potts, 77). That fact of the deed, and the impact of that fact if not of its effects, shall remain absolute and eternal.”
We can waste years of our lives angry at others out for all the wrong they have shown us. We can castigate ourselves for our personal failings (we all have our own list of them), vowing never to repeat them. We often struggle.
Potts’ answer? Bring in the principle of forgiveness: “Forgiveness seeks to live in the wake of loss. It accepts that what has been lost cannot be restored, and then it aims to live in and with the irrevocability of wrong” (23). He goes on to say that: “forgiveness also accepts that past as unalterable and so imagines what possibilities for the future its battered history might bear” (24). In other words, forgiveness is future-facing. “Whatever the past has been or the future may bring, we can begin, and begin again” (94).
I cannot quote enough of his book here to show you his extensive thinking around this idea. But I sometimes wonder — if we can not turn back time — why do we all turn our head to look behind us? Like how I started this post? These three quotes address this:
“As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future” (Margaret Atwood).
“One faces the future with one’s past” (Pearl S. Buck).
And finally, to bring it full circle: “Nothing we can do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future” (Ashleigh Brilliant). I liked Buck’s idea, that the lenses with which we view the future are colored by our past. Atwood is more tactical, encouraging to use what we’ve learned to plan our future. Brilliant, whose cartoon is above, cautions us not to waste our energy dwelling on mistakes.
I hope that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t tackle some of our UFOs, as I noticed that most of the quilt finishes (above) were pulled from my stack of UFOs. However, to think kindly about them, it’s like my past self left them for my current self to finish up (thank you, Pearl Buck). So, instead of rueing that new ideas in 2023 were sparse, I’m grateful that I had something to turn to to keep myself busy. I’m also trying to apply the ideas in Mr. Potts’ book to keep myself forward-facing. I’ve written up list of quilts I want to make in 2024, and I have already started on the first, sewing my way into this new year.
While I have a whole new year coming up in which to finish Potts’ book (and make quilts), what I’ve learned so far is this: Evaluate where you are. Move on from failures. Forgive, and then forgive some more.
P.S.In a combination of satisfying, yet somewhat unhappy goodbye to 2023, our local quilt shop (Bluebird Quilts) decided to close, and I picked up several lengths of fabric for backings for these planned 2024 quilts. It was sad to say good-bye to the place where I started teaching; her reasons for closing are varied, and I wish her well.
P.P.S. If you are new here, you can always revisit some of my Happy Old Year Ending posts, where I re-introduce myself to my readers. And maybe give an observation or two. The one from 2019 is a classic.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 