This Quilt Is A Mess

May 1, 2011July 23, 2012 Elizabeth E.Leave a comment

Whooey! Another tempest in a quilting teapot! (And this quilting disaster–explained at the very end!)

I love all this controversy. I love that we are talking about quilt issues, digging our hands deep in the loam of the quilting garden and really talking about things that bother us and that delight us. Rachel of Stitched in Color was quite frank one day about Saying Things She Didn’t Think She Should. Bammo! Millions of comments–some, mostly rants–about one aspect of the quilt world or another. I should have expected as much from all of us women who run blogs. Then her next post was about Things We Should Say, and the issues of it’s a subjective world (quilting) that some are trying to categorize objectively (skill levels, style labels).

Here’s my .02:

I’ve read all the posts and it seems like the conversation/comments has generated a healthy discussion, re: the labels of modern vs. traditional quilting. More about that at the end.
But about the other–the “dumbing down” stream. I’ve read all *those* original posts and realize that it had its genesis in trying to describe levels of skill. I think this is sort of one place where there is no subjectivity, and that’s kind of what set off the whole alarm bells and craziness. Either you have the skills to make successful HST (Half Square Triangles) or you don’t. It’s meeting an objective standard. For some, HST are intimidating. For others, they do them in their sleep. I do think it can be successfully argued that there are certain skills that come with practice and after having achieved them, a quilter can objectively say s/he’s got those down. I consider myself a master quilter, having done just about every technique in the book (some while I was majoring in CloTex in college, some afterwards as I took quilt classes to become more proficient). The point is I was still learning, still trying. And as I want to improve myself, I’m now trying to master more applique techniques. So even while I may have objectively met some unnamed standards of skill level, there is always more that can be learned, can be perfected upon.

Now: my .02 on the “modern” quilting business. A while back ( a year ago?) I read a blog post putting forth the idea that *modern* was one leg of a three-legged stool, the other two legs being *traditional* and the *art quilt*. I was happy with that idea–that we were all finding ways to be creative. I love the injection of fresh! new! that the modern gals have brought to the industry. I started quilting in the 1970’s when I was 21, and personally, I thought we were all getting a bit old and musty. Something had to change. I wasn’t ready to go the art quilt route because I still love a good cuddle under a hand-made quilt. So I was happy to see some fresh ideas, another way to contribute to our big wide world of quilting. It’s not an either/or. It’s all of us together, doing what we love.

On that note, I present to you. . . This Quilt Is A Mess.

I don’t think that this was its original name, but it is certainly the name it has now. I’d recently been on a trip to Venice and like so many other quilters, fell in love with the floor of the main cathedral. I bought the POSTER of the floor (they wouldn’t let us take photos) and started to sketch it out. This quilt was supposed to be one of those very clever quilts of using one block yet coloring it so many different ways that the quilt would be chameleon-like. Yeah, right.

It started out that way–I think that section is kind of in the upper right. Then I got tired. Then I started piecing things every which way. Then it sat, like an ugly gnome in a room of beauty queens. Here’s where the class thing comes in. I had to have a quilt to take to a workshop with Hollis Chatelain, who was just hitting the circuit after her very successful painted images (then quilted) were winning big prizes. I knew I would be experimenting with quilting, so grabbed this. She talked to us about spray basting (so I did that) and brought the “glued-together” sandwich to the second day of the class. I realized that I had to be plain-jane with the quilting, not swirly.

So the quilting consists of eight billion rows, one-quarter-inch apart, some in black thread and some in red and occasionally switching directions. I was never so happy to be done with a quilt. I put the binding on, a sleeve for hanging, but basically it is STILL an ugly gnome in a room of beauty queens. It rarely sees the light of day.

So, even though I execute flawlessly in objective skill level (well, okay, maybe not ALL the time), subjectively I can say: This Quilt Is A Mess. To this day, I’m still not a complete fan of tight row stitching, but I have learned from Red Pepper Quilts that there is a fresh, modern way to adapt that technique so it’s not so painful. So to all you bloggers & quilters out there–keep sharing, keep showing, keep writing. It’s good for us all. Even the tempests in the teapots.

Creating

RedWhite–Painting

April 27, 2011April 27, 2011 Elizabeth E.Leave a comment

I’ve been gone to see my mother and father (he had an art show of his paintings) in Utah. While I was there, I took the chance to download the recent red and white quilt exhibit app onto her iPad. This made it necessary to stay up late a couple of nights to look at all the quilts. I’ll be posting about this off and on, but given that red and white is on my mind, I was struck by the lead photo in the New York Times about the current Hirshhorn exhibit of Blinky Palermo, a German artist.

The write-up of the exhibit extolled Palermo’s”breaking” of the canvas, and using other shapes and textures to create his art–even to the extent of creating with the canvas off of the stretcher bars. In other words, what we quilters do. But when will we ever have our art exhibited in the Hirshhorn? When a chicken has lips. We’ll have to content ourselves with being exhibited in folk art museums, as well as art/craft museums.

The piece above is titled “Composition With 8 Red Rectangles,” and was produced in 1964.

And here’s one from an anonymous woman, which I have titled Stacked Bars, date unknown. But I know that even if I titled it “Composition with Multiple Red Rectangles” it still wouldn’t make the Hirshhorn. It’s not ground breaking (notice that Palermo’s composition has squares, not rectangles?), the woman didn’t die young (as did Palermo), she didn’t have time to make more than one quilt a year–if that–and furthermore, she only worked in mediums that are particular to women: cloth, needles and thread.

But maybe, just maybe, in her neighborhood or sewing circle she was looked on as someone who came up with interesting ideas and new ways to arrange them and so influenced the “art” produced in her neck of the woods. She was the go-to girl for new quilt patterns. She was the one people sought out if they had to get something interesting on the bed and they only had two colors: turkey red and white. And given the mortality rate of early Americans, maybe she did die young–in childbirth? from a fever?–and is only memorialized by this intriguing composition of stacked squares that fool your eye into thinking they are bars. A veritable artist who broke the mold.

Creating

Visual Snapshots

April 24, 2011April 22, 2011 Elizabeth E.1 Comment

Are you like me? Do you see something and either take a snap with your cell phone, or madly sketch out the idea on the back of a gas station receipt? It’s like we’re flying through rainbows, trying to take samples of the colors we zip through on our way to something else.

Here’s some visual inspiration I’ve found recently; the links are found below the images:

Tomorrow’s Reference

(Dots and text=delicious!)

Bean Bag from Marks & Spencer

(I think stripes are in the zeitgeist now.)

Print & Pattern

(Can’t resist at least one Kate and William design!)

Alice Potter

(Reminds me of a row quilt)

ArchDaily

This is the new Guangdong Museum in China. The interplay of light, dark, thin, thick, shape and form could trigger a whole raft of ideas. Generally, I am drawn to the cute. Purposely incorporating photos like this in my virtual sketchbook challenges me to isolate the elements I like, perhaps incorporating them into some aspect of quilting.

But as you’ve noticed in this post, then another cute thing comes whomping across my line of sight and I turn and follow it like it’s a siren calling. It’s always yin-yang, push-pull, bitter-sweet with me.

And here’s another image of the Guangdong, this time the exterior.

ArchDaily

The Grinza Chair from Milan

La Linea Delta (on right)

A dresser from Front

And lastly, a snapshot of the recent Talbots catalogue on my mother’s coffee table. Stripes are in the zietgeist!

Creating

Text on Textiles

April 21, 2011April 21, 2011 Elizabeth E.1 Comment

Just voted on Spoonflower again! There were a lot of fabrics that I liked, so there are more in my square of votes today.

Sometimes I see these fabrics and I wish I had the skills to design fabric. I read through the bios of those in the Selvage Contest and many of them had design degrees. “I think I could learn to do this” hovers in the back of my mind. It was like when everyone was dying their own fabric, ziploc bags filled with squishy reds and yellows and blues. I made a conscious decision not to go that there–not to jump into that aspect of fabric and quiltmaking. I think that was after I turned 40 and the energy level took a nose dive and I began to realize that I just couldn’t do it all, nor–if truth be told–did I want to. Now I’m even older and there’s even more editing of the To Do List. But I can admire the creators of these designs. I just don’t have to do the designing.