Halfway There

May 1, 2017October 26, 2017 Elizabeth E.18 Comments

4-in-art_3 Halfway There_1front

Halfway There
Quilt # 180
13-1/2″ wide by 20″ tall

That night, I was alone in bed in the guest room, five pillows behind me and one to each side, propping me up in a sitting position. I couldn’t lay down to sleep as it was too painful, so I semi-sat there, my head leaning back on the pillows, staring up at the ceiling.

My husband Dave had tucked me in that night, as he had done every night since the rotator cuff surgery three weeks earlier, helping me find the right position for the pillows, touching my cheek, making sure I knew he loved me, then turned out the light and walked down the hallway to our bedroom that now seemed oh, so far far away. I felt adrift on a sea of pillows.

Halfway There_4detail I tried to shift slightly, trying to move to a more comfortable position: there wasn’t one. The pain pills they gave me from surgery had been effective, but unfortunately their side effect was ever-present weeping, so I’d ditched them a couple of weeks earlier, relying instead on acetaminophen, which barely tamped down the pain and discomfort. I was pretty much a mess. Halfway There_3 I gazed at the ceiling, waiting for that sleep that wouldn’t come — hadn’t come, since I’d moved from the uncomfortable recliner chair two days post-surgery and had come off the prescribed drugs. The light from the white Christmas lights we’d left in the laurel bush outside the window shone up through the slatted blinds, casting a linear design on the ceiling.

I studied that pattern of line-upon-line, trying to let it dissimulate the discouragement: there was three more weeks of the sling, the sleeplessness, the being away from my husband, the not-sewing, the one-handedness, the inability to be present in my own life, the trying to be cheerful for whole minutes at a time. Three more weeks of pain. Three more weeks of the uncomfortable sling and the loneliness. Three down, three to go.

fourinart_halfwaythere_May2017

The shadows were linear like the slats in the blinds: they started light, the bright lines gradually decreasing until the dark bands became more prominent, obliterating the light. Half shadow, half light. Half of each. The realization that I was halfway there settled into the cracks in my fractured thinking. The timer on the Christmas lights clicked off, all was shadow and I finally fell asleep, exhausted by the pain, the mental struggle — and, as anyone who has been through this knows — the isolation. Halfway There_8 Halfway There_10back Our theme this year is Light, and Camilla chose this quarter’s theme of Light in the Darkness. I certainly had time to think about it. I loved the nuance and the subtlety of it, and was glad to figure out how to interpret it. Halfway There_11label

Halfway There_9

There is no deconstruction post for this art quilt. I had to cut off lots of outside edges when I trimmed up my Piggies! quilt blocks, and used those pieces to make a “whole cloth” of low-volume prints to be my “ceiling” fabric, as we have those old-time popcorn ceilings with texture. Using flat white cloth didn’t seem right for what I had seen night-after-night. I also liked that all those blocks sent from my friends helped pull me along and out of the sadness and loved their significance in this quilt, and appreciated anew all the encouraging comments from those who cheered me on (thank you). The darkness seemed to have a texture of its own as well. I did indeed have time to study it, and thought this seed print from Australia would stand in well for the shadows seen by a quilter, staring at the ceiling, late into the night.

It’s my turn to announce the next theme so look for it in my next post. And my recovery? It’s going well. I’m now past the three-month mark and while occasionally achy, don’t have much pain. I go to physical therapy regularly. When I hit the 12-week mark, my therapist said, “You’re about halfway there.” I guess that finish line moves, depending on the perspective; I do expect at six months I will hear it again.

You’ll notice that the quilt is sometimes light-on-top and sometimes dark-on-top. I think it works either way.

Last thought: when I stood in the aisles at Road to California this past year, not buying anything, I hoped that by next year’s quilt conference I would be able to say it was all done and all behind me.

I still have that hope.

4-in-art_3

Please take the time to visit the other Four-in-Art Quilters in our Fifth year, as they interpret their visions of Light in the Darkness:

Betty Backyard Camping

Camilla http://faffling.blogspot.co.nz/

Catherine http://www.knottedcotton.com

Janine http://www.rainbowhare.com

Nancy http://www.patchworkbreeze.blogspot.com

Rachel http://www.rachel-thelifeofriley.blogspot.com

Simone http://quiltalicious.blogspot.com

All of our blocks are on our blog, Four-in-Art.

200 Quilts · Four-in-Art · Mini-quilt · Quilts

Deconstruction of Shimmery Tunnel of Memories • Four-in-Art Feb. 2107

February 3, 2017March 14, 2017 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

This is the deconstruction post for my recent Four-in-Art Challenge of Shimmer.

First off: what a lame title. I had another name picked for this (“Multiverse Snapshot”) which is a much cooler name, but I’d forgotten that I had chosen it, and instead on the label put this blathery clichéed title. Now that you know how I really feel about it, I’ll tell you how I put this together. (And no, I’m not making another label.)

I wanted to recreate the little specks of light from Multiverse (see previous post), so cut strips of silvery metallic fabric. This is leftover fabric from my friend Lisa’s American Flag project (a flag the size of a basketball court); she rescued me when I couldn’t find my own lamé in my sewing room. Just for the record, that stuff is a challenge to work with: the strands kept going off on their own, as you can see above.

I wanted the vantage point to be off the piece, so I drew a dot on a post-it note off the paper, but when that didn’t prove to be a far enough vantage point, I went further to the left, making the radiating lines in red pencil.

I had some strips of solids leftover from this quilt, and put them into use.

After sandwiching the silver/black fabric, I cut it into narrow strips.

I seamed a couple of those strips end-to-end, laid the resulting longer strip in the center, and chose a bright solid to lead off the piece, and stitched down one side. I went back and forth between doing this piece in a series of gray and black fabrics vs. rainbow, but knew that I didn’t have a wide enough range to get the effect of Multiverse, so changed it up to a muted rainbow.

I pinned it on, flipped it over and sewed on the drawn lines, for the most part. Sometimes I went narrower, but used these lined to keep the correct angle going.

A good beginning. You can see by the red cast of this photograph that I’m sewing at night.

A lot of times I’m tired at the end of the day and don’t want to sew, but then I say: “What do I want to have done before I go to bed tonight?” and head back into the sewing room. Often just working for ten or so minutes will engage me enough to keep going at it for at least an hour.

I was feeling a lot of pressure to get this sewn up ahead of time, because I knew that I would have had a surgery when this posted (it happened about a week ago: a repair to a severed tendon on my rotator cuff) and I knew I’d be unable to complete this, or any sewing at all, for some time.

But hopefully it will be good to get the pain gone (cause is referenced here) and my shoulder back in working condition.

I almost like the back better than the front. If I had any creative guts at all, I would have gone with this. My professor in my digital art class once told me: “You have a problem with tidiness in your art.” Yep, I’m all about the tidiness, as long as you don’t look at my garage. Or sewing room.

I stitched around the outside edge to stabilize it, and went to bed.

After thinking it over and drawing all sorts of fantastical loopy lines on scratch paper, I went linear, quilting on the cottons, not that silvery shredding lamé.

Done.

I backed it with this new piece of fabric, “Dropping Seeds” by Roseanne Morton. Okay, I want this fabric in ALL colors; it’s terrific. I chose a simple black very narrow binding, and did my usual two squares-folded-on-the-diagonal-and-sewn-into-the-top-corners for how I’ll hang it. (I put a dowel cut to size in those “pockets” and suspend the piece on a pushpin or nail.) Happy Shimmering!

Next quarter’s challenge, due May 1st, is Light in the Darkness.

Four-in-Art · Quilts

Four-in-Art February 2017: Shimmery Tunnel of Memories

February 1, 2017February 1, 2017 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

Every time I head to Washington, DC and go to the National Gallery of Art, I head downstairs to go through this light insulation by Leo Villarreal, titled Multiverse. The lights are static, then blinking, then shimmering, then moving and I never tire of it.

Shimmery Tunnel of Memories, Quilt #177
Four-in-Art, Series Four: Light
10 1/2″ wide 16″ high

Our Four-in-Art art quilt group’s yearly theme for 2017 is Light, and our first quarterly challenge was shimmer.

Shimmer is best captured in movement, in seeing the light flicker and move and wink and flash, so it was a hard one to interpret in cloth. But I had taken a snapshot of Multiverse on a trip to DC, and used that as inspiration for this challenge.

I’ll do the Deconstruction on the this quilt in the next post.

Please visit the others in our Four-in-Art group, and see how they interpreted the Challenge of Shimmer:

Betty Sun Shimmer, Filtered

Camilla http://faffling.blogspot.co.nz/

Catherine http://www.knottedcotton.com

Janine http://www.rainbowhare.com

Nancy http://www.patchworkbreeze.blogspot.com

Rachel http://www.rachel-thelifeofriley.blogspot.com

Simone http://quiltalicious.blogspot.com

All of our blocks are on our blog, Four-in-Art.

Four-in-Art

Six Ways to Blue, Deconstructed

November 4, 2016October 19, 2016 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

This is a further discussion of the quilt I recently made for the quarterly challenge in our Four-in-Art group. I let this theme of “I’ve Got the Blues” simmer in my mind, thinking about all the blue connections, from mental health to water to ice to music and then just decided I wanted to explore that hue–just wanted to play with the shifting and changing of blues.

I went to Nicole Dacksiewicz’ site, Modern Handcraft, to catch her tutorial for how to make this. I’d seen the original quilt at QuiltCon and always always wanted to play with this. She even shows you how to baste your hexies, so you can’t get it wrong.

I used a 1″ hexagon, which yields a 2 1/4″ measurement across (we measure one flat side of the hexagon to get the name). I searched for a free printing pattern, and found these tips for cutting out hexagons. I used Geta’s hexagon sheet (had to give up my email to do it) and she was right. Cutting out all those hexies did go quickly! (Sorry for the pink nighttime photo.)

Then I started playing by pinning them up on my design wall so I could get perspective.

I moved it to my work table and kept playing.

When I was happy with it, I glued them down, following Nicole’s hints, and later went and purchased her pattern, as I like to donate to the talented designers who share their ideas with me. One major tip from me is not to do it on your cutting mat, or you’ll have little bits of glue that don’t really scrub off, but doesn’t impact the use of the mat. Maybe lay it down on some wax paper? Guess how I know this.

When the glue was dry, I layered the top up in a quilt sandwich, put a few pins here and there and drew in quilting lines with my Hera marker. Another major tip I’ll pass along — and why I want to re-do this — is I put the hexies too close together. I only discovered this when I started stitching. She suggests 1/4″ apart and mine are about 1/8″ apart. Not all the hexies are perfect (because I am Not.A.Machine, she says, in her best robot voice), and by putting them so close together, and “outlining” them with stitching, it really plays up their imperfections. I did, however, have fun stitching the straight lines, over and over, catching the corners and stitching in between all the hexagons.

I loved playing with the theme of the blues, and love my new quilt. I made this one larger than the ones I’ve done in the past, and it measures about 21″ wide and almost 20″ high.

sunset-in-kansas-city — *Sunset in Kansas City, September 2016*

Our next overall yearly theme is Light, and Catherine, of Knotted Cotton came up with our first quarterly challenge of Shimmer. I already have an idea (I’m not telling) and am excited for this new year.

Happy Quilting!

[Note: The cute clothespins are from a shop in Copenhagen, called Notre Dame. Link to the clothespins is *here.* I wanted to carry home buckets of these, but alas, I travel with a small suitcase these days and could only bring a few.]

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