Quilts

Working on My Stuff

March 20, 2014November 25, 2014 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

My first issue of Uppercase magazine arrived. It’s on my nightstand and I can hardly wait.

I also took a trip to Purl Soho-West Coast (in Orange County, California) where I picked up some more solid fabrics for the inner petals on that soon-to-be-renamed Rainbow Petals quilt. I appliquéd on three of the petals the other night while my husband and I watched the latest Star Trek movie, and added another petal during the our local quilt guild meeting.

Now that Downton Abbey’s over, I need to make time to sew. Maybe I should rewatch parts of it, so I can get this finished?

Quilts

Sol Lewitt’s Patchwork Primer

March 18, 2014March 18, 2014 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

In class this semester, one of the types of poems that we studied were “form” poems, or poems that have a prescribed meter, rhyme scheme, and even construction, such as a ballad, a sonnet, or a villanelle. Many poets like to write poems in this constrained forms, especially if they are difficult subjects, as the nice, tight boundaries help keep the poet from going off the rails, sloppy and wandering. Likewise, every once in a while, it’s good to put one’s brain to a task with similar constraints, just to see if it can be done.

This quilt started with this drawing from Sol Lewitt: “Fifteen Etchings: Straight lines in four directions and all their possible combinations.” Lewitt is famous for his wall drawings, where he would draw up a certificate with a set of instructions or descriptions, and others would execute them. This drawing would serve as my shape boundaries.

And my fabric boundaries? I had purchased a stack of Mirror Ball Dot fabrics two years ago to go with the few I already had, I decided to use these as my parameters for this quilt. Those shapes, these fabrics, and I started cutting last Saturday, after grading seventeen essays in a 24-hour period (yes, the brain was fried). I started laying them out, beginning from the upper right.

I cut, added. Rearranged. Went to bed. Cut, added, rearranged, asked my husband what he thought. Cut, added, rearranged, took a photo, then pondered. It was harder than writing a villanelle.

Until I got to here. Then it was like this:

All. . . Day. . .Long. I was purposely leaving that last square on the lower right white, for that’s where Lewitt had the writing, the description.

When I got to this place, I rested and began to doubt myself, completing ignoring the advice he wrote to Eva Hesse, a fellow artist, which included some of the following (with some edits):

Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, hair-splitting, nit-picking, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO!

He continues:

Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever – make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.

Then finishes with:

Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you – draw & paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistent approach to even some impossible end or even an imagined end” You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO!

So I called my sister in Philadelphia and sent her some images, and we talked about changing the design, adding another block and what kind of block would it be? She suggested some time with Photoshop, a tool to help me move beyond my stuck place. In an obituary in the New York Times (Lewitt died some years ago), the writer noted that “He [Lewitt] took an idea as far as he thought it could go, then tried to find a way to proceed, so that he was never satisfied with a particular result but saw each work as a proposition opening onto a fresh question.”

So the fresh question brought me here, where I think it will stay.

And yes, that block lurking on the right is an alternative block, which I am leaning away from. Borders (plain white) will be added last.

A primer (prim-mer), according to the dictionary, can be as a child’s first book of reading, helping that child to decode and unlock the words on the page. I doubt Sol Lewitt had any inkling of patchwork, steeped as he was in the fine art world, but when I saw his etchings, I recognized them as sort of a primer for what we quilters do: divide and subdivide and go at it again and again, always looking for that fresh question.

Quilts

Inspiration Strikes Everywhere

March 14, 2014 Elizabeth E.3 Comments

On this, National Quilting Day, I thought I’d share two videos from the magazine Uppercase, which recently published work from Bari J. (The above picture is from the magazine’s website.) They apparently are having a Spring Sale on subscriptions, if you want to be inspired monthly by their magazine.

Why do I mention this? Inspiration for our quilts can strike anywhere and everywhere, and why not a gorgeously produced publication to give us a little inspiration? I’ve been ripping out magazine pages for years, and clipping interesting photos from the newspaper for my files. That Old Time Method parallels my Pinterest pinning, as well as the file of digital images from quilt shows, blogs and screenshots from Instagram. I say, grab your inspiration where you can find it.

Here’s a vimeo about 10 surface design tips.

And here’s a little bit of what their magazine is about–fun for us to look at–a little eye candy!

Lastly, another source of inspiration for me has been other blogs.

That’s where I found out about this (now-deceased) quilt artist Edrica Huws. (Address of the blog is in the picture.) Apparently nearly 51 years old when she began her mosaic-like patchworks, she sometimes took a year to create just one. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Guardian newspaper:

“Edrica Huws, born in 1907, spent two years at the Chelsea School of Art, gained a diploma from the Royal College of Art, and worked as an artist until she married the Welsh sculptor Richard Huws in 1931. Five children later, and living in rural Anglesey with neither electricity nor running water, she turned her hand to poetry and began collecting fabrics for her patchwork. She was 51 when she began her first patchwork picture of a greenhouse. It took her a year. The challenge was in getting the assemblage of differently figured pieces to look like a representation of her subject, but not too like it. The scraps had to be treated like scraps, not like paint, or mosaic. Edrica said herself in a lecture in 1982 that to her ‘the essence of an aesthetic experience’ was ‘the control just winning’.”

Back to the blog:

I did a search on her name, and while I never found a way to purchase her book, I did find many photos of her quilts, apparently from an exhibition she had (and mentioned in the Guardian article).

And in a comment on the Guardian article, someone wrote: “Quoting from the book Edrica Huws Patchworks she says: ‘It was pleasant to have some recognition, but even without it, I would have carried on… When I had reached a time when I could have started painting again – I had more money, more time and more space, the three things that I lacked earlier – I no longer had the inclination. In a strange way, it seemed too easy.’ ”

Happy National Quilting Day!

Quilts

Selvage Block-A-Long

March 10, 2014March 12, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

I joined Diane’s Selvage Block-A-Long Flickr group some time ago, but didn’t have anything to show ~~off~~ for it. Now I finally have this lovely burst of orange. I used Poppyprint’s tutorial, figuring “Why reinvent the wheel and make my own?” as hers was perfectly lovely.

Update: you can get my own tip sheet for making these blocks here.

I did draw two more lines on either side of the middle diagonal, and it did help keep me on track (try not to find where I went haywire).

And I found that using pins was also helpful to keep the selvages from shifting. I use vellum paper, still leftover from Come-A-Round’s marathon of paper piecing a couple of years back, gluing on a side strip to widen the 8 1/2″ to 10,” making it all nice and square. True Confession: I didn’t have this many orange selvages in my pile, so YES, I did head to the stash, pulling and cutting to make more. If you cut them with at least one inch ABOVE the white selvage line, you’ll be a happier piecer.

I also had chance to finish up the February Block for the Always Bee Learning Bee. She meant to send out the fabric several times, but her family has had a bad winter of flu and yuck, so we received it last week, and I got it out the door today. I’m not making progress on my List of Goals, instead, I write the new project on, then cross it off. Is that cheating?

Here’s one that was written on recently: Rainbow Petals. I went and found all the greens I could in my LQS, cut and shaped petals and stuck them on. Which one would you choose?

Right. Me neither. So I went back to my stash and tried to find colored petals that would be slightly darker, yet a blend of the two adjacent petals. I had some successes, but going around to fabric stores to find just the right color may take a while. Better move this one off the First Quarter Goal Sheet and on to the second. And really, since it is the 10th already, there may be a few more projects moving forward, given that Spring Break is coming up, I might have visitors, and that the essay on Short Stories is coming in on Thursday.