Four-in-Art Quarterly Challenge: Stained Glass Shadows

May 2, 2017April 26, 2017 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

Shadow owes its life to light.
~an old saying

I am to provide the theme for our next quarterly challenge, and I choose Stained Glass Shadows. I love the saturated lights left on floors, walls, and benches in cathedrals by brilliantly lit stained glass windows and I wanted to make that my challenge.

Sometimes the colors play with what’s already there: think of the duality of jewel tones spilling ephemerally onto hard marble surfaces.

I like how sometimes they look like they’ve been through the Holi Festival of Colors, as if the surfaces had been doused in brightly colored chalks and powdery hues. Think of transparency and playing with color blending. Many edges on stained glass shadows are soft, blurring into the other colors.

stainedglassshadow_8 — *All photos were taken by my husband or I, in the National Cathedral, in Washington, D.C.*

While the opposite of light is dark, in shadows, the darkness is doubled down, softened, the shapes revealing as well as obscuring. A whole new conversation can happen with shadows.

Reveal date is August 1, 2017.

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.

Quilts

Piggies!

April 26, 2017April 30, 2017 Elizabeth E.24 Comments

Piggies1_front

Piggies!
Quilt #179
60″ wide by 76″ high
Finished April 2017

Piggies2_back Piggies3_signature All our signature blocks, close-up. And who are these people? My beemates from the Gridsters Bee. You can find our work on Instagram: they made over half of the piggies and I made the rest. The tutorial is *here.*

Piggies4_on my farm You’ve seen a lot of this quilt, but you haven’t yet seen it down on MY farm: here’s the beauty shot in our garden. Piggies5_detail Piggies6_label

The lower blue fabric dates from the 1970s, a scrap from the very first quilt I ever made. I try to work it into most of my quilts, one way or another.

Piggies7_binding

The backing is an old Marimekko fabric, purchased from when the Crate and Barrel Outlet store used to be nearer to me. The binding is a Kaffe Fasset fabric. Many many thanks to all who cheered me on while making this, and to my lovely bee-mates!

Creating · Something to Think About

Quilting System

April 13, 2017April 5, 2017 Elizabeth E.16 Comments

System_1

Some time ago, Oliver Burkeman, writing in the Guardian newspaper, discussed the idea of implementing “systems” rather than using goals when we are striving toward a new frontier, whether it be in quilting, or better exercise. He starts by quoting the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams:

“when you’re trying to get better at something – a creative skill, such as cartooning, or a habit, such as regular exercise – think in terms of systems, not goals” for “when you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist “in a state of near-continuous failure.” Almost all the time, by definition, you’re not at the place you’ve defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you’ll find you’ve lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose – so you’ll formulate a new goal and start again.”

Systems ideas mean that if you are a person who walks in the morning, you’ll strive to change one small thing about your stride, or improve your time slightly, and incorporate that into your exercise. The trick is to keep it simple and small, much like the kaizen idea formulated in Japan, which means continuous change for the better.

Adams notes that working in a system is “something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run,” regardless of immediate outcome. Burkeman goes on to say that “drawing one cartoon a day is a system; so is resolving to take some kind of exercise daily – rather than setting a goal, like being able to run a marathon in four hours. One system that’s currently popular online goes by the name “No Zero Days”: the idea is simply not to let a single day pass without doing something, however tiny, towards some important project.”

Keagan_6

So how does this apply to quilting?

If you think of all our words for unfinished goals (e.g.: WIP, UFO, etc.) and look at the number of online “finishing” blogs that give away prizes if you finish quilts on your list, you can see that we in the quilting world might need the idea of a system.

What IF you approached it as having no zero days…or…continuously making one small change for the better (kaizen) by sewing for small increments at a regular basis, rather than trying to do a blitz over a weekend? Certainly how your time is managed for you has an impact, for I recognize that small children, spouses, bosses and health issues can indeed interrupt the time available to you. But what if you had a idea of doing a small part of your project, but doing it daily? Soon your system would bring you to a completed quilt project.

It’s hard to grasp the idea of process, especially if you’ve spent your life thinking in terms of product. We’re very good at beating ourselves up over our procrastination or lack of motivation or our inability to get that quilt done. But I like the idea of leaving behind a “state of near-continuous failure,” exchanging that instead for a series of small, manageable tasks that become a part of my day.

shine-block_quilting