Bee Blocks & Winner of Project Folio

August 25, 2013 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

First, while my husband and I were watching Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in Three Days of the Condor, I leaned over to him and said, “Give me a number between one and sixteen.”

“Five.”

Five it is. Cindy, you are the winner. I’ll mail off the portfolio tomorrow. Thank you to all my very fine readers and followers. You are such lovely people!

I must admit that I did want to give it to my newest follower: my daughter, Barbara (Hi Barb!), but I’ll make her a new something or other for her work-out clothes (what she said she’d use it for) and send this white one to Cindy. Congrats!

Secondly, even though it feels as if I haven’t touched a machine much this month, I did get my Bee Blocks finished. Above is the one for Always Bee Learning. We were sent some some fabrics, a link, and we were off to making arrows. It was a real brain-stretcher, but I finished mine and sent them off to Megan.

And for the Mid-Century Modern Bee, Mary asked for some Cross-X, or X & + blocks as I’ve seen them called, in pinks. So I followed her linked tutorial at Badskirt’s blog and sent them off.

And now, the to pull the biggest rabbit out of the hat: figure out how to start sewing my projects again. With this disjoint summer, a bad beginning to my school year (it will get better), and some time away from the sewing machine, it’s like being on a boat being carried down stream from the dock, slowly, and you can see your picnic lunch there in the middle and you are getting kind of hungry but you can’t figure out how to get to it. Okay, bad analogy, but I think you all know the feeling.

I look at my list of things I want to sew and nothing interests me. I love reading blogs and seeing everyone’s fun projects, and think, I could do that. But if I do everyone else’s project, how will I find time to do mine? It’s a double-edged sword, this living in a world of blogs and Instagram and it’s hard to turn off the input in order to find the creative project that is uniquely mine.

My father, aged 87, goes most mornings down to his painting studio on the second floor of a building in his downtown. There, he thinks, starts his routine, puts on his music, paints, pauses. Of course, I can only imagine this because it is done in solitude, but every October he opens his studio for a painting sale in his studio, proving that he accomplishes, produces, Gets Stuff Done, sending out more paintings into the world.

I find my challenge to still myself — to enjoy the social media-fied quilt world, yet also to let that project that is interesting to me find its way forward. I’ve been tempted by another Polaroid Swap, a recent Signature Swap, this winter’s Scrappy Trip-A-Long, and the Medallion Quilt among other recent popular quilts. But I also know through historical evidence that our quilting grandmothers searched the newspapers for what others were doing, and through imitation, linked themselves together through common projects.

LIke them, I do quilt what is in my universe. I often think of Nancy Crow, a quilt artist I admire from afar who has seemed to produce what is important to her, to follow her own stream of thinking and creating without regard for what is the most popular. Perhaps she, and my father, are at one end of the spectrum while the social media/Instagram/blogging crowd, of which I am a part, is at the other end. No answers here.

Just searching for those oars that will get my boat back to the dock, back to my sewing machine, back to my quilty world.

Creating · Four-in-Art · Quilts

Owls

July 10, 2013July 15, 2013 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Our Four-in-Art theme this round is Owls, under the year-long theme of Nature. When Betty chose it, I went blank. Then she wrote about it, I did a search on Flickr, and ideas starting percolating. Slowly.

This chick has owl rings and owl socks, but is not the same person that owns the collection up above. I found out my daughter liked owls, as does my niece, one of my husband’s colleagues and Suz, of Patchworknplay. I had no idea there were so many owl enthusiasts in my life.

This card was from my granddaughter when I had my surgery. More owls:

But how to move an owl idea into a quilt? What aspect to focus on? I looked up the meanings of owls, the folklore and those were all over the map, fragmented. Sometimes they are good, other times they portent evil or bad things, sometimes they bring luck, in other cultures they spell disaster. Just about anything can be pinned on an owl.

The only “experience” I’ve had with an owl was when we were traveling in Canada around the Sunshine Circle (Vancouver and above). We were standing waiting for the ferry to take us across one night. The sun was fading into pinks and golds and it was pretty quiet up there near Comox that evening. I was focused on the water and thinking about where we had to get to before we could stop traveling, when all of a sudden I heard a whoosh–a rush of air. I spun around and an owl was just moving away, its wings unfurled and climbing toward the sky. It was eerie, out of nowhere. No wonder these birds get pinned with all sorts of intents and purposes.

This was my computer desktop yesterday, with all sort of bits and pieces of my owl scattered over the screen. Whenever I approach these art quilt deadlines, I feel like a child being dragged kicking and screaming toward home. Deadline, I moan to no one in particular. I’d better get crackin’ because I know my Four-in-Art-mates will have theirs ready.

But one thing leads to another and to another and pretty soon I hear my husband arrive home and I’ve been working and veering through a creative journey for hours, absorbed in my task. And then I can’t wait to get back to where I’m headed–which of course, I have no real idea of where it will end. For now, I know only the next step, and that’s where I’ll go.

(from *here*)

We’ve decided to open our group up to four more quilters to participate in our art quilt adventure. You do not need to be an artist (hey–I’m not), but only want to stretch your creative wings. We have four art quilt deadlines a year: February, May, August and November. So far, the quilts are experimental in size: 12″ square. You’ll need to have a blog or a Flickr site, and a sense of adventure. We welcome beginners, but most of us have some years of experience either in handcrafting or sewing. I think we went this direction just because we wanted to try something new.

Leave a comment if you are interested, along with a comment as to why you might think taking a jump into this kind of creating is where you want to tread. Make sure I have a link to either your blog or your Flickr site, so I can get a feel for what type of quilter you are.

Quilts

Punching the Creative Buttons

June 2, 2013June 2, 2013 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

{NOTE: If you are looking for the teensy scissor giveaway, you can find it *here.*}

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If you’ve never traveled to New York City, the question of whether that city is worth all the hype may cross your mind. I can’t answer that one, but from a quilting perspective, the stimulus provided by this “town,” as the cabbie called it one time, gives me a chance to look at things in a different way. I’ve had the unique opportunity to travel there three times in the past year and half and have come at the city as a tourist, not as a resident, so can’t answer whether it would be lovely to be there 24/7. Is my experience so different from any travel, anywhere? Don’t know that, but here are three things that punched my creative buttons this past week (along with some quotes on creativity).

“Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” –Ken Robinson

Five Pointz, Queens, New York–scheduled to be demolished in September of this year (2013), so hurry if you want to see it

Take the 7 train from Grand Central towards Queens, and as you round the curve, the elevated track passes an old factory, completed decorated with street art. Yep, like you, I don’t really want this on MY house, but here in its urban setting, it was amazing.

On Memorial Day when we were there, the area was deserted and quiet, with only a few tourists like ourselves strolling around, cameras clicking away. I put quite a few of these up on my Instagram feed and within hours, the street artists were identifying each other’s work, noting for me who created these and in some cases, which country they were from. The taggers (but most of these weren’t really tags, but full-fledged art) have to get permission to put their art up here, and I felt like I was interacting with a community as tightly-knit as our quilting community.

Detail of above

I liked also how people interacted with the art. This family was from France.

This young woman was there with three of her friends (can you see her in the middle?), and they did yoga poses in front of several pieces. We talked to one set of spray paint artists (the best paint is apparently purchased from art stores–no Home Depot for them) as they worked, and they said this building could look completely different next week, as it continually being painted over. There is one man who kind of runs the place, and to be able to paint here, new artists have to work their way up from scraping and cleaning the site, in order to adorn a wall with their creation.

As quilters, we have quilt shows, blogs, and places to show our art. And while the street art at 5Pointz may not be your thing, I thought it was interesting how this community had evolved in this particular place and time. I hate the blight of graffiti on my town, the tags scrawled across buildings, defacing them. But I loved coming here. My takeaways: passion for your art, dedication to completion, ability to put it out there and let it go, colors, shapes, novelty.

“You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid — things you liked — on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that: ‘Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.’ Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken.” –Ken Robinson

El Anatsui–exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (click on this link and watch the video of them putting up the pieces–reminds me of hanging a quilt show. Sort of)

El Anatsui is a Ghanian artist working in Nigeria and is a master at using materials at hand to create his art. These squares are all bottle tops, bent and shaped and then put together to create massive “quilts” of color and form and shape. In a video at the exhibition, he used the word “patchwork” to describe his work of creating pieces and put them together. There are a lot of similarities to what we quilters do, only ours are cloth, not liquor bottle tops.

My sister had gone the week before and said it was an amazing exhibit. Be sure to watch the video on the Brooklyn Museum’s website about how they installed these pieces. Although they are huge, they look as light as air. Takeaway: explore all kinds of colors, materials, shapes and forms. Don’t be afraid to reshape or move things around to get a different result.

“Human life is inherently creative. It’s why we all have different résumés. … It’s why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.” –Ken Robinson

Punk: Chaos to Culture–showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Like the above street art, I am not drawn to punk naturally, but this exhibit at the Met I thought was brilliant, because it talked about the influence of punk fashion on the greater world of fashion–and it brought together some of the things I’d been seeing this week in my touristing. [All photos are from the internet.] To get a fuller perspective on the show, watch the video, narrated by Andrew Bolton, the curator.

This gallery, titled Bricolage, was where the culmination of recycling trash to treasure was noted, and I loved what what used in the skirt and shirt below:

Bottle Tops! Couldn’t believe it. They also had dresses that had graffiti sprayed on them, and how graffiti can be incorporated into T-shirt and dresses. I thought of the current obsession we have with text on cloth, and wondered if we were also feeling a wave of punk influence, in a more refined way.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” –Ken Robinson

I won’t show you any more of that exhibit, as it was punk-ish, after all, better seen in context, as is all art. But I will leave you with one more picture:

This is the grave of Elias Howe in the Green-Wood Cemetary in Brooklyn (hey–it was Memorial Day, after all), in the who we all owe a great debt, as he was the inventor of the modern sewing machine. Apparently the biggest sticking point was where the eye of the needle should go, and this account from a family story, tells how he came to invent this (from Wikipedia):

“He almost beggared himself before he discovered where the eye of the needle of the sewing machine should be located. It is probable that there are very few persons who know how it came about. His original idea was to follow the model of the ordinary needle, and have the eye at the heel. It never occurred to him that it should be placed near the point, and he might have failed altogether if he had not dreamed he was building a sewing machine for a savage king in a strange country. Just as in his actual working experience, he was perplexed about the needle’s eye. He thought the king gave him twenty-four hours in which to complete the machine and make it sew. If not finished in that time death was to be the punishment. Howe worked and worked, and puzzled, and finally gave it up. Then he thought he was taken out to be executed. He noticed that the warriors carried spears that were pierced near the head. Instantly came the solution of the difficulty, and while the inventor was begging for time, he awoke. It was 4 o’clock in the morning. He jumped out of bed, ran to his workshop, and by 9, a needle with an eye at the point had been rudely modeled.”

Wikipedia also notes that “Howe received a patent in 1851 for an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure.” Perhaps because of the success of his sewing machine, he did not try to seriously market it, missing recognition he might otherwise have received.” In other words, he invented the zipper, too.

Sorry for the long post, but sometimes it’s interesting to note where we get “refilled” when we’ve run out of ideas, or are tired, or have too many UFO’s lurking in the closet and have lost our creative mojo. (Plus, we had a great time in The Big Apple.)

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Quotes are from Ken Robinson, who has given many TED talks on creativity and our educational system.

200 Quilts · Four-in-Art · Quilts

Doleket, deconstructed

May 2, 2013October 26, 2017 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

When the theme of fire was announced for our Four-in-Art group, I immediately thought of all those days spent roasting marshmallows over campfires, just like Betty did. And then afterward, when people would gather back and just sit and watch the flames, as they moved and shifted. It was that movement I was trying for. I had thought about taking a lot of pictures of fire and scanning them onto fabric. What was I going to do, light a bunch of bonfires and take photos? Nyet. Then it was patch together a lot of squares, and “color” them by doing rubbings of a textile crayon onto the surface. Because I couldn’t come to a vision of that one, it faded, too. So one day in a church meeting, I sketched the bit on the left:

I dropped the notebook and when I picked it up, I noticed I liked it better the other way (the version on the right). With the triangles pointed upwards, it also had a birthday candle effect.

I dutifully drafted and cut out a bunch of orange and yellow-gold miniature triangles, and pulled red, ochre, rust, magenta fabrics from the stash.

I chose whatever colors I had in my stash that had that “fire” color to them.

Because I wanted that idea of movement, I pieced up the strips with two colors. It’s about this stage in the process that I begin to talk about it to my husband. I told him I’d been reading in a book, Why Faith Matters, by David J. Wolpe, and although I hadn’t gotten very far, I had read the section about Abraham and the idea of doleket, and how the duality of fire was presented in that passage. I began to research this idea, and to think about it as I worked.

If this was to be a consuming fire, then wouldn’t there be fallen timbers? I took a few of the strips, laid them across the upright timbers, stitched down on edge, then folded them over. I figured I didn’t need to really nail these appliqued pieces to the cloth, for it was in a place of construction/destruction. I may sound like I’m spouting malarky, but how do you explain where the brain wanders?

First draft Doleket. This measured way over our constraints of 12″ per side.

So I laid two pieces of cloth over the top and bottom, trying to figure out where the trim line would be. Whoa! Tidying up that jagged line really bothered me. I’m usually one who likes her quilts — and edges — all tidy and pristine, but this wasn’t where this quilt was going. Construction, or creativity, and destruction by fire happen in a random, haphazard manner.

So from the back, I raggedly hacked at the edges, purposely making them uneven and slightly unkempt.

Our group is keeping to the idea of a quilt sandwich and I knew I wanted the batting to be organic–cotton, rather than my usual. But I needed to piece some scraps. I auditioned several pieces for the background of the burnt timbers, but ended up going with a text written in a vintage style. I was thinking about words, how they also are permanent, yet ephemeral.

Now to quilt. I just started stitching along the strips, quilting right over the crosswise strips. I’d done a few, and really liked the hanging threads — they reminded me a prayer shawl (seen mostly in the movies, to be quite frank), and I liked them.

I took it outside on a bright sunny day, laid it on this yellow cloth and took a photo, but realized that the small details of the threads couldn’t be seen. I also had a hard time photographing this because the reds would freak out the camera sensors. I think this version is the best representation of the color.

Betty had started making labels for her pieces, and I wanted to follow suit. So here are the three we’ve finished so far. Our next theme is “owl.” I’ve known lots of owl collectors (of trinkets, mostly) in this world and I’ve never been one. But it’s really in nod to wisdom, so Betty says, so I’ll have to think about that. Our next reveal is August 1st–right after Rachel delivers her baby.

We’ve settled into a comfortable groove now, and while sometimes it’s been interesting to bring the discipline to get these done on time (we did move one deadline), I’ve appreciate how the process, and the product, has been gratifying. I was curious to see if I could make “art.” And with this last piece, I think I can say I’m approaching it, if only in my small way.

I’ll end with a few thoughts from a recent obituary for Eudorah Moore in the LATimes, describing her as someone who “blurred the boundaries between art, design and craft.” She championed “mixed-media inclusivenss,” working for years as curator at the Pasadena Art Museum, which later became the Norton Simon Museum. In 1973, she wrote:

“We’re going to put down the 19th-century idea that unless you are an easel painter you aren’t an artist. We’re going to accept that an artist is a person who has a definite statement to make, and can make it in any material.”

Now onward to wisdom, and owls!