A week with Dorothy Caldwell

I spent a week earlier this month in a workshop with Dorothy Caldwell at Nancy Crow's Barn.  The name of the workshop was "Human Marks," and we spent the week making a variety of marks on paper and fabric, with all sorts of implements/methods.  The final project was to make a small book with the products of some of these exercises, plus anything else we wanted to add, and to do that we also learned a simple book-binding method.  The workshop was both stimulating and fun, and it was a great group of people--more diverse than most workshops, as it drew people from a variety of backgrounds, including people whose main work was in weaving, collage, installation, dyeing, quilting, and more.

The small pieces on the left (the shorter ones, about 4x13") were done by putting soy wax as a resist on fabric and then discharging color with bleach.  The four smaller pieces all started out as black fabric (top two on a black that discharged to tan, and the bottom two on a black that discharged to yellow, the lighter background from leaving the bleach on longer.  The long piece on the right started out as orange, discharging to black.  My favorites are the top two on the left.  Upper left done by stamping wax on with a stamp I made by glueing string to a wooden block; upper center done by brushing on wax.

 This is a small segment (about 8x10") of a piece done by putting a very large piece of paper on the ground, taping a brush to a 3-foot long stick, dipping it in India ink, and painting.  The big piece then got cut up to make a book.

We spent a day learning about kantha embroidery stitching, and the rest of the week worked on small pieces.  I've wanted to learn this, so was glad for the opportunity, but the intensive work was hard on my hand, so I didn't get too far.  Dorothy has spent time with women who do this work in Bihar, India, and had a number of pieces to show us--quite amazing.  You can see some examples here.

 Here are a number of the small books that students made as a test of the binding technique, made by cutting up the paper we'd used as a desk-protection when doing various exercises.  (Double-click for a larger view.)  The two with lovely black and white covers are Dorothy's own samples.  Mine is towards the center with the turquoise spine. I really loved making this little book.  I used to study medieval books, so I've long known what a "signature" is in bookbinding.  But I'd never made one myself.  Something very appealing about putting the signatures together and weaving the threads for the spine.  I may be looking for things to put together into little books. . .

Much of the week was spent in alternation between working very carefully (bookbinding, kantha) and working without control (painting with a long stick).  One of the most interesting exercises in working with less control was in blind stitching:

We cleared our tables, threaded up five needles and laid them to the right of the fabric.  Then we each put on a blind-fold.  Dorothy would read out a word related in some way to design, and we were to make a row of stitches with that word in mind.  I love what happened in my second row, where the word was "dialogue."  My intention was to make two stitches close together, but sometimes I couldn't remember if I'd done one stitch or two, hence some triplets as well as the pairs (detail below).

I can imagine working with this stitching motif in some way in future projects.  It will be interesting to see if I can make the stitches with this combination of order and casualness if I have my eyes open. . .

One of the major lessons I took away from the workshop was reinforcement of the idea to slow down and look carefully.  To be open to accidental beauty.  To look for serendipitous adjacencies/relationships (this last most in play when we were making our books, looking to arrange pages with interesting juxtapositions).  For example, on one of my cloth-book pages, I sewed a trapezoidal piece of fabric I had brought with me.  But when I turned the page, I found I was more enchanted with the line of stitches that showed on the back:

Thank you Dorothy, and thanks to all my wonderful classmates!

Beyond "rail fence"--Two projects

I'm working on two projects right now that are both based on the traditional "rail fence" pattern, but that go in different directions.   The first one, above, had its origin in an improvisational quilt class back in February, described at the end of this post.  This quilt retains the notion of each block having parallel pieces, with a common layout that staggers horizontal and vertical blocks.  But I did improvisational curvy lines instead of straight, and made the strips of uneven width.  I'm about 2/3 of the way done with quilting this one, straight lines going horizontally across the quilt (which you can see at the top and bottom of the photo; as always, double-click to see in more detail).  To choose colors for this quilt, I looked at African textiles, which often combine gold, red, blue, green, and black.  As mentioned in the earlier post, the darker colors are commercial Kona cotton, while the lighter values are mostly fabric I dyed to widen the value-range.

I can only comfortably quilt for about a half-hour a day (or sometimes two half-hour sessions), so I started piecing fabric for my next project, which is also based on rail fence, but modifies it by alternating long rectangles with the squares.

This great "Union Station" pattern is by Janine Burke of Blue Underground Studios, published in the book she wrote with co-owner Amy Walsh, Colorful Quilts.  (Union Station is the railroad station in Chicago, so a nod to the "rail fence" name.)  Working on this is totally different from the improv approach, as it depends on very precise piecing, a challenge for me.    I decided to use entirely hand-dyed fabric for this, and started out with what I have on hand.  Here are the first blocks, on the design wall--nothing sewn yet.

Besides running out of fabric on hand, I also decided I needed to widen the color and value range, so I dyed up several additional colors.



Below is a re-organization of the blocks that includes the new colors; this is about half the quilt.



Much rearrangement will happen as I put up additional blocks.  I may end up taking out the brighter gold color (now just one piece in bottom left corner; others replaced with the newly dyed darker gold).  I'll decide once I've got the whole thing up on the design wall.  Opinions welcome!