Project #3: In memory of my mother

Back on April 23rd I promised posts on three projects in progress. Other things in life have held back progress on the third project, and I wanted to be closer to completion before writing about it. With the backing for this piece now being dyed, I'm ready to describe it. A detail shot is above, and below is what the full top looks like, laid out on the floor, edges not yet trimmed; it's about 52x67." 

This piece is in memory of my mother, Helen Schine Gold, a kind of color portrait of her and my feelings about her. I started thinking about doing a quilt in memory of her many years ago (she died in 2003, a year before Jeremy), and started actively working on it in about 2010. The initial thinking was something that would convey the comfort of my mother's presence and of her care and concern for me, embodied in this story:  When I was a sophomore in college, I came down with a serious case of mononucleosis, and wasn't eating. My mother flew to Chicago from New Haven to take care of me. (This is an indication of how badly sick I was, as this was the only time she came to Chicago until I graduated. I had visited the university on my own--my first plane flight ever--and had moved out for my freshman year on my own. My mother was nothing at all like today's "helicopter" parents.) Before my mom even came to my apartment-dorm, she stopped at the grocery store to buy the fixings for chicken soup. I ate it, and I began to get better.  

I went through several different projects on this theme, advancing each one, but then putting it aside when I could see it had had less promise than I hoped. Finally in this last year or so I worked through to an approach that has gotten me closer to a completed work, one that I feel accomplishes what I've been trying to express.

From the beginning, I had colors in mind, referencing chicken soup as well as colors I associated with warmth and care--a wide range of yellows and golds, and maybe a little orange. When I picked up this project again about a year ago, I still had those colors in mind, and thought about doing something that would combine the bowl shape I worked with a few years ago (itself a result of thinking about chicken soup). I did sketches, thinking about doing something large-scale, likely piecing fabric together in a way similar to my Shelter quilt.

Then one day, I was whiling away time on the coloring app I enjoy (Happy Color) and I colored in this rooster. Colors in this app are all pre-set--no choice involved on my part. This particular color combination showed me that I could enliven my palette of yellow/gold if I added in some darker values and some contrasting colors. It's a little embarrassing to admit I learned this from a coloring app, but there it is.

I worked up an expanded palette, with the help of Color-aid papers (thanks Rick!).

Then I pulled some fabrics I had on hand.

Then I began cutting them up, making several maquettes with different piecing techniques, none of them satisfying.

Then, somehow, I got the idea to try something with crewel/needlepoint yarn, rather than with fabric.  This immediately felt like a good direction, as it provided a strong connection to my mother, who taught me both embroidery and knitting, and with whom I planned out large needlepoint projects I enjoy to this day in my dining room (a full set of dining room chairs and 2 large side chairs). So I ordered some yarn 

and started stitching samples. I assumed I would be stitching onto a cream or tan colored base cloth, and ordered samples of linen twill recommended for crewel work. I tried out various stitches to fill space or to define shapes.

I wasn't happy with the background color, so I started sampling on some linen cotton I had on hand that I'd dyed black.

In the last sample above, I was trying out stitches in the upper left that would give a line rather than define a shape. This reminded me of a quotation from a poem of Yehuda Amichai that I had recently noticed in the Shabbat morning service, a poem about the tallis or prayer shawl, that is often decorated with thin stripes:

And why is the tallis striped and not checkered black and white 

like a chessboard? Because squares are finite and hopeless.

Stripes come from infinity and to infinity they go

like airport runways where angels land and take off.

Yes, lines.  I roughly laid out strands of yarn on a large piece of black fabric. Yes, this could work.

But how to make the lines? I decided on an unbroken line of yarn, not something broken up by stitching, and tried a couching stitch, in which a strand of yarn is laid on top of the fabric and then held down by a series of stitches that wrap around it.

But I didn't like how visible the wrapping stitches were, even when done in the same color yarn. So instead I tried stitching inside the strand, moving the stitches between different strands of the 3-ply yarn so that all is held down.

I got even better at it, so that the interior stitching is really not visible.

Satisfied with this technique, I started stitching. I set up on the dining room table. (You get a glimpse below of the needle-pointed dining room chairs and the 2 side chairs by the windows.) A drying rack was convenient for lining up the yarns.

As I worked out the design for this work, it became less about the nourishing comfort of chicken soup (standing in for my mom) and more a color portrait of my mother. As I chose strands of colors from what I'd ordered, I included not only the colors I associated with the warmth of her personality and her support of me, but also some colors I remembered from her clothing, which seemed to work well for expanding the palette. 

In a few places, I put a line of what I call my "conversation stitch." A little conversation with my mom.

Along the way, my idea for this piece changed from something to be hung on a wall to something I would use as a covering. It will replace the fleece throw that I keep by the living room couch and that I use when taking a nap. I think it will be a comfort to draw this over me.

It will look something like this when in use:

I am so much happier with this than with the one other piece that I actually finished before relegating it to a closet.

The plan here was to focus on various pale yellows, in the way that I did for grays in "Holiness"; I made this much smaller (34x42") because I wanted something to hang on a wall, and had no larger spaces available. But the end result gave me no satisfaction. I found that it's not possible to dye as interesting a range of pale yellows as pale grays, and it also became clear that the large size of "Holiness" (70x85") is crucial to its impact. Another difference is that I quilted the yellow one, and although I like the dense quilting I used (below), the total flatness of "Holiness," stretched on a frame with no stitching, is part of its power.

A final note:  Here'a shout-out to Judy Kirpich's moving interpretation of chicken soup, which I came across along the way, and which inspired me to continue searching for my own.