Recognition

When making each of the quilts that developed into my series about loss, I worked from compelling needs of my own; I had little thought of an audience.  But as others have seen the work, I have found out that it speaks to other people as well, and that is gratifying too.  I've recently received two requests to show my work, one in a museum, the other in a book.  I am grateful for this recognition, and the chance it provides for more people to see two of my quilts.

The museum:  The Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts asked me to contribute one or two quilts to their upcoming exhibit on the theme "In Death", which will be on exhibit from July through December, 2017.  They left the choice of work up to me. I'm probably going to submit "Self-Portrait, Year 2: Beneath the Surface" and "Holiness."

The book:  I was also invited to include "Self-Portrait, Year 2" in a book being put together by the Modern Quilt Guild, featuring about 200 "modern" quilts made in this century; the book is scheduled to come out in February, 2018.

Thanks to all of you who have helped me in the journey to make this work.

Progress on "Holiness" and another quilt about stones

Holiness is now basted and the hand-quilting has begun.   Hand-basting on the floor took about a week.  Now that that's done, I can begin on the next quilt about stones.  I can only hand-quilt for about 30 minutes each day (to prevent injury to my hand,) so that gives me lots of time to work on another quilt.

Here's a small sketch I did a while ago, a quilt that would include some drawings of stone shapes, probably done through scratching into flour-paste resist, but with other methods also possible (direct drawing with thickened dye, monoprint, discharge, etc.)  I was thinking of an arrangement of the stones that would recollect the way stones are lined up on a gravestone.  When I showed the sketch to a friend, she said it reminded her of the layout of a cemetery--all the better.  (Thanks Louise!)

I'm thinking of this as a large quilt, about 70x80.  I redid the sketch, re-drawing to eliminate overlap in the rectangles, and then tried folding up yardage to size and putting it up on the design wall.  Very difficult to work with.  Then I put the drawing into Photoshop, and filled in spaces with different values of gray.  That got me further, but I decided it would be better to do a small maquette with actual pieces of fabric rather than continuing on the computer.  You can see a couple of results below. These are about 15x18."  I cut 3" strips from the various grays I thought I'd like to use, and then cut them further to size.  In the first trial, I used a range of values from light to dark, but with a preponderance of medium values.

I did several more versions, concentrating more and more on the medium values.  Below is the 5th iteration; mostly medium, but keeping one light in the corner and a few somewhat darker.  This is getting closer, but I'll try another step towards a narrower range of value, all medium.

Then I'll work further on the composition--I'm not satisfied with the relationships between the shapes. I'll start by tweaking the design I have, but I think I'll likely end up starting over again.  Having the range of values set may help me rethink the composition.

And not everything I've been working with is gray!  I'm just finishing up a hamsa for a friend who is in the middle of chemotherapy.  A hamsa is an amulet commonly found in Jewish and Middle Eastern cultures.  This website has many nice images and some explanation.  This hamsa is a little smaller than my own hand.  I enjoy doing the embroidery, and keeping my friend in mind as I sew.

I'm thinking I will face it with another piece of cloth, cutting it into the hand shape--like this one I bought years ago and carry around in my purse:

And here's another one I made for a group quilt, put together for another friend undergoing treatment for cancer.  The Hebrew word in the center is "Chai"--life.

From "Stones" to "Holiness"

In the last two months, I've spent a lot of time in my basement wet studio, dyeing many gradations of different grays.  After the first set of gradations, which went from dark gray to very light, I found myself especially drawn to the very lightest of values.  (The photo above shows scraps from the fabrics that were eventually cut into blocks.)  So, already having narrowed from a palette of neutral stone colors to gray, I found myself narrowing it further to very pale grays.  This inclination of my eye and heart led me to an understanding/decision about the aspect of the subject--stones--that I was moving into:  the quality of holiness.  The original commitment to stones as a subject goes back to the experience of the Jewish practice of leaving small stones on a grave.  I've thought about why one would leave a token of a visit, and why stones serve so well as such a token.  I've been drawing stone shapes for many years now, thinking that the beauty of the shapes would be the focus of a quilt--and it may yet still be.  But I also wanted to work abstractly, extracting from the stone as an object something of the quality that so draws me to it.  As I puzzled over my attachment to the pale gray fabrics, the idea of holiness settled into my mind.  The holiness of the place where the stones are left--the cemetery itself, as well as the grave of a loved one--and the holiness of the relationship--of the love, of the attachment, of the grief--that is embodied in the gesture of leaving a stone.

I had been thinking for a while about a composition that would be very similar to an earlier landscape quilt, "Late March."  I had adjusted the proportion of the rectangles to be more suggestive of the actual proportions of random stones--they would be 9x11" rather than 9x12".  But once I found the new subject of "holiness," rather than "stones," that seemed too small, and I scaled up the blocks to 14x17.  The final composition is 85 x 70." As I chose the colors and decided on the layout, I had these qualities in mind:  quiet, secure, solid, protective, encompassing.

"Holiness" [photo from August, 2016; unquilted cloth stretched on a wood frame]

Most of the quilts I've made in the wake of my son Jeremy's death--quilts like Loss, Shelter, Regret, and Accident--have been exhibited and then rolled up and put away--they are not meant to be used or hung on display at home.  But this one I can imagine actually using as a quilt.  It won't be for a while, though, as I plan to hand-quilt it, which will take some months.

This last photo is for those who are interested in details about what dyes I used.  Unmarked squares are from dyes I mixed myself from primaries; one other one I mixed is identified as "Carol's black"--the formula known to anyone who has taken a dyeing class with Carol Soderlund.  The 600-numbers are pre-mixed blacks from Pro Chemical and Dye; the "Black CWNA, Dark Black, and Black Bang" are from Custom Set Procion Dyes.  The second number is the DOS (depth of shade), where .03 DOS means 0.03% (or 0.0003 of weight of goods).  The orange that I mixed with one bluish black is a primary from ProChem, "Strong Orange."  Not shown here are the samples that I didn't use because they leaned too much towards green, blue, or brown.