External Validation

The feeling of engagement in the process of quilting and the pleasure in (some of) the finished products are entirely sufficient motivations to keep me going in quilting. But it's nice to get external validation occasionally as well. My little "Waves" wall hanging recently brought in $250 at the Brockton Family & Community Services raffle. (Detail above, to show quilting.) And "Loss" has been accepted into the 2009 Sacred Threads show. (Mary Beth has had two quilts accepted into the show also.) I'm not inclined to enter juried shows, but the special nature of Sacred Threads made it a venue in which I could imagine sharing "Loss" with a larger audience.

Progress on "Shelter"

After a couple of years of making countless small sketches and maquettes with different combinations of curves for my "Shelter" quilt, I made the leap recently to a full-sized pattern. It has turned out to be larger than I had been thinking of—this is 58x70 (instead of about 34x40)—David's suggestion and a good idea. The width was determined by how far my hand could sweep a line without me taking a step. (For other views of the plan for the quilt, go to this earlier post.)

I've been making progress with doing sets of curved strip-piecing with the fabric I've collected in turquoise, cobalt, rusty red, and black. The next photo shows which color I'm thinking of for which part of the quilt. There will be many panels joined up in each swatch of color, with a variety of angles. Reading Vikki Pignatelli's Quilting by Improvisation has given me very helpful ideas for how I'll stitch them together—basically, an improvised appliqué technique.


Here you can see the four colors together, just pinned up on the design wall.

And I might mix them up, also. It will be easy to add other colors in, as I play around with the panels. Here's a sliver of red added between the turquoise and cobalt.

Lynette suggests that the red-orange in the upper right may overpower the quilt, and that having a fifth swath between the orange and the black might help. It will be a while before I have enough panels done to get an idea of how much I'll need to mix things up.

Leave as is or rip out?

Deciding on the quilting of the quilt is one of the most challenging aspects of quilting for me. Here's a small hanging (20 x 27) I worked on last week. I sometimes think that putting more stitching on a top is ruining it. Here's the top before stitching:


When I showed Mary Beth this top along with another one with small rectangles, she suggested trying out some decorative stitching in the black borders. I was putting off trying something out, but then Kay asked if I would donate something for a raffle at her place of work, Brockton Family and Community Services, and I offered this quilt. Knowing now that "Waves" would be in a raffle, and so would go to someone I don't know, I was freed up to experiment. I tried out some hand embroidery with a lovely, heavy silk thread. First I did some a traditional "open cretan" stitch in turquoise and green.

Then I decided to try out something wavy in the borders. I let some thread fall onto the black, and liked the random squiggles it fell into, so I drew along the squiggly lines and embroidered them with backstitch. The combination of the controlled and loose stitches didn't work, so I took out the controlled ones. Then I machine-quilted the waves with various designs, using a small loopy stitch in the black borders. You can see the quilting in the strips here on the back. Hmm, maybe this should be the front:

So, the question is: Looking again at the completed top, with the bright squiggles in the right and left borders, should the squiggles stay, or should I take them out and leave the black borders plain? (I am happy with the four-color binding. I first tried a pieced binding, but that was distracting.)


I welcome your comments! (By the way, if you wonder what to do next after you click "comment," it seems that you have to select a profile. Should you want to comment some other time: To leave your name--which is nicer for me than anonymous--under "Select Profile" choose "Name/URL". In the window that pops up, putting just a name is fine; no URL is needed. Then click "continue.")

I originally made this top to try out curved strip piecing, following instructions by Brenda Gael Smith in her "Ripples" pattern (published in Down Under Quilts, Issue 113, Oct 2007). It was a lovely coincidence that I won some patterns on her blog last week, just when I was working on this quilt again. Here's her quilt—you can see how I adapted it to a smaller piece (image posted with Brenda's consent):

Brenda Gael Smith, "Ripples"

Fabric for "Shelter"

I was in Phoenix this past weekend visiting my sister, and we went to three quilt shops, looking for more fabric to fill in the palette for "Shelter." I was able to find a large range of turquoise/aqua fabrics, a fair amount of cobalt/royal blue and rusty red. I found just a couple of black batiks, with the rest silk and polyesters. I've include some non-cotton in each color, looking to add a little shimmer to the curved strip-piecing that I'll be doing for each swath of color.

Here's the thinking behind this quilt, from a description I wrote to Mary Beth in January 2006:

The shelter quilt is a sequel to the "Loss" quilt that I started at Design Camp in 2005. That quilt was about David's and my experience of loss--of the brightness of Jeremy's life in ours and then the stark emptiness of our future without him. (Photo here.) As I worked through this expression of our experience of loss, I found myself thinking something like: Our future is unremitting blackness, but I don't want to think of Jeremy's future--his existence, of whatever possible nature it might be, after death--as this same blackness. I have no sense or understanding or ideas about life after death, nothing that I could possibly articulate in words. If someone asked me "Do you believe in life after death?" and asked for a yes or no answer, the closest answer would be "no." And yet, when David and I had to find words for the stone on Jeremy's grave, we put this epitaph (taken from the Jewish funeral service, with language from the Psalms):

May he find refuge forever
In the shelter of your wings
And may his soul be bound up
In the bond of eternal life.

I couldn't say that I "believe" in these words, but I need their comfort.

So, for the next quilt, I've been thinking of the image of "in the shelter of your wings."


When I first thought of doing this, an image came to mind--a Durer watercolor of a bird's wing.Long ago I had a postcard of this image on my office door, just because I thought it beautiful (despite the fact that it's a wing from a dead bird. . .). Looking at it again now, I think the colors Durer used might also be a guide for me. The image also suggests the feel of the open wing that I want to capture in the image of "shelter."

Study to Studio

For many years, this desk was the focal point of my study, the place where I wrote books, where I did my scholarship. The laptop sat on the pull-out typing return, at the perfect height for a short person like me. This desk held current notes and drafts of my research projects. Another skinny desk went off in an "el," to the right of the typing return; this second desk held materials related to the classes I was teaching, as well as bills and letters. The room was filled with books and files connected to my job, to my professional life. It was a good place to work.

After my son's death in 2004, the study no longer pulled me in. The part of my life connected to research fell away. In the midst of a quilting design workshop I took in June 2005, an idea took shape: I could turn my study into a studio. Talking with Amy D. at breakfast, I tentatively told her about this idea. "Penny, that's huge!" I was so grateful for her understanding of what the shift would mean, and her encouragement to go ahead and make the change. Which I did.

It's been three and a half years now since I re-did the room. It's been difficult to say the word "studio"; I more usually call it my "sewing room." Louise and I challenge each other to say/write the word, without hesitating, without putting quotation marks around it. Naming this blog "Studio Notes" was one way to claim the word for myself. "Study" and "Studio" both seem to be derived from the Latin verb "studio"—to pursue eagerly. Yes, I pursued scholarship eagerly for 35 years. Now that same eagerness is going into my work with fabric.

If you're interested in a (longish) account of the FunQuilts Design Workshop and how it transformed my approach to quilting—and my identity—you can read this talk: "From Study to Studio: Meaning and Motivation in Scholarship and Art" (link added in July 2010, replacing an earlier talk referred to here previously).

By the way, the typing return is just the right height for working on needleturn appliqué.

Another view of the studio.

Perseverance

One of the things I've liked about quilting is working on many projects at once. In knitting, I generally work on one project at a time, maybe two. The choice is just whether to knit or not. In contrast, I have many quilt projects in process at the same time, and the different types of projects and the different stages they're in give me the pleasure of working on whatever I may feel like at the moment: needle-turn appliqué, machine piecing, designing, machine quilting, hand-quilting—with more than one project going in each category. But I'm now feeling that I have too many projects in the air, and that the frequent switching back and forth means that a long time can pass before any one thing is completed, depriving me of the pleasure and satsifaction of seeing the work done.

And if I'm flitting from quilt to quilt, it's especially difficult to make progress with the quilts that are of my own design, the ones in which I'm working out thoughts, ideas, feelings that need the expressive vehicle of art. It's scary to work on these, something I've written about in another blog. (This is a group blog for people who share the experience of having worked with Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr of FunQuilts.) After that post, Louise and I were talking more about the issue of fear, and she brought up "perseverance"—how important, and difficult, it is to persevere—rather than moving on to something else as soon as there's some block or snag in the design process. I had already decided to limit myself to working on only one or two things in a given block of time, and keeping the word "perseverance" in mind has really helped me continue working for a couple of weeks on one "big idea" quilt that has been in my mind for a long time. I put a little sign on the studio wall: PERSEVERANCE. It helps. (Christine Kane's notion of choosing a "word for the year" hasn't interested me before, but now it clicks.)

So here's what developed when I kept persevering on the quilt I call "shelter." For a long while, I've had the idea of four curved bands of color, and I've made a lot of small maquettes with various shapes, like this:

Recently, I made the big step of going from the small maquette (about 8x9") to full-size (about 40"), but I realized that it didn't translate well—the large pieces looked clunky and boring. I decided to try out different ways of piecing the bands. First, I tried some strip-piecing:


Then some improvised "crazy-piecing":

I like this one very much, but it doesn't work for the idea of this project.

Then I went back to the stripped-piecing, but overlaying different bands to get a variety of angles. The result is in the image that opens this post. I like it. Here it is again, just so they're all in a row.

Mom's Needles

Today I needed some #4 double-pointed needles to finish the neck on a sweater, and then I needed a #13 circular needle for knitting a string bag. No problem—I had them at hand, along with about every size of regular needles and crochet hooks too. Pulling out this stash of needles floods me with memories of my mother. These are her needles, accumulated over a long life of knitting. My mother always had something on her needles, alongside other projects she did over the years: macramé, beading (flowers, necklaces, earrings), rug hooking, needlepoint (including the chair backs and seats above). Those projects came and went, but knitting was constant. I don't know what she made with the teensy crochet hooks—perhaps doilies that were around the house, made earlier in life than I knew her. Or maybe she inherited them from her mother, Annie Schine, as I have inherited them from her.

My mother made sweaters and afghans for the whole family; later on there were babies to make gifts for—not just her own grandchildren, but all through the family, and friends' too. The basic baby gift was a toddler sweater, with the child's name knitted in or embroidered onto the back, with a stripe on the sleeve and a number representing the child's order in the family. If my mother had been invited to the wedding—a convenient marker of closeness of relationship—then my mother would knit a Scottish lace baby blanket for the newborn, a thing of beauty that could also double as a shawl for the new mom.

When I was in my mid 30s, accepting infertility and the unlikelihood I would have children, I asked if my mom could knit one of the baby blankets for me, so I could use it for a shawl. She did, and as life turned out, I could use it for our adopted son a few years later.