Slow progress on Shelter

I've been very busy with a large project at work for the last two months, which has made it difficult to get back to "Shelter." I am at the stage of building up the large turquoise section that will arc around the blue section. I started working with some strata that I had pieced back in February, but found that working with 42" strips on this larger section wasn't going to work--the pieces looked "straight" even with curved piecing. I finally figured out that I needed to work with shorter pieces and interlace them, as I'd done in a very early sample piece. So, I cut most of the existing strata and most of my fabric in half (scary! I left some uncut, just in case). I laid the strips out on a drying rack (photo above), and now in the shorter bits of time I have for quilting (given the big work project), I'm concentrating on creating more strata, rather than working on laying them out on the design wall--which takes more active mental work than I can muster right now. Here are some of the strata:


And here's a photo of some of the turquoise section, very roughly pinned up--enough done to show me that using the shorter strata is the way to go, but with a lot of pinning and re-pinning yet to be done to get this section working:

Genealogy of a Quilt

Not only did I need a break from the concentration of working on Shelter, I also needed something easier to balance the intense work I'm doing for my job this summer. So, I spent a week or so piecing this top, made up of rectangles of various sizes that I had cut for another project, since abandoned. It was just the right thing to be doing--playing with colors and placement, but not a lot of intricate planning or sewing needed. Here's the story of how I happened to have all these rectangles on hand. They have their origin in two different ideas.

This little maquette (12x12") dates back to 2005--my first attempt at abstraction. My intention was to evoke the feeling of a very quiet place at the summer camp that I attended as a child, the "Pine Grove." Away from the busy-ness and activities of camp life, this was a place further down the lake, a walk down the road, a place where you could sit along amongst the pine trees, hear the lapping of the water, and just be by yourself, quietly, for a while. I don't know that I'll ever make this into a quilt, but when I saw solid fabrics in related colors, I would buy a half-yard or so. A few years ago, I started thinking about working with images of stones, and my eye was caught by a pattern in Jean Van Bockel's book, Meadowbrook Quilts: 12 Projects Inspired by Nature. Her model used mottled fabric for the stones and various beige fabrics for the backgrounds. I started out trying everything in solids, including a wider range of colors for the backgrounds:

But I thought these looked like dinosaur eggs, rather than stones, so I bought a lot of quarter-yard pieces of fabric that had stone-type textures and tried out several blocks with those:

This was better, but I didn't like it enough to go on, and I eventually went in another direction with the idea for stones, painting my own fabric and working with other sorts of compositions. That left me with a large number of solid rectangles cut up--some from the "pine grove" fabric and some purchased to fill out a palette for the background to the stones. About a year ago I used some of the rectangles to make this hanging, about 28x40:

It hangs on the wall above my computer at work, and is a welcome restful spot for my eyes. Then a couple of weeks ago, I went back to the box full of rectangles, and I made the top at the beginning of this post--about 48x56 or so. Finally, I used up the last remaining rectangles making three place-mat sized pieces. I'll use these to test out possible quilting designs for the larger piece, and then have them for placemats afterwards:

And what about all the leftover "stone"-type fabric? Perhaps I'll use that for the back of the quilt, along with the abandoned blocks.

Details

Having finished the blue section of "Shelter," I'm taking a break, and have made a half-dozen coasters, 4x4," piecing leftovers from the strip-pieced strata, and adding in an accent color. These make up quickly, especially if I sew just one line of stitching around the edge, rather than quilting lines inside the square. I didn't think to take a photo of version #1, where I had sewn a continuous row of navy blue stitching around the edge of the coaster. The blue stitching across the red/orange stripe was distracting. "But it's just a coaster," I told myself. But I also kept noticing the blue stitches interrupting the contrasting stripe. So, the next coasters I sewed a start-and-stop line, thinking I would leave the earlier ones as they were. In the end, I ripped out the stitches in the earlier ones, and re-did them. Better. At a retreat this winter, Bill Kerr of FunQuilts gave a talk about the importance of details--to carry out one's work into the smallest detail. The point seemed somewhat obvious, but in these past months I've felt the influence of the talk a number of times--pushing me to consider a detail that I was tempted to skip over. Now, these coasters are far from perfect; they tend to have dips or bulges on one side or another, not easy to control for. That I'll live with, but the element of contrast was too important to mess up. . . even for a coaster.
Here's another one. A quieter contrast--I like this one a lot. I just finished reading a collection of essays by the composer Roger Sessions, Questions about Music. (Not a usual subject of reading for me, but I'm participating in my public library's summer reading program, which challenges you to read a book in eight different categories over a period of six weeks; music is one of the categories.) The book includes two essays on composing; lots of analogies to the process of creating a work of art. For example, he talks about a composition being built on elements of association and contrast. I tend to be drawn to fabrics closely associated with each other, and have to push myself to bring in the element of contrast of value and hue.

Bricolage

I've spent this week going from pinned up sections of strip-pieced strata to sewing together the sections with needle-turn appliqué. As I have tried this and that in the somewhat complex process of construction of this piece, the term "bricolage" came to my mind. It's a term I learned long ago when reading Claude Levi-Strauss's book, The Savage Mind; it refers to the making of something through a kind of resourceful tinkering or fiddling around, making use of things that are at hand. When making a quilt that originates in an idea, rather than a pattern, it can be a puzzle as to how to physically get the fabric to do what one has imagined. Sometimes I feel like an engineer, figuring out a process of construction. But "bricoleur" (one who does bricolage) is closer to the role, as it is not a systematic, principled process, but one of trial and experimentation.

Next spring I'm scheduled to do a talk at the college where I teach, in a series dedicated to the research/creative work of the faculty. I'm planning to talk about my turn from research to art, and knowing that this is coming up in a year, I find that I'm starting to think about the talk. This is probably why I've been noticing comparisons of the artistic process to the research/writing process. I can't think of anything parallel to "bricolage" in my life as a writer. Nothing physical (except my love of the original historical documents--though they were not material that I were subject to my physical manipulation, other than careful handling), and very little that was experimental and spontaneous in the way that working on a quilt can be.

* * * * *

Below is a close-up that shows a line of applique joining strip-pieced sections. In working on this quilt I've been helped by two books that explain methods for doing layers of curved piecing, Vikki Pignatelli's Quilting by Improvisation and Karen Eckmeier's Layered Waves. These have both been very helpful to me, though I'm using hand-stitching to join the sections, rather than the machine stitching they use (Pignatelli using a blind-hem stitch and Eckmeier a top-stitch). Both books avoid using the word "applique," even though these are both methods of machine applique. It seems that many quilters are put off by the notion of applique, which is really too bad, because it makes possible virtually anything in joining fabric.

And here's a section that is all sewn up. By the way, the photo I put in my posting last week was way too dark, but my camera was on the blink and after that photo it gave up the ghost. These images taken with a borrowed camera are much better.

When is something done?

One week later, I think this is now ready to be sewn. (Click on image to enlarge.) After the version posted on 5/30, I fiddled for another hour or so, and then wrote to a friend, "Knowing there are limitless variations, it's sometimes hard to know when to stop. Sometimes I know 'This is IT,' but sometimes the feeling is more like 'yes, I could go on, but this version is good, so get on with it.' Right now, I feel more like the latter. I'll look at it again tomorrow and see what I think." Well, when I looked at it the next day, I knew it wasn't there yet. Every day this week I've spent time adding and changing pieces. As soon as one section was better, something would bother me in another section. When is it done? When I can sit peacefully in front of the work, with no one spot catching my eye, calling out to me for further attention.

As I've turned from writing and scholarship to quilting, I've often seen parallels in the two processes, but this issue of "done-ness" seems different. When doing research, I could tell I'd done enough when there started to be diminishing returns--when the more I read, the more I came up with things that confirmed what I'd already figured out. When writing, I would always go through multiple drafts, revising, revising, and more revising. But when writing a book--or even just an essay--one never sees the work all in one visual experience. It's easier--or more necessary?--to accept that one has to let the work out in the world without perfecting each minute detail. But maybe there's a parallel also. What would keep me from considering a chapter finished? If there was a place where I realized the argument wasn't clear--where the reader would have trouble getting from one paragraph to another, or one sentence to another. In a quilt or visual art one also needs movement through the piece, needs not to get caught in one place.

First section of "Shelter"

For the last couple of weeks, I've been back working on "Shelter," constructing the bottom left corner. (Click here for a sketch of the quilt and notes on how the layers are being constructed.) The photo shows a lot of strata pinned in place (28"high and 34" wide). The challenges I'm finding are: 1) working in variations in line, avoiding too many parallel lines; 2) judging the right quantity and placement of light-valued pieces (the largish shiny stripe in the upper right is not so bad in reality--it's satin that is catching the flash); 3) avoiding some pieces that sweep across the whole field. I thought I had fixed this last issue, but in adjusting something else, there it is again. A detail:

Suggestions welcome!

Success, on the second try

I set aside a large block of time yesterday for my first dye project at home. Good thing I had another large block of time today, to compensate for the large error I made yesterday. Here were the steps I took, with the goal of dyeing several pieces of fabric that I could cut up for use in "Stonescapes":

1) I dyed several pieces of fabric a pale gray with a full immersion method, with the intention of then doing a second low immersion dyeing to get various kinds of mottling with darker gray and brown. But when I washed out the dye, no color was left. As I reconstructed what I had done, I realized I'd made a catastrophic math error when mixing the dye, using way too much water (by a factor of 10). Since I was aiming for a pale color to begin with, this meant essentially no dye was used. Well, on to Plan B.

2) Not able to face up to another 1-1/2 hours of full immersion dyeing, I went on to the less time-consuming part: adding mottled color onto the still-white fabric, in low immersion. At the same time, I pulled a few of pieces of colored Kona cotton from my stash, two pieces gray and one tan, and did the same on them, after washing this non-pfd (prepared-for-dyeing) fabric with Synthrapol. (Sorry for the dye lingo--it's for the benefit of any dyers out there who may be reading.)

3) This morning I washed out and dried all 7 pieces of fabric. The bottom three in the photo above are the ones done on the commercial Kona. Done! The top four at this point were streaks and spots of brown and gray on white. So, next I overdyed these pieces, three gray and one tan, using low immersion.

End results: This is all fabric that is definitely usable for my projects involving stones, and I think they'll yield larger pieces with interesting design than what I've been getting when I paint. And I'll triple check my math the next time. . .