Final Post on "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly II" (originally posted January 1, 2023)

I started this quilt in the spring of 2021 and finished it in the fall of 2022. The quilt presented some challenges along the way, especially in working with the heavy, loosely woven linen and in quilting, but I am very pleased with the final result, and so, happily, are the recipients! The quilt is 90 x 94", made for a queen-size bed. The central medallion covers the top of the mattress, and the three plain borders drop over the side and bottom edges.

When I last wrote about the quilt, in June, I had decided to set aside the free-motion quilting I'd been planning on (which would have been in the tan only, not in the black) and to try straight-line quilting instead. [Here's a link to that old post; you can read the content in this "back end" version, but links to other posts will not work.] I usually prefer straight-line quilting, but for this quilt, I was worried about having thread visible in the black cloth--any thread light enough to blend with the tan linen would show up too much on the black. But then I remembered a kind of thread I hadn't used in a while, Invisafil, which is a very thin (100 wt) polyester thread that is colored, and yet blends in with a range of colors/values of fabric, much more so that the 50 wt cotton thread I normally use. I had stopped using Invisafil because it kept breaking in the new machine I bought several years ago, but I thought it was worth another try. To my delight, I had no trouble with breakage, and the charcoal gray color that I had on hand blended well with both the tan and the black, despite the large contrast of value between them:

Once washed, the thread sinks into the fabric, and just looks like a shadow made by the quilted line.

I'm definitely glad I went with the straight-line quilting, rather than free motion--here's the earlier trial piece with free-motion:

I wrote previously about the work it took to dye fabric for the back. I'm happy with the color I ended up with, and plan to keep some on hand for use in other projects. I also used it for the end panels on a couple of pillowcases I made for possible use with the quilt (body is from fabric by Marcia Derse).

So, a fond farewell to this quilt!

Spliced Lines Sewn into Eighty-Eight Squares: Homage to Ellsworth Kelly II

Work on this quilt has been going slowly, but I have been making progress. The photo below shows the quilt top, batting and backing layered on and pinned into the carpeted floor in our large guest room. This is where I'm basting the layers together in preparation for quilting. The silvery line at the bottom of the photo is the piece of straight metal I bought some years ago to help me mark quilting lines. This time I used it to help me get the inner black border pinned down in straight lines.

Below you can see the basting stitches I've been putting in. These big red stitches will hold the layers in place as I do the machine quilting, and then will be pulled out. (I would usually baste with safety pins when doing machine quilting, but I didn't want to add further weight and bulk to this large quilt.) In a method learned from Suzanne Marshall, I sit on the floor and put in the lines of stitching. I only do about an hour a day, listening to music. I've been at it for a couple of weeks, and it will take me another several days still. Then on to the quilting!

Going back a step, it took me a while to prepare the backing for the quilt. I like using a fabric wide enough that it doesn't have to be pieced, and I have plenty of white fabric that width that could be dyed for the backing. Dyeing the color I want is usually easier than purchasing fabric, because there are not many quilting stores within easy reach, and I rarely buy fabric online because it's impossible to know the actual color from what you see on the computer screen. I also enjoy the challenge of dyeing the color I want, so the process began. I have a lot of experience in dyeing grays, with lots of samples to choose from, but not much experience with tan, which is want I wanted for this quilt. Yes, I have my invaluable sample book from Carol Soderlund's "Color Mixing for Dyers" class, but the samples are only 1" square, and for something as subtle as tan, it's difficult to assess from that small bit. Then when one of my first trials came out greenish instead of tan, I realized that my dyes were several years old, and red is usually the first to go. So, new red ordered, and the trials continued. Five samples are shown in the photo below, laid on top of the natural linen used in the top. I had started out aiming for a medium value like the ones on the far left and right, but decided that a lighter value was much better--less important to get a close match to the hue of the linen.

The next photo has pulled the fabrics that were 2nd from left and furthest right above; they are two values of the same hue.  The one on the left is what I chose, so it's what you see peeking out behind the pieced top in the first photo in this post.  It's quite a lovely "oyster white" kind of color, and I can imagine finding other uses for it.

Of course the big question remains of how to quilt the quilt, what pattern of stitching to use. With a number of leftover blocks, I did some sample quilting some months ago. The photo below shows the sample quilted and washed. I like the idea of keeping the black lines untouched, so the quilting will be done in the spaces between the lines, basically echoing the shapes. The lines are spaced more closely together in the top four blocks than in the bottom two; the plan is to go with the wider spacing. The long side pieces, trials for the wide borders, are done with wavy vertical lines, sometimes intersecting.

Well, that's been the quilting plan for a while, but as I look at the sample again now, I'm thinking I should do one more trial before a final decision. It occurs to me that simple straight-line quilting might be better, either just horizontal lines (which I've often done on quilts), or a grid of horizontals and verticals. Yes, this would mean crossing the black lines many times, but it's possible that a medium-value neutral thread would not show up very much. So, there will be a pause between basting and quilting while I do one more trial. If you have any thoughts on this, do let me know!

Once the quilting is done, there's one final decision--what kind of binding to put on the quilt. I considered a black binding or a linen one, but have decided on a faced binding done with the same fabric as the backing. A faced binding is seamed to the front for a finished edge, but then pulled around entirely to the back so that nothing shows on the front. I like the idea of the large borders of the quilt, that will hang over the sides of the bed, to be just plain linen, with no "frame." (I've done several quilts with faced bindings; here's one.)

I came up with a new name for this quilt. The small work of Ellsworth Kelly that inspired my design was called "Brushstrokes Cut into Forty-Nine Squares and Arranged by Chance," so I've done a riff on that. I left out the "arranged by chance" part, because there was a lot of thinking involved in how I placed the squares. And I wonder, did Kelly really leave the 49 squares exactly as he first laid them down by chance? 

Earlier posts on this quilt:

January 25, 2022

April 29, 2021

Returning to "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly II"

It's over five months since my last post. For the first 2-3 months, it was because on intensive work I was doing on a capital campaign for my synagogue, and all my writing energy was taken up with drafting campaign materials, and then--happily--thank you letters. When I was able to get back into the studio, I needed something simple, that didn't involve much thinking, so I finished up a couple of baby quilts that I'd started a while ago, and started a 4-patch posie quilt with some fabric on hand. At that point, it became clear to me that I wasn't just taking a break, but that I was actively avoiding getting back to the quilt I was in the middle of last summer, my second "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly." The last time you saw this project, I had completed 82 blocks of a projected 195 (for a queen-sized quilt), and I did a dozen more after this photo was taken.

I finally realized that I wasn't up to making another 101 blocks. I had really enjoyed making the blocks I did, figuring out various configurations of lines and how far I could take a pieced-in curved line. But going on to do dozens more would have been repetitive, without the joy of discovery. So, I talked it through with friends and came up with another plan. I decided to use the linear blocks for a 60x80 medallion that would cover the top surface of the bed, and then add plain linen borders to bring it to the size of a queen-size quilt (90x94).  Here's the medallion, with all the blocks sewn together.  Since this used just 88 of the 94 blocks I had on hand, I was able to set aside blocks I wasn't so fond of.

I dropped the photo of the medallion into Photoshop, and tried out a black inner border and then wider borders of tan (which will be the same linen as in the blocks). [I wish I knew why blogger lets me place some photos centered, but refuses to move others except to right and left 😐]

So, the image above is the final design for the quilt, and has been approved by the recipients--all set! But there was one more design decision to make--exactly how wide should the black inner border be? I knew I wanted it narrower than in the Photoshop image, but by how much? I pieced together six of the leftover blocks and tried out different widths in the border. First I pieced in a 1/2" strip, and then I cut a strip for a 5/8" border, feeling a little silly for trying something with only an 1/8" difference. But I'm glad I kept the difference that small. To my eye, 1/2" looks good, while 5/8" is definitely too wide!

So then I took out the 5/8" strip, and replaced it with a 3/8" strip.

The 3/8" strip is so similar to much of the line-work within the blocks that it looks like it's meant to join up with them. The 1/2" strip is still in keeping with the line work (there are some lines are are 1/2" wide, and occasionally even a bit wider), but it stands out a bit more from the line-work, reading as a border. Decision made--1/2" it will be.

There's one other thing that helped me get back in the studio--I figured out a different way to manage my time so that it's easier to spend stretches in the studio. I'll describe it here, in case it might help someone else who is having trouble corralling the computer-based tasks that can so easily take up the whole day, especially with the temptation to click on one link and then another. 

For all my working life, I've worked each day from a list of tasks that needed to be done. My habit was to work task by task, and I usually tried to finish one task before going on to another. But thinking about this recently, I realized that most of the tasks in front of me don't have specific hard deadlines. So, I now tell myself each morning that I will spend 2 hours of concentrated time on the campaign work, which is what has been most likely to take up expanses of time. I set a timer for the two hours, and make a commitment to not check e-mail, or follow random links during that time. The timer is important. It's helping me finish a satisfying chunk of this work before lunch, and to be able to be in the studio for much of the afternoon. It doesn't work out every day, but still enough of the time that I'm feeling much better about how I'm spending my time. (I'd prefer to be spending the mornings in the studio instead--my favorite time of day--but when I try that, I can feel a cloud hovering over me, the burdensome stuff that still awaits. It feels better to get that done at the beginning of the day, and then to know I don't have to think about it again until the next morning.)

One final note: Every once in a while over the past months, I thought of writing a blog post, but when I went to the blog page, I saw the photo of me on the couch, covered with the blanket made in memory of my mom. I really liked seeing that photo, and didn't want to supplant it with another post. Today when I looked at the page, I noticed that there was no image under the title of "Studio Notes," so I thought I'd try putting the photo there, where I can see it every time. I don't know if I'll keep it here, and if I do, I'll need to figure out how to tweak the placement of the name of the blog, but I like it there for now.

Finished blanket

The finished blanket is two layers only, sewn together with a "pillowcase binding," no quilting. I had dyed up a length of linen the same charcoal color I used for the top, thinking I would line the blanket with that. But I kept thinking about how I liked the feel of the fleece throw I've been using for naps. Fleece would be too heavy for a second layer on this, but then I thought of "minky," which is similar to fleece but thinner and even softer. I found a nice gold color, available in a wide enough piece that I didn't have to seam it together. Done! 

For the story of this blanket and its making, click on this post.

 

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.

  

Project #2: Homage to Ellsworth Kelly, II

Back in 2013, I made a small quilt,  "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly," working from his paintings of colorful squares. You can see an example of one of Kelly's such paintings in the top row of the stamps put out not long ago by USPS--wish I had purchased more!

After studying a number of Kelly's paintings of squares, I decided to use multiple bright colors, along with both white and black, and to place the squares so that value contrasts dominate, but to also have some places where two adjacent squares are close in value. Here's the quilt I made, 36"x36."

For quite a while, I've had a photocopied image of another piece by Kelly on my bulletin board, "Brushstrokes Cut into Forty-Nine Squares and Arranged by Chance." 

Recently it occurred to me that I had on hand some fabric that might work well for a quilt based on this idea. I had dyed a couple of yards of cotton/linen blend in dark charcoal, but it came out less mottled than I wanted it, so had set it aside. I also had a large supply of the heavy natural linen that I used for Words Spoken. So I did some sample blocks with these fabrics, and decided to go forward with a large project. I'm making blocks that will finish at 7" square, and I'm planning on a queen-size quilt (91x112"), which will need 208 blocks. (In contrast, Kelly's entire piece is only 14" square, which surprised me--it seems large-scale to me, but instead it's small and delicate.)

The appeal to me of this kind of work is the combination of intent and chance. Kelly's original brushstrokes were made with some level of intent: making lines both thick and thin, curved and straight, and pulling the brush in long strokes across a page.  But then he cut the paper up into squares, with no attention to where in a line's path the cuts fell, and then he arranged the squares by chance. 

Kelly's piece is the starting point for my quilt, but my materials dictated a somewhat different method. Cutting and sewing in fabric strips makes for a different kind of line, and gestures made this way are not as free as a line made with a brush. And rather than making one large drawing and cutting it into 49 squares, the most I can do is work a strip that will be cut into two blocks. I've been doing that for about half the blocks, but if I want to include a pronounced curve, or some intersecting lines, then I work on just one block at a time, and do a more intentional composition. So, there's less randomness within the blocks than Kelly achieved. And although I initially put the blocks up on the wall randomly, as they are each completed, I do then step back and rearrange to get something that pleases me. This is a very enjoyable part of the process, seeing the different ways the lines can relate to each other. Did Kelly really arrange the squares totally randomly, without moving any squares? If so, what will power!

Once I made a few dozen blocks, I tried out different arrangements. The first is closest to Kelly's drawing:

Then I wondered what it would be like if I added in a few squares that flipped the black/tan relationship, and I like the result:

And then I wondered, what if I introduced more black still, isolating each of the blocks within a black grid:

I like this also, but the plan is to go with the second arrangement--some scattered black blocks, but no black sashing. Below is progress so far, with placement very provisional. The width will be as is; the length will go down past the bottom of the design wall, so I'll have to work on this in two sections. I've made several more blocks since this photo, so I'm now about 1/3 done. Some days I make a couple of blocks, some days as many as four. I'm taking it slow, enjoying watching the design in each block take shape. This is not a project conducive to production-line piecing.

Here's a close-up of part of one block, so you can see the texture of the linen. It's a loosely woven fabric, so I starch each block heavily before trimming it to size. (Click on the image if you'd like to see it larger.)

One other issue I've thought about: Are my two "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly" quilts too close to Kelly? Am I copying or making something new? Is it OK to make work this close to another artist's? A few thoughts:

• Studying the work of other artists is a key part of learning to make art. Looking really closely at Kelly's, figuring out compositional elements that are central to the work, helps me understand key elements of composition such as color and line, and how to use them.
• Copying the works exactly would likely have taught me even more, and art students are sometimes asked to do this as an exercise. But I was interested in making something that built on Kelly, while still developing into my own work. I have gone further in that direction in the second homage than the first.
• If I ever do another exhibition of my work, I wouldn't include these quilts, given that they are derivative rather than more fully original. Not that anything is 100% "original," if you study at all the work of other artists, but there are degrees. 
• To make my source clear, I have given both of these quilts the title of "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly," and I hope the recipients will enjoy looking at the work of the artist who inspired them, as well as the quilt.

And here's another, somewhat similar quilt that's a step further from being original work, a quilt that I made in 2015 from the "Glyphs" pattern by Modern Quilt Studio (issue 9 of their magazine). 

Being done from a pattern, much was decided by the authors of the pattern, although I did change the colors and sashing width and left off the borders. And while the pattern authors gave samples of "glyphs," they encouraged makers to create their own. Still, no mistaking that this is a quilt I made from a pattern created by someone else. 

Comparing the design of this with my second "Homage to Ellsworth Kelly" quilt: While there's much similarity in the construction, this quilt has straight lines only, and each block is a composition unto itself. The narrow sashing keeps each block distinct, so one doesn't get the feeling of connection that happens when there's no sashing, and when the lines include some curves.

3 works in progress

I'm working on three different projects at the moment, and thought I'd give you a look at each one, over a few posts. 

This first one was the last begun but the first finished. I was thinking I would intersperse working on it with the others, but it created such a mess that it took over the studio, so I just kept at it until it was done. This is from a pattern by Rachel Hauser of Stitched in Color, "Confetti." For a background fabric, I dyed some Nature's Way muslin in a pale gray that I like very much. (The color shows a little better in the detail shots below.)

I have made two "confetti" quilts long before I saw this pattern, with both of mine done improvisationally. The first was a wedding quilt made for a friend, and the second used the same idea to make "If Only," a wedding quilt for Jeremy. In contrast, Rachel Hauser's pattern utilizes paperpiecing, which pre-determines the position of scraps. I don't think I'd ever do this again, as I prefer the more spontaneous look of improvised "confetti," but that spontaneous look comes with the cost of much greater design time and mental exertion.  Much as I love doing work of my own design, I also enjoy relaxing with the simpler process of making according to someone else's design. The other appeal was that paper piecing is a technique I find challenging, and I thought this might be a good pattern for me to use to build the skill. Well, I did get better, but I made every possible mistake there is in paper piecing, most of them more than once. For those who aren't familiar with it, a little taste of what's involved: A pattern for each block is printed out on paper. (I used a translucent paper made for this purpose.) Pieces of fabric are sewn to the underside of the paper, in the order indicated by a sequence of letters.

And here's the paper turned over, showing the first pieces sewn on.

I won't try to explain anything more, except to say that because of the flipping, you need to be able to imagine everything in reverse, which is very challenging for me.  

Below are a couple of close-ups. Working with scraps is always fun, as you get to re-visit projects from the past.

There's always a hope that when doing a project with scraps, that one will work down the volume of the scraps on hand, but that never works. Going through the bins of scraps, only results in fluffing them up and creating more volume than one takes out in little pieces. To use up some more of them, I decided to make the back of the quilt entirely from large scraps, which included a few already-pieced blocks. (The top and bottom rows will be trimmed after quilting.) 

And here are a couple of photos to give you a taste of the other two projects: