Persistence

Here's what I'm thinking about for my work about "persistence"--a large piece of cloth (about 90" in longest dimension), on which I stitch thousands of marks in linear configurations.  I've made a full-size sketch that roughly replicates the layout of the three major alignments in Carnac. This is just a very early starting point and the final piece may bear little resemblance to this, but it's enough to serve as a kind of placeholder. Right now, it is hanging vertically on my design wall, but it may end up horizontal.

This rough sketch in place, I went on to do stitching trials, trying out the kinds of marks I might make, with what kind of thread, and in what colors.  I started out with the heavy natural linen I enjoy working with (4C22 from Fabrics-Store), and a black silk-wrapped linen thread that I had on hand from Habu Textiles. 

Then more sampling with different threads, this time stitching on linen that has been colored with different hues/values of earth pigments (more on earth pigments below):

This helped me decide that I prefer a light or medium-light color for the stitches, on a dark background. 

In order to try out a range of colors/values for the thread, I purchased a few different flat threads from Habu, which I can dye myself. (I like how a flat thread yields unexpected shapes in the stitches.)

Here's one of the threads, dyed with 2 different light grays, though it is difficult to tell the difference in hue at this light value.

And here are trials with three different threads from Habu, all dyed very light gray:

Now to explain the earth pigmented fabric. From an early stage, I've been talking with my friend Sheryl St. Germain about this project. Sheryl and I both attended a 2022 workshop by Susan Brandeis that centered on hand-stitching. I focused on stitching that I might use for my work about menhirs, and Sheryl was working with cloth that she had painted with earth pigments, a method of coloring cloth that she had recently learned from Claire Benn. We continued to e-mail back and forth about our work after the workshop. When I wrote about my decision to not use the natural linen, along with some thoughts about dyeing the background fabric, Sheryl suggested using earth pigments instead of chemical dyes. I liked the idea of this--because of the close association of earth and stone in these neolithic monuments--but I knew from hearing about Sheryl's experience that the process of using earth pigments was very different from anything I had done before, and I just didn't have it in me to learn a whole new process that I might not use again after this one project. Sheryl then offered to color the cloth for me. This was such a deeply generous offer that I hesitated to accept, but her offer came from the heart, and I opened my heart to accept. (It happens that this was one thing that has led me to think about how hard it can be to accept help, and I'm learning that accepting help is as important to a life well lived as is giving help.) 

Here are the samples that Sheryl worked up for me early in the design process, before I had decided whether I wanted the background to be light or dark. Sheryl tested three different earth pigments (all in the grayish/brown range that I wanted), in 2 or 3 different values.

I've picked the color in the lower right corner. My cloth will have the earth pigment applied late in August, and then it will need another four weeks to cure before I can work with it. This gives me the additional time I need to do some further thread trials, both of dyeing and stitching.

This is the first time that one of my personal works has become a collaborative project, and that scared me at first--how could I give over a central, physical part of the project to someone else? All of my work has been shaped significantly by extended discussion with friends and teachers, but I've always done all the actual work myself. But giving up control can be a good thing, and having Sheryl move forward with the cloth experiments has helped keep me moving forward on my part of the project. And of course our discussions all along the way have helped me find my way to the composition this will become.

THANK YOU SHERYL!!

Menhirs

In 2019, my husband and I went to France, and we spent several days in Brittany, including two days in Carnac. The neolithic stone monuments there made a deep impression on me--thousands of menhirs (large stones placed upright) arranged in rows over a space of over two miles.  The monuments date from about 4500-3300 BCE, so about 6,000 years ago (1,000 or more years earlier than Stonehenge). 

Here are a couple of aerial views of portions of the stone alignments: from way above and closer in. And here's a video that puts together aerial views of many alignments in Brittany. (Ignore the creepy music at the start; it soon quiets down. There's no narration.)

Of course standing amongst the stones, one doesn't get such an overview. Instead, there is a feeling of immersion in a massive enterprise.

The stones range in size from about 2 to 13 feet. You can see the scale of some of the larger stones in the next photo, which includes a human visitor in the center foreground.

The stones are many different shapes, and were taken from outcrops of stones right in the area. The stones are mostly unworked, but some have been lightly shaped.

You can see the overall plan of the 3 major alignments here, and some additional photos here. [Added 8-25-25: And here's a video with great aerial views of the alignments in Brittany.]

My initial response was a sense of awe at the enormity of the human project, which must have required persistence over many years. There had to be a collective commitment to an endeavor that would eventually result in the lines of stones and the corridors in between them. This was my starting place: that the stones were a kind of witness to the persistence of humans, creating together a monument of deep meaning to them.  So, the first words I had in mind as I thought about a possible art work in response to the alignments were "persistence" and "witness," and I have one piece sketched out that is centered on this theme. (More about that in a subsequent post.)

But I was also driven to find out what I could about the possible meaning of these lines of stones to the neolithic people who placed them. From the museum in Carnac and from early reading, it quickly became clear that there will never be a consensus on the issue of meaning. Archaeoastronomical explanations (e.g. connection to a solstice) don't work for these configurations, and of course there is no written record to refer to. I've been driven to do a fair amount of reading in the scholarship on these and other neolithic sites--a practice of reading and note-taking that I thought I'd left behind when I stopped doing historical scholarship in 2004. But here I am again, trying to piece together what some human actions meant, based on whatever evidence one could find--in this case physical evidence rather than written.

I am still reading and thinking about this, but it now makes sense to me that the overarching meaning of the alignments, taken together with other kinds of contemporary monuments in the same area--dolmens (stone tombs) and tumuli (burial mounds)--is connected to death and remembrance. That the manipulation of stone and earth (the stones "planted" in the earth, and earth mounded over stones) is an elemental response to human loss. (There are no burials associated with the menhirs, but the location of the lines of menhirs in relationship to the dolmens and tumuli puts the overall complex in close relationship to death and its associated emotions and practices.)

So. . . this brings me back to familiar territory, as a significant part of my previous work on loss was centered on stone, described here. I am in the midst of sketching out a second piece on the alignments that centers on this theme. I'll also write more about this in a later post.

I'm back!

I've been unable to post to this blog starting last fall, so back in January, I put the last two posts about my recently completed Ellsworth Kelly quilt on my recipe blog. With the help of a team of friends, the problem has finally been solved, and earlier this month, I re-posted those two entries here on StudioNotes. Many thanks to Wanda Hanson (blogger extraordinaire), Rick Ortner, and David Amor for the string of suggestions that led to the solution! It turned out to be a too-vigorous blocker by the new internet provider we started with last fall.

In the meantime, I've been working on a large new project that I am ready to start writing about. Not having the blog has slowed down progress. This has made me realize how much occasional writing to a public forum helps advance my thinking/working. It gives me a reason to think through issues that come up in the work, and it nudges me to keep making progress, because other people know I'm working on something.

I am in the midst of writing a post about my current project and will post that soon. As always, I look forward to any comments you may have!

"Homage to Ellsworth Kelly II" on its bed, with cats (originally posted January 9, 2023)

And here's a photo of the quilt in its final home--I'm really pleased with how it looks, cats included!

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.