I’ve never understood people who worry about unfinished work. I treasure my unfinished quilts because they are springboards to more new quilts, just waiting for their time.
I learned a while back that it was easier to set the machines for one process and work a number of pieces at a time. It seems a bit scattered, but it works for me. I spent yesterday working on 8 quilts at once.
It makes sense to do all your dyeing at one time. It also works to do oil rubbed fabric in batches. I could do one at a time, but the mess is prodigious for both of those. Here’s the rubbed pieces of fabric I used for my quilt batch today.
Once I started straight stitching with metallic, some quilts needed more. Some need couching, some need extra flowers, some needed either applique or embroidered applique. So I line them up by the techniques involved. Then I set my machine for the next process and do them all at once.
It creates a lot of work in a hurry. Which is good right now because I’ve sold a number of small quilts over the sale, and am going to add these to the sale as soon as they’re done.
So, no guilt! Unfinished quilts are invitations to new work. And they finish quicker if you do each process at a time.
I find myself taking things in batches. Each quilt gets exactly what it needs. But I can work smoother and quicker by taking them in batches and working one process at a time, not just one quilt.
It’s the words no one wants to hear. Yes, if it’s stopped changing stitches, the board is probably going out soon. Gasp. No. It’s my machine!
Lots of desperation here. I do have backups, but they are not meant as major machines and they won’t back me up long.
My dear friend Elaine always knew when I called her at 7am, that I’d trashed my machine again. I’d call to ask if I could borrow hers. She’d thank me for having waited until 7, That bad.
I may be retired, but I’ve sewn and quilted all my life and probably will until they dig the final hole. I need a new machine.
But the other difference when you’re retired is that the easy money is much harder to find. So I’ve put all my quilts on a 40 % sale. I have a number of great new works at every price range. And I’m willing to let them go to make sure I can get a new machine. The sale will be on until September 21.
If you’ve been wanting a quilt of mine, this is the best time! The prices won’t go lower, because they really can’t. And I have some fabulous new work.
842 Hosta Moon
866 Arabesque Rose
IF you are new to my work, please take some time to see what I’ve made. I feel each quilt is a separate world of it’s own, there to warm you from your wall, visually.
Prices on the web page and on Etsy will show the full price and give you the discount in your cart.
This is another modified blog from almost ten years ago. It’s still an interesting story. And an interesting way to think about how we design our art.
It’ss almost impossible to talk about our art without talking about the art that comes before us. Before we talk about design, it’s worth saying that there are many different design aesthetics. It’s not that a design is good or bad necessarily. It’s designed to be part of the statement. The notions that fuel our art choices are a statement loud and clear past subject matter and past our technical handling of fabric and thread.
As quilters, a lot of us have backed into art by accident. We started with squares and one day found ourselves with an odd quilt that somehow was an art quilt. Maybe it had too much orange in it or you found yourself like me, embroidering frogs and bugs into the borders. There’s a tender soft spot in most quilter’s artistic persona. The part that said that you should have gone to art school or studied water color. So our first designs spring out of a personal view. Later, as we become more facile, we realize that the choices in design are a huge statement all their own.
My first artistic love was the impressionists. I grew up near Chicago, and there was a pilgrimage every year to the Art Institute. I strolled through the halls looking for paintings like old friends. Since they were my first real introduction to art, they felt bland to me. Safe. Something soft and soothing out of my childhood.You know it’s become mainstream when you see it on a birthday cake. This astonishing cake is by Megpi, a pastry chef in Silver Lake. California. You can see her work if you follow the link to Flickr.
impressionist cake, a photo by megpi on Flickr Since you can buy Van Gogh’s work on umbrellas and coffee cups, it’s easy to miss the point that he was a raving revolutionary in his time. His work nauseated the current critics, got him hospitalized, was refused for all the important salon shows, and the subject of ridicule in the press. Time and familiarity have made him a lionized artist, but that was not who he was when he began.
I was immediately in love when I discovered Japanese prints. It was a while before I realized why. The Impressionists took much of their new artistic vision from the prints out of Japan. The first prints that came out of Japan hugely influenced them as beginning artists.
In contrast, this is a painting called Nocturne from around 1825 by Turner. Turner would have represented the design aesthetics from the early 19th century, that Van Gogh and the other impressionists and Post Expressionists blew out of the water.
Early 19th Century Western art was about permanence. It honored stability. It was a world of people in their proper places, forever and ever. It used Greek and Roman scenes and portraits of nobility as an way of saying we had an eternal understanding of a changeless world.
Japanese art was about the moment. It moved. It created a path for the eye to follow. It went off the page. The impressionists saw it, fell in love with the concept and incorporated it into the designing of their art. The movement is called Japanisme. It was in my humble opinion, the beginning of modern art. And changed us all.
Myself, I cherish movement. I plot my quilts to travel from one side to another, taking the eye on a journey across the surface. The visual path and vertical path quilts I’ve been exploring are all about the traveling eye.
The decisions behind design are the most telling. Without a word they say so much about what we create, what we find important, and what we value. The way we structure our art is at least half the story we have to tell.
This is a reblog from around ten years ago, but I still think it holds true. How do we gather the courage to do art? And the courage to show it and let it into our lives like a strange wild cat? T
I’ve been teaching now for almost 30 years, so it’s not uncommon to find people who’d had class with me teaching, writing, creating amazing art and winning awards. Students in the quilt world are not like students in other places. They’re often experts in their own right. They’re there in class to pick your brain, but they’ve already got amazing skills. So it’s not like that student owes you very much. They’re another traveler, perhaps out ahead, perhaps a step or two behind. But you’ve showed them a cool trick or two and they may well have showed you as well. It’s more like meeting a pilgrim on a similar path.
I used to give everyone three scraps of fabric: A red badge of courage, a green lunatic fringe and a purple heart, because if you’re doing brave things, of course they’re shooting at you. At some point, in the four thousand things that have to get done before class, I stopped.
I also always used to wear a badge. At one point someone gave me the most wonderful bug pin. I put it on my badge and it was part of it. At another point, I lost it. No one seemed to miss it. My old student asked me if I was still giving badges. I think I had him in class 15 years ago. It still mattered to him.
Every so often, someone would stop me and tell me they lost their badge. I gave them explicit permission to make another for yourself or for someone else.
Perhaps the badges need to come back. Am I as brave as I need to be? Are my students? Are any of us?
The wizard of oz behind the curtain
A sacrament is an outside sign of an inward grace. A symbol can be one too. Can an ordinary person can stand behind a curtain, make a great deal of noise and convince people to be brave and have a heart simply by giving them one? Yes, perhaps. Symbols do work
Should I start making badges again? Do we need the lunatic fringe rampant? Would you stand in the lunatic fringe?
10 years later, I’m no longer teaching. But I am struggling for my own courage, my own celebration of my wounds, and my understanding that of course I’m out in the fringe. I ask you how you hold your courage to create? What badge, pledge or thought holds you straight and strong at your art? And if I made you a badge at some time, would you let me know if it worked?
For fun I was looking at some old posts of mine. I found this fun and wanted to share it with you.
I am a redirected Drama Queen, Daughter of a Drama Queen Delux. My mother was not a happy girl until she had a drama 10 feet high and too wide to get through the door. It was all about telling stories.
Now Margaret Eddy was the queen of all stories. And a serious fan of silly. She told amazing whoppers, one-liners, true tales spun into gold from straw, hopeless lies and astonishing steaming piles. She loved her drama. She had a somewhat loose relationship to truth. She was a devastating school teacher, because much of that could indeed come out in a teacher conference meeting or a family reunion. But she had a special gift for looking within and without. First she’s build you a verbal image of herself as she felt about the story. But then she’d draw you into an outer view, where you could see her spinning in what she knew was a silly situation, build for howling laughter.
It happens to me in my quilts. I’m quilting along and I realize that this silly thing I’ve drafted is someone I know. Or worse, me. There with all my rather small fears and desires. I’m not overly deep. I’m just noisy. At that point, it seems just to the point to let it be silly. I am. It is. And the world is better for it.
This quilt, The Orchid Olympics, wasn’t meant to be funny. It just happened. I’d found a great picture of a frog in an odd pose and worked with it. One afternoon in a class demo, I was placing it into the piece and trying to put a sun over his head. It wouldn’t go. It just wouldn’t go. Not over. Not to the side.
I looked again at the frog and thought, “If you get into that pose, it has to be for something like the Olympics. No one would willingly bend like that otherwise.” The sun fell into her hand like an award and there we were.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all. But I try never to tell a story on myself until I’ve found the funny part. Perhaps it helps to be short, round and have a pug nose. My gray hair also seems to give me an amnesty for silliness. And why not?
