For my brother John

It's way too easy to forget that the menfolk deserve to be honored with the work of our creative hands and minds; I rarely find myself thinking, as I'm making a quilt or other fabric piece, "Oh, my brother (or father, husband, son, etc.) would love to have a bright, festive, handmade objet d'art , made just for him, by me, with love in every stitch!" I don't think I'm much of a sexist, but I usually think more along the lines of something useful as a gift for the menfolk, with a function beyond mere visual delight or - god forbid! - sentimental value. I guess a part of me places both fabric and sentiment squarely in the realm of women - wrong again, I know...

But here it is, a small art quilt made just for my brother. (A very badly photographed one, in this case - you gotta trust me, this baby is rich and beautiful in the flesh!) The photo transfer in the center is an old B&W shot of me, the big sister on the left, and my little brother John, the dazed-looking little guy in the muddy snowsuit. Probably around 1957 or so. I remember the day this was taken, and I can still feel the weight of responsibility that settled like that navy-and-white houndstooth checked scarf over my head as I was "in charge" of my dopey little brother, probably for all of 5 minutes or so while my mother wrestled the stroller in or out of the front hall. I can still smell the faintly animal must of wet wool snowpants as they dried later, draped over the radiator, and taste the icy slush I sucked from my wet woollen mittens. Remember that chapped red ring you'd get around your wrist, where no matter how well mittened and cuffed you were when your mother wrapped you up & sent you out to play the cold snow would seep in anyway? Clearly, I grew up long before the days of polarfleece, goretex, or moisture-wicking long-johns! Our snow gear was wool, our boots were rubber, our underlayers were cotton, our skin was inevitably cold and wet and chapped, and we didn't care a hoot - we assumed that playing in the snow was fun, and so it was!

I hope John won't be offended by the rather saggy, droopy depiction of him in this photo - it wasn't his fault that his baby-green snowsuit (hand-me-down, of course) was filthy - he was still at the wallowing on the belly stage of life. Hell, I had probably dragged him up & down the patchy front yard on his stomach and told him it was a special treat - I was just that kind of big sister!

I love this picture, because to me it captures something true and touching about our childhood. This little quilt is embellished all over its surface with bright metallic threads, stitching, and beads, but none of that shows up well. Much of the fabric is my own hand-dyed and -printed cloth, which I am trying to learn to actually cut up and use in my work, instead of just hoarding it in ever-more-glorious heaps and piles. I hope that John will like it, because I dearly love him, even though we like to pretend we're all gown up now. (Well, in the reality of my family, we don't actually try too hard to be grown-ups - and we're all the happier for it.) I will give it to him this weekend, when "all of us" - me, my sister, and brother, and my parents - will gather to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday. Which is a whole 'nother blog posting, one I will no doubt be too lazy to write.

Liberated Log Cabin

And here's another one I'm working on - Liberated Log Cabin, per Gwen Marston's method. I think this will be a pillowtop; I added a 2" solid dark purple/blue border all around, to rein it in a little, and now am busy procrastinating on the part I don't like, all that business with getting it backed and finished, with enough overlap so that it doesn't come busting out of the velcro or buttons or whatever. Simple, huh? But I've come to really dislike the "drudge" part of making quilts!

Making pieces like this one and the previously-posted one is, I'm sad to report, how I "clean up" my sewing space, which is why these two pieces have so many of the same fabrics in them. They come about by a combination of serendipity and an obsessive-compulsive-like fervor to use up ever-smaller bits of fabrics. I wander into my sewing room and see the exciting heaps of scraps, and before I know it I find that I'm sitting at the machine and "just sewing these little bits up to clear off my work area". Hours or days later, I emerge from the mess with a bunch of crazy looking blocks and strips and chunks, and an even-smaller pile of tiny scrips and scraps. Usually, I just put the newly-pieced creations away in what I like to rather grandly think of as my "Parts Department" (a la Gwen Marston & Freddy Moran), rarely to see the light of day again. But, like all true fabric nuts, it makes me feel happy to know they're there, a resource safely stashed away just waiting to be used some day when I "need" them - like what, the day I run out of fabric??? Not bloody likely, at least barring a major act-of-God-proportioned disaster, in which case the loss of my fabric supply will be the least of my problems!

"Are There Hummingbird Gardens in Gee's Bend?"

So here's a very rough shot of what I've been working on this week, unfinished and still up on the design wall. Its working title: "Are There Hummingbird Gardens in Gee's Bend?", because the colors and general wild, bright layout are inspired by my own hummingbird garden here outside of Ithaca, NY, and because it is done in a very spontaneous and not-straight-line manner of construction. A little not-too-straight cut with scissors here, a little curved line piecing there, a little Nancy Crow meets the quilters of Gee's Bend meets Gwen Marston.

It's not that easy, when your mother has spent your whole lifetime training you in the skills of precision and exacting measuring and cutting, to force yourself to throw off those careful habits and sew things crooked on purpose! And by no account would I claim to have mastered the free-piecing skills of the Gee's Bend and other traditional African-American quilters, but I'm trying.

Matthew and Naomi's Wedding Chuppah

First, the Disclaimer: the color in this picture seems, at least on my monitor, a little off - the border, for instance, looks turquoise on my screen, but it's not, it's more a deep medium blue. Other colors are similarly skewed in the direction of too much yellow. I don't know how to correct it, or I would.

It's been a long time in the making, but Matthew & Naomi's chuppah is finally ready! (Good thing, too, since the wedding is next Sunday, June 14!) As I look at this simple photo of it, it really doesn't look like that big a deal, but what this chuppah really is is a physical repository of all the love and dearly-felt good wishes I hold for Matthew and his bride: it holds the slightly bewildered amazement of a mother that her firstborn child, that glowing round-cheeked baby boy, has grown into this lean, sensitive, funny, creative, brilliant man who has the wisdom to choose for his wife a woman that seems like his perfect counterpart. It is made "with love in every stitch", as we always say in my family, with deep, dear love in every stitch and brushstroke and bead and dye-swath, and with hope and joy, and even with some stabs of pain at other loves that didn't turn out the way I'd planned. This childish assemblage of silk and paint and thread and beads holds it all, as well as my hopes for a future as filled with joy and abiding love as any soul dares to aspire to. No limits: no limits on my love for my son as he has been since the moment I was gifted with him, and no limits on my wishes that he and his beautiful Naomi will make a strong and happy future together. Past, present, future - it's all in there.

OK, enough sap - now for the details. Including the border (which is cropped in this photo), the finished size is around 58" x 76", more or less. The fabric is silk on the face you see here, and cotton on the back. The background (earth, water, sky, and golden sun) is hand-painted with (mostly) Setacolor transparent fabric paint, with occasional touches of shimmer (all right, it's glitter, but don't tell the bride & groom that!). The entire process of painting on silk was new to me, and I spent a lot of time practicing and testing and generally fiddling around, with the result that now I have a big pile of painted silk to cut up and play with in the future and a whole lot of new methods in my arsenal. The scribbly, sketchy grasses along the water and at the base of the tree were added with permanent fabric markers and I think there's a bit of Shiva paintstick in there too. It's hard to see in this picture, but the water has waves done with paintsicks and rubbing plates. And, trust me on this, the whole thing is much more beautiful in person - I'm not just saying that because I made it, but because the luster and play of light on the silk just doesn't carry through very well in pictures. The border is hand-dyed as well, of the same silk/cottonj fabric. I haven't yet attached the beautiful "tzitsit", the fringes that observant Jews have on the corners of their prayer shawls (tallit); they are made, in this case of a very soft ribbon-type yarn, by tying and winding the yarns prescribed number of times in a specific sequence. Often the groom's or an honored relative's tallit has been used as the chuppah or wedding canopy, and my addition of the tzitsit is to honor that tradition.

Inside the "circle of the sun" (a reference, by the way, to a song that my folk-singing friends and I have been trotting out at every birthday and wedding and change of season and any other occasion, momentous or not, for most of my children's lives -Matthew "gets it") stands a Tree of Life, laden with shimmering leaves and fruits. 18 fruits, to be exact (well, if you count each bunch of cherries as 1 fruit), because 18 is an important and lucky number to most Jewish people, including the bride. The leaves & fruits are cut from all different bits of silk & cotton, many of them my own handpainted & printed & stamped fabrics; they are fused with MistyFuse (as is the tree itself), and then hand-embroidered and embellished in whatever ways the spirit moved me or necessity dictated. I tried not to get too carried away in my addition of small beads - as much because I figured the chuppah didn't need any extra weight pulling it earthwards as for artistic reasons.

The Tree has 6 strong roots, as Matthew & Naomi have 6 strong and loving parents (Matthew has 2 "bonus parents", that lucky boy!) Just like life, just like their marriage will, the Tree bears many and varied wonderful fruits - their future children, the work they produce together, their many creative endeavours, the joy they generate, the offspring of their minds and spirits and bodies, are there in those crazy-looking fruits. Along the water's edge on the left-hand side is some Hebrew script, a quote from Proverbs3:18; it says "It shall be a tree of life to those who hold fast to it, and all who uphold it are happy".

About that Hebrew script: I don't know Hebrew. Hell, I'm not even Jewish! Naomi chose the verse, which is lovely. After a whole lot of internet navigation, I managed to find & order a set of Hebrew alphabet rubber stamps. Just the letters, not a stamp with the words all put together. Got a copy of the Hebrew text (actually, many variations & varieties of the Hebrew text...) Spent many long hours making sure that I selected the right character for each letter, hoping that the final outcome would not end up saying something like "It shall be a pillow of bacon that blows a blue balloon to the jug of vinegar" or anything nonsensical like that - I really hope I did get it right! Check in with me next week to see if I managed to offend anybody! I had great help with this over the phone from my friend Debra, who is Jewish & has recently had 2 kids in Hebrew school; we went over it letter by letter, so I'm fairly confident, but I'd be lying if I said I was 100% sure about it!

To support the canopy, the couple will be using strong wooden poles and weighted bases made by Naomi's grandfather. Both her grandfather and her father enjoyed working with wood, and so the Tree of Life motif seems to suit this wedding well. I feel very proud that my son has chosen so wisely. I am a realist in the sometimes-grubby world of marriage and relationships, but I feel that these two have a far better chance than average of making a long & happy life together - I certainly wish it for them with all my heart, and there's not much more I can do for them than that. And if all else fails, I'm pretty confident that I've managed to impart to my son a sense of the great adventure that life is, with whatever it brings us. Above all, I hope he and my daughters will always know that they have always been and will always be loved beyond all my powers of expression, that their presence in my life has been a gift of pure, undeserved radiance to me; I hope they know that. Beyond that, their lives are their own - they are grown now, and it's up to them to trample out their own pathways!

Bamboo and the Deep Blue Sea

More Playing with Paint. A very ugly bit of pink & purple cotton that resulted from an earlier experiment with scrunch dyeing, stencilled over with Shiva paintsicks. Still ugly.

The blue and green fabric is silk, painted and manipulated into folds while still wet, then sprinkled with coarse salt. I've never had much luck dyeing with salt, but this is almost OK. It has a wonderful feel, since it's a very luxurious 11.9 mme silk charmeuse. I'm really getting hooked on working with silk! But what to DO with it, once I've dyed & painted and stamped and stencilled my little heart out on it - I still hate sewing with its squirmy, slithery self!

Pomegranates and Pistachios - a Visual Feast?

Here are 2 little bits from my Playing With Paint class (Quilt U, Lyric Kinard). The assignment was printing with fruits & vegetables, so I dutifully made a nice vegetable soup and carefully saved various stumps & interesting little pieces and set them aside to dry. Next day, they're nowhere to be found - my dear sainted husband had foolishly considered them compost, and off they went to enrich my garden. Hmmmm, there's a song in there somewhere - no, wait, it's already been done, perhaps by Pete Seeger...And I know, I know, how much complaining can you do when the man is tidying up the kitchen, eh?

Anyway, not being in the mood to embark on any further cooking when I was in printing mode (what, again with the dinner? I don't think so!), I was left with a dried out old pomegranate and some pistachio shells to print with. The base fabric is some previously hand-dyed cotton that was loitering around in the vicinity of my desk. I used at least 2 closely-related colors to print with, one of them a "shimmer", but you can't see that in these pictures. The purple "smudges" in the green piece are very fine prints of a shell I found in the Bahamas - they show up very well in person; I guess this is a crappy low-res scan. Also better in the flesh: the repeated but barely visible print suggesting wild grasses that I mad a long time ago by glueing some leftover slivers of fun foam on a piece of box cardboard.

And then, because everything looks better with a little sparkle, I whisked a little "shimmering pearl" and/or some very diluted metallic gold hither and yon over the whole thing.

I have to admit to loving the little pistachio shell prints - so clean, so shapely, so available, so free of any preparation other than eating them! I predict that they will be making future appreances in my work. And I learned something useful about pomegranates, too: even when they appear to be all dried up past edibility, the seeds inside remain juicy and fully, edibly, tasty. Handy to know, huh?

More Playing With Paint

Or "Evolution of a Colonoscopy"... after I ironed out this piece of scrunched & painted silk , I noticed that it looked like, well, something best not seen outside of a gastroenterologist's office. So I tarted it up with Shiva Paintstick rubbings over a couple of my hand-carved rubber stamps and a little piece if plastic needlepoint mesh that was lying around. Because it is silk, it has a nice flow and drape. Still don't know if I like it, but it's growing on me.