Terra Cognita - finita!

Finished - unless I decide to re-do the binding; I am trying to pass it off as an "organic" finish for this most organic of pieces, but in my heart I know it's just the worst job ever. This serves to demonstrate the eternal truth of the wisdom that says "never undertake any even moderately dicey sewing job when you are sick and not thinking well". Next time I will just live with my impatience and put the thing aside for a better day! But I like this little piece anyway - it speaks to me of land and earth and growing things, and certainly imperfection is the ultimate in organic growth!

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.

more hand-printed & dyed cloth

Another piece from the same batch of experiments. This one is monoprinted over hand-dyed muslin, then printed with my own hand-carved stamps. I like this piece a lot; it seems much more useable than some of my more far-fetched pieces (which of course I can't show you right now because of the previously-mentioned computer issues).

Prayer Flags - from my daughter's wedding

When my daughter Liddy & her husband Chris got married in 2004, I and my mom & my other daughter Molly - Liddy's twin) made dozens of what I thought of as "prayer flags" - like the brightly-colored Tibetan Buddhist flags that carry prayers of thankfulness on the winds to the Buddha - to surround them with the love and blessings of all of us who love them so dearly as they walked into this next stage of their life.

The wedding was held outdoors, under the long covered pavilions of our local Farmers Market. No, silly, it was in the evening; all the local cabbages and brussel sprouts and apple vendors had gone home. It was magical - we transformed the space with hundreds of candles and Chinese lanterns and locally grown (from Market vendors) fall flowers, all in the marigold colors that they had chosen, and handmade tablecloths, and the whole scene just glowed with home-made love and celebration. Not to mention Hippie Chic! I strung dozens of these flags, all carrying messages of love and hope and blessing, some meaningful, some rich with quotations from the songs that surrounded Liddy as she grew up, some just plain goofy, all along the sides of the pavilion, with the intent of surrounding them with all the love that followed them in their journey.

So...it was all very beautiful and meaningful, but after the wedding most of the flags got packed away in my basement studio, and of course in all the excitement of the wedding I knew they hadn't really had much of a chance to take them all in. This past Christmas, I finally got around to doing something that had been on my mind all along: I joined 4 of them together, added just enough more embellishments to make it seem united, and added hand & machine quilting in a beautiful copper metallic thread (it doesn't show up that well in the pic, but ooo-la-la baby!), beading, and a few doodads here & there, and gave it to them to put up in their place in Philly. I hope that every time they see it, they will remember how much love they are cradled in - and also that some of the thoughts of love that are expressed in it will help to remind them where they started through those married-life days when the troubles sometimes make you wonder "what was I thinking?" You know what I'm talking about!

So that's what this funky thing is. The picture in the upper left corner is a little painting Chris made for Liddy on their first Valentine's Day together, and they used it as their wedding invitation. Doesn't that kinda melt your heart?

Little Art Quilt

Here's a little art quilt I made for my mother for Christmas this year - I'm quite infatuated with it, actually. The background fabric is my very-first-ever venture (well, my first intentional one, anyway, not counting various bleach spots on favorite jeans over the years!) into discharging; I think it was discharged using Palmolive dishwasher gel, painted along the fold lines of the fabric. Or maybe Soft-Scrub with bleach, or possibly a Clorox bleach pen - anyway, you get the idea - not anything too high-tech or artsy! The circles are Dupioni silk, fused to the cotton background. The little piles of squares & rectangles are watercolor paper, variously painted & stamped & ripened in the box where I throw all those things for future use; they have a beautiful metallic sheen, and are very lovely, if I do say so myself. They're secured to the background by some of my handmade paper beads, which are also very special. (Well, at least my mother and I think so...) Then came both machine & hand-quilting, done in gold Kreinik thread, and various random beadings.

Too bad I don't have something more profound to say about it. It just started out as a little sampler, to see how Thing This combined with Thing That. As it evolved, I kept thinking of how my mother is always telling me to "just hang it on the wall and call it art", so that's where it ended up!

Now Here's a Funky Old Thing...

In 1969, back in the Glory Days of all things hippie, I first decided to try my hand at batik-making. I was swept off my feet by the beauty and diversity of the "new" (well, maybe to this 16-yr. old American girl!) fabrics I was seeing - the Indonesian batiks, the tie-dyes, the exotic block prints and embroideries and sheisha mirrors, even the dreaded macrame. Of course I had to try them all! I'll spare you the results of my first adventures in tie-dye; suffice it to say that there was a lot of excited activity involving Rit dye, rubber bands, and white cotton Carters' Spanky Pants around the ol' kitchen stove...

Not too thrilled with the washed-out colors of those experiments, I moved on to trying my hand at batik - and this was my first attempt. As an impulsive and impatient young girl, I lacked most of the requisite supplies for making true batik - no beeswax, no tjantjing or tjap, and above all no patience for the complicated process of layers and resists and repeated ironing-out of wax from fabric. What I did have was good old Crayola crayons, paraffin, an electric skillet, Schaeffers Permanent Black ink, and one of my father's white cotton handkerchiefs, snitched from the laundry basket. Voila -"batik", American-teenaged girl style, 1969!

The piece lingered on my dorm-room walls for awhile, and then sank from view, as such things do, until the inevitable churning of household detritus tossed it up unexpectedly when we moved to our new house last year. Who knew the silly thing was still around? It's not like it was ever, even when it was first created, anything important; it was just my early doodlings with wax, color, and crackle, a Sunday afternoon experiment the summer before I started college. But still (or again), when it came to light again after nearly 40 years, it struck me as playful and spirited and worthy of a space on the wall, and I just stuck it right up there, in a public part of the house, for all to see.

Sophisticated art? Hardly! "Art" at all? Who cares? But there is something in it of spirit and fun, and of a part of myself that I am happy to be reminded of every time I see it. So maybe now I know how to batik and dye and block print and embroider and quilt the "right" way - but I still remember how utterly thrilling it was to lay down these colors of melted crayons on my Dad's stolen handkerchief: the suspense of waiting for the wax to chill in the freezer so I could crackle it up & give it its final wash of black ink, the pure burst of surprise in my heart when I saw how those black lines just made the colors pop right out - that joy was as honest & real as any I've gotten from any more mature, sophisticated, technically-correct creations since then.

And I don't want to forget it!

Matthew's 30th birthday

Wish I could remember to take decent pictures of the things I make before I give them away! This is my son Matthew, celebrating his 30th birthday, in Maine; he's holding the little quilt hanging (which you can't see very well - the best part is below the frame of the picture) I made for him. I know, pretty girlish present, huh? Anyway, the little quilt was made entirely (well, except for the black) of my own hand-dyed & printed fabrics; below the frame of this photo are the beaded-bead embellishments and the tiny "liberated" log cabin squares. The label on the back is a fabric-printed old photo of me holding him at about a month or so old, as well as some more piecing of my hand-dyed fabrics.

The point of making this piece was to force myself to begin cutting into my own dyed, painted, & printed fabrics and using them as if they were "normal" (commercial) fabrics. A small start, and a nerve-wracking one, but at least I did it, instead of just hoarding up my "special" pieces and admiring them as cloth. More to come!

Wild Birds Art Quilt

Wild Birds Art Quilt

This small art quilt was inspired by lyrics to a song by Jan Harmon; I sing a lot of folk music with my similarly-inclined friends, and this was a song I have always loved, especially when sung by my dear friend Jo Houghton. The chorus, part of which is the words on the front of the quilt, is:

"They're all dressed up in feathers with colors outrageous,

They soar from this earthly-bound kingdom of cages

On delicate wings, so small and courageous,

Thank heaven for wild birds."

I started it last fall, when the rich autumn golds and oranges and purples were all around me. I used my own hand-dyed fabrics, commercial fabrics, rubber stamps on painted watercolor paper (the birds) and fabric (the lettering), and beads. Instead of using the more traditional batting, I fused front & back on to Fast-2-Fuse (a stiff, heavy fusibile Timtex, the stuff the bills of ball caps are made with); this allowed the machine quilting to be purely decorative & free of the necessity to hold all the layers together evenly.

I admit it - I did get carried away a bit on the back! The frame around the "label" portion is a digital copy of a paper-and-scissors collage frame that I made 3 years ago as part of my daughter's wedding quilt - I'm quite fond of it, apparently.

Sadly, it was not accepted into this year's Small Art Quilts show at Main Street Gallery in Groton, NY. This was my first submission to a juried show, though, so I'm not too discouraged. And who knows, it may be accepted into another show - or I may just hang it in my living room, where I can see it every day!