Monthly Archives: February 2009

February brings more light

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a birthday cupcake for friend in Maine

pin cushion

February also brings lots of birthdays — mine, B’s, Elizabeth’s, Lisa’s.  I made this sweet pin cushion for my bow-tie-making friend Lisa Eaton.  She will appreciate how well it takes a pin.  (This project comes from a great book by Betz White).  The light coming from the skylight above makes the cupcake look like it’s glowing!!

This morning found me making lunch for B, whose birthday is today.  We had peppers stuffed with curried, mashed potatoes (from an old Bon Appetit)… oh, were they delicious!  I have decided that the best cure for living with picky eaters (boys, not Ken), is to cook for friends who will “ooh” and “aah” and inquire about ingredients!

If only fixing the finances had as easy a repair!  Today my head spins with ideas of selling the house, renting out the house, moving to North Dakota (not really, more like Natick or Waltham)…

This is one reason I go to the inspiring blog, High Desert Home .  To read Susan L’s reflections on how to stay centered, sane, and grateful while leading a simple life is a  much-needed tonic to my misery-grubbing.  Having said that, it is also worth considering how removing myself from a pocket of affluence (Newton, Massachusetts) might make feeling gratitude for my simple life a little easier.  I probably would feel like an alien just about anywhere (this, I know).  Nevertheless, would I feel less like a Have Not if I lived amongst others who mow their own lawns, do their own taxes, clean their own homes, rake their own yards…. among families who drive a single car for batches of years, who don’t go on vacations for batches of months (and in our case, years) and who worry about how they are going to pay for college?   Such a shared perspective might not ease the financial worries, but it would certainly render me more visible, which I suspect would feel better.

Here is this week’s Journal Quilt, up close.  It was one of the three sketch quilts from an earlier post.

gourd-and-rodents

I suppose this small piece can’t qualify as a  ‘spring’ quilt on account of the full grown gourds, but it was made with the season of spring in mind.  The checkered polyester that I used for the bottom has always reminded me of tilled fields.

gourd-l-corner

The background is an opened light bulb box — a reference to the lengthening days.  When I assembled the Chinese flashcard with the ink-jet printed transparencies, I though the black shapes were seeds (again: ‘spring’).  Turns out, though, they are rats or mice!  I like the way artistic choices can surprise you.  Who am I to deem rats or mice ‘undesirable’ or ‘unspringlike’?  I ended up feeling that the presence of rats with fall gourds in a quilt about spring summed things up better than my intentional mind could have managed (maybe I’ll know how, tomorrow).  I cut up a piece of fabric that I had printed a collage on and placed a few pieces on the quilt.  The one shown below includes a sliver of an old astrological map of the sky.

gourd-and-rodents-up-rt

Lastly, I was thrilled to discover that stitching a bent piece of pipe cleaner to the back of a quilt made with a stiff upholstery fabric makes it wall-ready!

pipe-cleaner-hook

Here’s the whole quilt (roughly 8′ x 12″):

Journal Quilt Feb 22, 2009

Journal Quilt Feb 22, 2009

Blog through the fog?

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Three small pieces

Three small pieces

Last week found me sick, distracted, and stuck, and so I did not post.  It wasn’t that I didn’t have time, with the kids home and all, it was that I couldn’t stand to hear myself.  Today my need to show up outweighs the need to feel presentable (and I DO feel better!).

These three ‘sketch’ quilts were made over the last two weeks.  The Journal Quilt on the far right did not start out as a house, but once I put the windows on there was no going back.

Journal Quilt Feb 15, 09

Journal Quilt Feb 15, 09

The thing I like most about this quilt is not the final result, but the way the cotton batting took the needle as I hand-quilted the background.  So often, I am quilting through four, five, six layers of fabric, one of which is drapery weight, with poly batting (almost necessitating pliers!), so I want to remember how smooth and easy this was for future projects.  Also, I dyed the muslin in coffee and the aged look is nice.  The house I can take or leave, mostly leave.  Perhaps the slumping roof expresses the time of year and the wish to get out of town while staying home.   For future projects, I also want to explore using that silk of the roof for ‘drawing’ a fish — I can just make out the beginnings of a large Pacific salmon in a leaping arc there.

I seem unable, however, to generate any polar bear that I can stand to incorporate into the kitchen table quilt.  The bottom is nearly done, and the top, still waiting.  I experimented, unsuccessfully, with printing onto lutrador, and also tried using oil pastels on fabric.

kitchen-table-feb-21

bottom-big-quilt

If I am going to include this in the quilts that will be showing at the Arsenal Center for the Arts starting Friday, I’ve got to hustle.  Or jettison the idea of a polar bear altogether!

Here’s where I’ve been having some fun:

many-buttons

Gratitude List #3

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salt-and-butter

I am grateful for:
being loved, homefries, change, longer days,
bright winter sun, menopause, smart kids,
heated car seats, chocolate,
surprise ice cream cakes, guild meetings, KenKen puzzles,
jeans that still fit, birthday presents, fire balls,
being healthy, the full moon,
dental insurance, Craig Ferguson, sharp scissors,
not having aging parents to care for,
a dog who is devoted to me, the powers of speech,
the power to revise, forgiveness,
American Idol (with fast forward), and
bath salts!

Obey

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Journal Quilt Week 6

Journal Quilt Week 6

This week’s quilt was meant to be inspired by a trip to Boston’s ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) in a manner other than it was.  We had to pull teeth to get our two teenage boys to go see Shepard Fairey.  I thought the fact that the artist had been arrested in Boston on Friday, that his work could be found on city streets and the bottom of skateboards, that his motto, “question everything” informed most of his images, would hold some appeal.  Not so.

I started with the idea of using Photoshop Elements to pair words of my kids’ resistance with a photo that revealed some of their exuberance at actually being there.   I was going to print that on fabric, stitch it to another piece of fabric with wild, angry slash quilting, and be done with it.

harbor side of the ICA

harbor side of the ICA

But, in keeping with a prolonged and now excruciating run of malfunctions, the printer ate the fabric and then died.  The top four or so inches printed before the fabric jammed, and those words and ink smears made their way into the finished piece.  I cut out newspaper letters to spell “obey” — a reference to the artist’s “Obey Giant” series — which, of course, ironically also refers to our family conflict.

Because I forgot to look at last week’s quilt for a “carry over” fabric, the carry over is paper.

obey-top

In the end, I like this quilt much, much better than the original idea, which means I am grateful to the printer’s malfunction.  What I hope I can do now is to translate that to our family.  If our outing yesterday was the printer jamming, then the way we relate to each other in the coming week would correlate to the improved, more interesting quilt.

obey-with-curse

And I’ll say it here for the record (look again at the spade-like leaves occupying near center of the quilt), the energy and intelligence that goes into rebelling are good things.  Something Shepard Fairey knows for sure.

Sewing paper, swimming bears

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polar-bear-full

Journal Quilt Week 5 (18" x 24")

For the first time since starting these journal quilts, Sunday morning arrived without my having so much as having picked a background fabric.  I knew I wanted to depict a polar bear, but that was it.  Two weeks ago, sitting with two other artists in a fledgling crit group (yeah!!), a painter asked another quilter in the group, “Do you ever do studies before making a quilt?”  While I make variation upon variation, I’m not sure I’ve ever made a study.  I liked the idea.  So, given that the “hot” part of the large global warming piece that is all over my kitchen table is resisting attachment to the  “cold” part — study was definitely in order!

animal-picture-polar-bear-swimming2-ucumari-animalpicture

"Willy" by ucumari

On Saturday, I did a google image search, gathering a handful of pictures of bears swimming, and fell in love with the above photo by ucumari (check out her great animal pictures on flickr!)

Sunday, I started the day flipping through a book of Rick Bartow‘s artwork — incredible pastels, ink drawings, and sculptures of animals — mythic and full of gesture.  Absolutely gorgeous work.  I was also remembering the stunning, muscular animals of the artist Nancy Erickson, who works on fabric and paper.  (I looked at her website today and found that one of her polar bear quilts is titled the very title I was considering for my kitchen-table-piece — and that is,  “Where’s the Ice?”)  Anyway, their combined artistry inspired me to render my polar bear with pastels, rather than fabric.  Since I am out of sheets of fabric to feed through my inkjet printer and since the deadline was rapidly approaching, I stitched the paper right on the quilt.

bear-with-bubbles

Now, I have stitched a lot of paper — for cards, in particular — but never for the central image of a  mid-sized quilt.  It was exciting and freeing, and justified the whole discipline of doing these journal quilts, I think, but I wonder at the durability of it.  Even though these pieces are meant to be finished by Sunday, I plan to bind this one, and also to trim some of the pointy edges of the paper.bear-constellation

I stitched a bear constellation in the sky, using the leftover Heat n’ Bond paper from my earlier bear journal quilt as a guide on the wrong side of the quilt top, right against the batting.  It was a good idea, but I would like this quilt better without it.

I am encouraged by this piece.  It suggests a direction that might satisfy my need to work faster.

Speaking of stitching on paper, here is a flashcard I made awhile back.  It is too big to be an official ACEO (Art Cards, Editions and Originals – must be 3.5″ x 2.5″, the size of a trading card), but could be a collectible nevertheless.  I think I’ll offer it for sale in my etsy shop.

find-that-peacefind-that-back

The front is a photoshopped digital image of a small Buddha statue which might have become a holiday card if I was someone who got it together enough to send holiday cards.  I like the fact that there are two sides.  The very emphatic directive to “find that peace” seems like a pretty apt suggestion from the Buddha!