Monthly Archives: March 2010

Cultivating Curiosity

4 Replies

Curiosity
14th century 1 : desire to know: a : inquisitive interest in others’ concerns b : interest leading to inquiry <intellectual curiosity

After the post about feeling like a jerk for being unorganized, I have decided to offer myself at least as much “inquisitive interest” in how I perform day-to-day as I would offer a work-in-progress.

In quilting, I really have learned to look at pieces with a certain amount of curiosity and detachment, because I understand that my subjective stance, at any given moment, might undergo radical revision as I move along.  Further, I recognize that detached curiosity can be key to discovering HOW to move forward — in quilting.

And, more along these lines, why is it that I can offer another blogger (with children, lamenting the interruptions), the sage advice that ‘interruptions add up to a life’, while feeling desperate in my neck of the woods, as my time gets meted out in one caretaking task after another?!

Carolyn Myss says ‘there are no unimportant jobs’.  If, for even a fraction of a day, I can act as if there are no unimportant jobs, will I feel more freedom?  You can sense what my answer would be here …

A Sufi I had the privilege of spending a summer with at a camp north of here, put it this way (we were cleaning the camp’s bathrooms at the time):  “You can find God cleaning the toilets.”  I don’t think I understood this at 17.  Or, even, why one might want to believe it.

So, forget my little post about being a jerk.  Doing the best I can here.  Might even learn to trust some of my hesitations.  Readers’ comments about the two-sided nature of selling through stores helped pop this into focus for me — thank you all.

I kept seeing the ecru silk in the little abstract (former angel) quilt as a snowy hillside.  It wasn’t long before the upright rectangle in the foreground was begging for a roof.  The moon uses a piece of organza on which I had printed a picture of the World Trade Towers  — a photo snapped in the brief expanse of time between impact and falling.  Smoke was pouring out of the upper stories, as we all remember.   As surely, none of us can forget.

Although this detail is nothing a viewer would be able to know without my telling them, I am telling YOU, dear reader, and so now I can further suggest, that this piece assumes its humble and obscure place in a chain of works about memory.  The little house here is tippy, but secure.  It will hold.  It has survived the winter.  The shadow of events from 9/11/2001, are THERE, but barely recognizable — a mere cast of grey on the edge of the moon.  We get through.

And, boy oh boy, is spring around the corner.  Perhaps that is all I needed to write this morning!

Deadlines and Being a Jerk

10 Replies

1. Haute Couture – Voici Paris!, 2. Upon this Ground I Walked 010, 3. black merz 2, 4. gelb merz, 5. Structural experiments ( Jane Austen), 6. Blue Swirls and Teal Twirls, 7. Rust, 8. comfort, 9. Destined, 10. ACEO 42, 11. . Over The Wall ., 12. . Autumn Story – The Liquid-Rust Ship ., 13. Rainbow Sun Wheel, 14. Uninterested, Portrait of a Boy, 15. February geranium leaf, 16. 5 ways to Spring, 17. 13 Moons (detail 6), 18. 13 Moons (detail 3), 19. so many dreams, 20. Poppyblossom

What are all those things I’ve said about self-acceptance and self-forgiveness?!!  Would somebody please remind me right about now?!

I am meeting with a shop owner tomorrow (TOMORROW).  She is coming here (HERE!!).  She says she won’t even notice any mess (oh, really?!).

I should have already sorted through my inventory with a critical eye, asking — Can I bear to make more of these?  Is this completely and totally a one-of-a-kind item (most of my stuff is), and if so, can I price it ‘wholesale’ and still live with what I’d make on the piece?

I was going to make a Kitchen Angel and finish a headless doll that I’m going to be proud of.

(To be fair, I ‘drew’ many faces for the doll and embroidered two, and none are right yet).

My first and only venture with shop selling was last year in a five-week holiday shop in Brookline.  It was a bust.  Some selling ventures are.  I accept that.  But here’s the thing, I spent TWO FULL MORNINGS preparing an inventory, working with the price tags (they were taking 40%, so I had to raise most of the prices at least a little), boxing my work and driving it there or picking it up.  That’s roughly 8 hours.  I sold six items (one small quilt, five pillows) and my take? $126.00.  That is about enough to cover the work of prepping for the event.  I forget what I paid to ‘enter’ my work into their jury.

That’s obviously not sustainable.  In that case, the  query, “Was it worth it?” was a resounding NO, even BEFORE I took into account labor and materials, which somehow or other, I OFTEN do not take into account (and that is just wrong).

So, while I’ve been busy with other things (lots of other things), and my ambivalence about the possible venture is getting in my way, I ought to have been further along than I am in prepping for this meeting.

So what am I doing sitting here? you ask.

Good question.  Bye!

Enjoy the mosaic!!!

Rusty Memory Collage

7 Replies

Found this collage recently. When I pulled out the pin that had been securing the organza to the bark paper, a streak of rust remained. I liked that — Rusty Memory.

For pieces like this, I get stalled at the finishing. Does it get framed? Do I add a thread for hanging so that no frame is necessary? Do I scan it and transfer it to fabric so that I can use is as cloth in a quilt?

‘Course, I could do all three of those things.

Now, what is the opposite of Rusty Memory?   I wasn’t consciously wrestling with this, but when I saw a photo from one of our recent sessions of deconditioning our Corgi of his camera terror, I thought — AH HA — the opposite of Rusty Memory is Conditioning —

memory so tightly embedded in the cells that they cause unwilled reactions to certain stimuli.

Good to ponder the two extremes.

Jack is such a reminder that we need to be gentle with all the things that scare us. We don’t know what happened to him in his first two years in Puerto Rico. We do know that he was NOT one of the large population of street dogs down there. He had been cared for and then abandoned, tied to a fence and left to starve. He weighed twenty (!!!) pounds less when we got him and his ears were infested with bugs.

Obviously, something having to do with flashes of light gave him a real fright. Perhaps it was just surviving a few lightening storms while unable to take any kind of cover. Most dogs HATE thunder and lightening. But sometimes I think it must have been something more awful — burned with a cigarette?!  (Because it seems even the red ON button of the camera terrifies him, as does the striking of a match).

We’ll never know. So in that sense, the rusty memory and the conditioning overlap… just as they might in a trauma survivor who uses amnesia to block out the memories.  So here is an instance where polar opposites can and frequently do, overlap.  A spectrum that circles ’round on itself.

Chop chop, Fizz Fizz, Oh What a Relief it is!

12 Replies

A little ruthlessness can go a long way, particularly with little pieces that seem to be going nowhere.  This chunk was the bottom of a piece roughly four times as big.  It started as pure abstraction.  It started as another lap-size piece that would accommodate my need to work upstairs, without my machine.  It was a continuation of a new-found love of handquilting with buttery layers.

I then thought I saw a figure in the shapes and started to turn the blue shape into the dress  of an angel (the little green tip of embroidery, upper right, was a foot).  I kept stitching, kept adding thread and time, and the result was getting further and further away from anything that I could stand to look at.

At first I was going to chuck it.  Something I plan to do more of in the future.  Just chuck it.

But then I cut it up and now I have some pieces that I want to play with.  I have a drawer full of cut-up-quilt chunks.  The new thing here is — What if I created something specifically for cutting up (as opposed to cutting up rejects, only?)  We shall see.  We shall see.

I also cut up a piece that had used a lovely, transferred image of an angel from a notecard as its centrepoint.   Even though the image had been cut out, incorporated into a collage, then transferred to clear acetate and then sewn onto a quilt…  everytime I looked at it my heart said, “Copyright violation.  Copyright violation” (think of the ‘land shark’ from Saturday Night Live in the late 70’s to get the voice right).  Even when I considered finishing the piece as a gift or for my own wall, I felt the drag of the copyright violation.  So, I chopped up THAT angel too (jeez, this is starting to sound like a nasty theme).

The upper left teeny bit shows just a corner of the acetate collage.

I am reveling in the process of letting go of objects that feel negative and seem destined to continue provoking a negative response.

(This is NOT like the difficult part of constructing a quilt where design problems need to be resolved… where you are INVESTED in the process, you CAN’T WAIT to see how it turns out, where you feel ONTO SOMETHING).

In the case of the Acetate Angel (sounds like a name Craig Ferguson might have danced under — you’d have to watch his show to get this reference), I was dreading the prospect of spending many hours to quilt and bind a project that screamed ‘copyright violation’ everytime I looked at it, even if I was never going to put it near the public’s eye.

Not so long ago, I would have done so, out of a kind of compulsion.  I suppose that’s why it feels very liberating NOT TO.

Spring cleaning

Leave a reply

Scrubbing the slate this morning.  On my hands and knees.  I LIKE cleaning that has a good result (as opposed to one that does not, like, for instance, trying to vacuum with a plugged up vacuum tube or the nearly useless task of trying to get burnt popcorn off the bottom of a pot).  Grime on slate cleans up beautifully.  As does the grout.  I used an abrasive cleanser, a toothbrush, a bleach pen, an old body brush and elbow grease.  The only trick was making sure that Jack didn’t walk through it while I worked.

Inside and outside don’t look that different today.  This is the blue stone pad outside our side door this morning.

Next days are crowded… A commission to start.  A shop appointment to prepare for.  A missing item sold on Etsy to find (oh, St. Anthony, St. Anthony come to me now!).  Not to mention the four file folders of applications for various services that I will be sorting through with my sister tomorrow.

So, it is time to get busy and keep myself away from the screen for a bit!