This little piece came from one of my ** New ** works-in-progress drawers and was constructed last spring, back when I was still making journal quilts.
The vertical edges needed bound, and I so wanted the blue and white swirly because of the way it picked up the floral motif and the black and white near the hut, but it was way, way, too much.
Or, maybe it wasn’t too much, but it was a different quilt in the making and I wanted to finish this one in the mood in which it began.
So I went with the soft green.
After binding it, I fiddled with the moon some more, added a word, and quilted here and there. I’ll show you tomorrow. The quilt reminds me of how fertile the journal-quilting-process was. I think I’ll begin again. Last year, I made a quilt-a-week (small, unbound) from January to about June, I think.
It rained again. Day was full, satisfying.
Nice work. Isn’t it amazing how just changing the binding gives the whole work a totally different feel? I think you made the best choice here.
I think it´s nicely harboured in the soft green, too…
welcome back from taxland.. i need to go there now.
thanks, all and good luck, jude, with the numbers and forms… and remember, it will be over soon!
lovely piece – thank you for showing some of the thought processes you go through
and how much adding a bit here and there or a colour changes everything –
_a
Hi Anne, thanks for your feedback…
I, too, loved both seeing and reading about your thoughts as you made your final decision. Oh, I would have wanted that swirly one, too, but I agree that the soft green is perfect. The other piece of fabric will find a special home somewhere else. It is almost harder when we have too many fabrics to choose from, isn’t it? And I find that I have about a half-dozen favorites that I keep returning to over and over. This is such a very lovely quilt. And I love the idea of a journal being written, or stitched, with fabric like this. I’m trying to find a way to use paper and fabric to illustrate my day-to-day life, or my thoughts, at any rate. You have given me some lovely ideas here! xo Kari
the plenitude of fabric DOES become a problem, as my recent clean up miseries can attest to… what i’ve missed about making journal quilts is the deadline/quick paced creation, and the way the little quilts told stories to ME….
although I have always loved writing, I don’t think of myself as a storyteller… reading your blog and Jude’s blog, however, I am wondering about that… and wanting to will myself into one… (or open up to the one that is already there?)
I’ve been thinking about your reply to me, about storytelling. I KNOW you are a storyteller just from your header! A row of houses, each one full of stories . . . I love those little houses! If a piece of art is so abstract that we cannot discern a recognizable object inside it, we still find a way to “read” it, but sometimes the title gives the whole piece its story, for example, maybe the title is “Storm.” But if the title is “Storm in a Teacup,” then we would have a different story. I love how words and images can come together to make something that isn’t there if you had one without the other. Does that sound too mystical? I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I think storytelling is such an integral part of creating art that I’m not sure we can create anything without endowing it with a story. I think of myself as a writer and find it very hard to see myself as an artist, but I really think we are all artists and we are all storytellers in the same way that we are all human. I taught school and it breaks my heart that early on children start to think of themselves as incapable of art or music or writing or math. How does that happen, I wonder? Please do forgive such a long comment!! I really only wanted to say that your storyteller is already there ~ for sure!! xo Kari
You are so right, Kari, and pls. never apologize for providing so much insight and encouragement!!!
The other thing that can cramp us as children is the whole sibling thing. My mother was an art teacher and really knew how to give her children a sense of freedom and joy in creating… and, yet, somehow we got pigeonholed — I was the ‘writer’, my sister was the ‘artist’, and to the extent I WAS an ‘artist’ (a term I will never use comfortably and who cares, really?), I was only good at lines (not color). To this day, when someone praises my use of color, I am flabbergasted… talk about stories! that is me, hanging on to such an old story…
but mostly what I take from your comment, is the invitation to let the stories BE there, and to see how innate they are, not just to the process of making things, but to being human… thank you for that thought!!