Monthly Archives: August 2012

circles and pause

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Who said that you, even as you move and change and relate from the side to things, are the center?  This new indigo cloth has been poured on.  Seen lightning and heard cicadas.  Sun has dried it.

It is its own thing, and it is a thing-yet-to-be.  Not unlike a child going off to college.

The spec of rust is like a beauty mark to me.

When a partial circle is visible, we easily fill in the missing part.

And, when a circle is filled with water, it often captures the sky.

Families are circles.  Time is a circle.

We are driving C. up to Montreal tomorrow, so I won’t be here for a few days (thankfully, our house sitter knows all about how to care for quirky, slightly over-sized Corgis).

Our circle is expanding.

 

two-sided postcard quilts

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When BOTH sides of a piece warrant viewing, here’s one way to create a hanger – if you have used wool felt.  The same treatment could be adapted to employ a rivet or a button for a more traditional, three-layer cloth quilt.

Who doesn’t love wool felt?  Especially slightly THICK wool felt?  I could use an awl to poke a hole, confident that the hole would not enlarge.  This allowed me to create a simple, single crochet hanger, right into the quilt.

Waxed linen offers the nice benefit of being a cohesive thread… here, the snipped-off end can be twisted once or twice around existing strand and MASHED into pretty permanent place.  No need for clear nail polish, or fray off, or to worry about unthreading.

Here, a little clock gear serves as a doorknob.

These stitched landscapes were appealing on the ‘wrong sides’, which is part of why I wanted a ‘side neutral’ hanger – so both sides can readily be viewed with a flick of the wrist.

When I stitched the grey one, a piece of fabric got caught in the threads and I decided to cover it with a moon and add a window, being conscious of where my hand stitches would land on the other side.  Here are both the purple and grey felt postcards, with fronts and backs:

And a couple close ups.

And the other:
So, when the ‘wrong side’ is worth showing, consider a hanging method that can flip from side to side.

One wedding commission that I made ended up sandwiched between two pieces of glass and hung where both sides could be seen.  I don’t love putting fabric under glass, but I thought that was a great idea on their part.

Has anyone else found that they love the wrong side of their fiber creation? Or found another way to showcase both sides with a hanging method different from this?

narrative quilting and viewing

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A summer story emerges.

It has some specificity – THIS August there will in fact, be a blue moon.  This summer, cloth has hung on a string strung out back, not tree to post or house to post, but deck to mini-ramp.  Still…

The rabbit in the quilt really does visit our yard, even when eight of us are having BBQ and salad at the table under one of the catalpa trees.

And the results of my indigo ventures are evident – nearly all of the blue fabric in this piece were dipped in the five gallon bucket out back.  Some were bleached as well.  I have fallen in love with the color of indigo, and more surprisingly, with the metallic smell it imparts to cloth.

I have been stitching to a boxed DVD set from library called, “Why Quilts Matter” (more on that another time) and in the evenings to Showtime’s series: The Tudors.  Both K & I loved Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hollow’ and are psyched that its sequel now resides on our kindles… I’ll probably save that read for winter (and it may consume most of the winter!).  ‘The Art of Fielding’ is a perfect tale for the end of summer, and some compensation for not sleeping until 2:30.

This week I watched ‘In the Electric Mist‘ twice.  It is a post-Katrina murder thriller set in Louisiana.  It stars Tommy Lee Jones and is based on a book by James Lee Burke.  My sister turned me on to James Lee Burke.  They are good reads all on their own, but are particularly interesting to me because I am currently obsessed with southern landscapes.  I especially wanted to see one of his books on film to confirm what I found disappointing in the wonderful new movie, ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ – and that is, that ITS landscapes were repetitive and washed out instead of marvelously tangled and varied and intensely blue and green.  (The relationships and characters of the ‘Beasts’ film more than made up for my disappointment about the scenery).

Today I include my viewing notes because it has struck me recently that perhaps I stitch in order to sit and watch one narrative after another on the screen, and not the other way around! Has anyone else ever had this slightly disturbing epiphany?

happy weekend

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I woke to the sound of rain, plop-plip-plopping down.  It made me happy.  It cooled the air significantly and refreshed all the plants.  I sat and read the opening to “The Art of Fielding”, which I will read after I finish the second Hunger Games book.

A busy day, with a visit to my sister, laundry, and the gathering of winter garb for Montreal-bound C., but wanted to share a quick picture.

I can’t wait to show you how this is coming along.  The little teeny garments are stitched down and there is now a clothes line, and pegs!  The tree trunk received a covering of brown-ochre cotton and there is another clothes line on the other side of the house.

Is this so much fun because it is akin to playing with paper dolls, I wonder?!

the house is open

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The house is open, and hot, and airless, but still it is preferable to the AC.

A cute bunny added to an otherwise unpopulated piece ought to inspire something besides my own sense of being derivative.  I may just have to give her time. And what about the dragonflies, you ask?!

My best moments, of late, come in the basement… where there is no season, no tide or influence, just stuff wanting to be chucked, folded, or assembled.  It’s cool down there.  Scraps that I saved got stitched into this assembly this morning.  The pink handmade paper (center) dates back to when we renovated our house.  Stuffed in the walls of the old kitchen were newspapers… I saved them, whirred them up in a blender and pulled them into sheets.  Ads for clothing and rugs for sale in Framingham.  Words that had been in the walls.  This batch might have been made with four year olds at C’s nursery school (clue? the pink sparkles).  THAT tells me the paper is 14 years old.

Another year, I fed acetate through the inkjet & made copies of a collage featuring fingers pressing into dough from a food magazine.  Back then I was thinking about craft and money, wondering about it.  I am still wondering about it.  There were stars from an antique map of the constellations and fires from Providence, but you can’t really see them now.

Allen Ginsburg never did it for me, but I suppose I have to mention him, what with  ‘howl’ and all.  I printed HOWL onto cloth and acetate at a time when you couldn’t (and you STILL can’t) escape the words DREAM TRUST CREATE BELIEVE, like we are all four years old and waiting for Santa.

I like the photographed, ink stitches lining up with the thread stitches.

I can’t keep my blog up to date with the work that I am doing.  I guess that is a good thing, but it has a way of feeling heavy, too.

After quoting the bible yesterday, I was wondering if I ought to express my protests about homophobia in this country, just in case people got the wrong idea.

Nah, it’s too hot to protest.  I’m going back to this table, hopefully to stitch myself into a better mood.