Category Archives: Hearts

Heading home tomorrow

As usual, after about ten days of wall-to-wall TV programming that I have no role in selecting and the tricky dance of determining a meal that my brother will actually eat (and failing half the time) plus my own inability to read while here, start to get to me.

Don’t get me wrong, it was cool to watch the final two Knicks’ games and the World Cup is kind of engaging, but?

A catastrophic fire at a large cold storage facility about six miles south of here continues. It looked like it had been put out after two days, but then the fire reignited.

Because it’s a cold storage facility, it is piped with ammonia and one of those pipes leaked. The contents of the facility are now also of concern. Most of it is meat.

The city’s handing out masks and air purifiers but also running out of them.

The dog panicked the first day — we think because of the chemical smell to the cloud (which we could see from the front deck). Now the air merely smells of fire.

June gloom. It’s a thing — often caused by “the marine layer.” For some reason the term amuses Ken and me and we walk window to window, announcing, “Oh look! It’s the marine layer.” At least we’re past stumbling over the California highway naming convention: “the 110,” “the 5.” We’re perhaps a little too satisfied by this.

The fog usually clears by noon. Today the smell of fire and ash spices the marine layer. Maybe that’s now also an LA thing?

Fortunately I can manage to quilt while here.

Don’t know what this is. It started as a central heart with a few smaller hearts to the bottom left — mostly blue with a yellow border. I added a moon and then orange around the heart. I’ve been filling in with some of the flimsy cloth I brought along with me — many are scraps cut from garments purchased in Longmont. That source occupies me some as I stitch.

It’s weird to spend so much time on a piece that is chaotic and unpleasing and that doesn’t really show any signs of future resolution.

But maybe that’s apt: chaotic, unpleasing, with no resolution in sight. Of course I’m not talking about quilting.

A Saturday dog walk

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It’s the kind of day when you take your thin cardigan off halfway through your walk. Beautiful, in other words.

I swear dogs are so much smarter than we think. Case in point: passed a beagle who howled in just the right register and with just enough volume to penetrate Beyoncé on ear phones. Oh, hello over there!

I never wear earbuds the whole way because they create a barrier to the world. Before Beyoncé, I briefly sampled a recent Sisters-in-law podcast and whew, switched that off fast. I wouldn’t mind a day of not thinking about Judge Cannon and classified documents.

A friend who is also an intellectual property lawyer gave me a free and informative rundown on copyright law yesterday. It was excellent timing because of that notice I got on Instagram last week.

I had no idea, for instance, that posting too many words from a book could be problematic (and here I thought I was promoting the author!) I will be more judicious in future, maybe limiting quotes to a short paragraph.

Also “fair use” (a defense against a copyright violation allegation) is broader than I thought. For instance, an image doesn’t necessarily have to be transformed if the artist is using it to make a commentary that differs from the original.

Not making money is a factor, BTW, but not an exemption. I thought it was.

There are also privacy interests apart from copyright issues. Public figures have no privacy interests to protect. So that means, for example, that the recurring Jeremy Irons face in one of my collage series would not run afoul of the actor’s right to privacy. Only the photographer in that case might have a grievance.

Paper only — border is a photo of a quilt I made. Buildings from a magazine. Barn eave from PCC

The upshot of all this is I want to use more exclusively my own images. The interior magazine image above was originally whole. Yesterday while thinking about all of this, I ripped it in half and oriented one half upside down.

Paper collage discussed above is here doubled exposed and filtered with another quilt I made (below).

Or is it the one below? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. I don’t mind that.

Oh stop now! You’d never know I meant to be very brief here. I have an AWA workshop in a few.

But no discussion of copyright is complete without noting the value of proper attributions: please find some of Deb Lacativa’s extraordinary fabric in quilt above (if you hurry, she has a new batch of vintage, hand-dyed fabrics available). Also, both the nine-patch and woven cloth strips arise out of a long association and class-taking with Jude over at spiritcloth. A real mensch and a maven, she is.

Snow and hives

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After three days of itching, I bagged up what I thought was the offending allergen and trotted over to urgent care. Yes, it’s hives. Yes, it could’ve been because of a newly purchased cocoa butter body gel.

After getting my scripts and instructions, the nurse picked up the ziplock bag with the gel in it.

“You can throw that fucking shit out,” I told her.

I may itch and look a pretty sight, but at least I made the doc and nurse laugh!

Geography of the heart

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The midsection of this work-in-progress uses a contour map print for the central form, leading me to call this and others in the series, “geography of the heart.” The embroidered word “love” below the heart underscores the theme, but in a generic and possibly saccharine way.

I was nevertheless prepared to finish it up when I came across some spoonflower fabric that used a collage (above) that I made a while back as part of the second of two sketchbook projects.

The scrappy fella silhouetted speaks of war orphans, Spanish flu orphans and children of immigrants in New York City.

More specifically, this jaunty man-boy is a stand in for my father who grew up in Woodhaven, New York (an area sometimes claimed by Queens, sometimes Brooklyn). As a teenager he worked as a runner on Wall Street. I can imagine his wiry form, his scrawny athleticism. Eventually he earned enough to attend Pratt Institute and set himself on a path out of the boroughs and into the suburbs.

Suddenly, the idea of the heart’s geography comes alive with particularly.

‘Design is working with what you have and doing the best you can to hold it together.’ Jude Hill

One of the biggest challenges for a collage-style quilter is holding onto the feeling of the piece as you adhere the components. Things that are overlaid in the design phase may lose an element of spontaneity or positioning or something when pieced. On the other hand, if elements are simply stitched down, they may not relate well enough to each other.

Problem one: to lend more meaning to an otherwise generic notion of origins. Solved: by inserting scrappy fella.

Problem two: adding one overlay guy on the left (circled in red). The strip of spoonflower fabric under him will be seamed — just like the right-side panel. But the guy? If I appliqué him will he float too much? And if, on the other hand, I piece him in, will the narrow seam allowances be significant enough subtractions of pattern to disrupt what’s going on?

I’ve gone both ways with this over the years without having formed a real preference. This time, I think I’ll use appliqué.

[Couldn’t find my xerox copies of the sketchbook and so grabbed a few images from Flickr. The first two page spread below is shown two ways. It reads: When will they try to steal your liberty?

The bottom image shows the title page, “It’s Not About Me” — which was one of the themes offered that year.

You can see the entire sketchbook on their site. My user name is katydidart.

Scripted and unscripted love

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After reading Fiona’s post describing the making of her banner for Mo’s project (“I Dream of a World Where Love is the Answer), I decided I wanted my own embroidered “love”. So I stitched the word on a strip of walnut-dyed cloth just below an appliquéd heart. It seemed a good spot.

Have you noticed how often typing on a phone that one mistakenly types ‘live’ when one means ‘love’ or ‘love’ when one means ‘live’?

The quirks of a teeny iphone keyboard dishing up a philosophical message is emblematic of our age — for what is life without love?

To live is to love. To love is to live.

If one is loving, of course.

We were out of town this weekend and I got to witness the tender care my sister-in-law gave her 91 year old father. Did he need anything? Could she read his cards to him? Didn’t he look sharp in yellow and how about walking down the hall a little ways? I reflected on how my manner with my sister in no way approaches such soft, tenderness; how I could NEVER get her to walk down the hall a little ways; how impatient and defended I can be.