Tag Archives: barn

November arrives

My thoughts and prayers are with the folks in NYC and NJ and elsewhere, suffering with clean up, destruction, and deprivation. I hope temperatures stay mild. It’s gotten a little cold here (outside of Boston) in the last couple of hours. Here is one of the Berkshire barns, as of this morning. It is a completed quilt top.

I’m not sure why it turned out to be such a struggle to assemble, but it was. It’s about 32″ wide and incorporates some of the more successful indigo cloths from this summer. The indigo worked particularly well for the mountains. I’m calling it, “Waiting for Snow”.

I created a ‘side bar’ quilt on the work table, taking little breaks from the Barn. It has a totally different feel, and therefore constituted a visual contrast. This was refreshing for some reason.
In this one, the structure is merely hinted at, and the landscape has been granted license to be wild and dominant. Not a surprising choice, given the rampaging punches that Sandy delivered over the weekend, while I was safely working down in my cellar studio. This composition features some more of my indigo dips, as well as silk from my upholstery-design-contact, quilting cottons, batiks, and that Lonni Rossi broccoli/tree fabric that I so love.
I am hand quilting this little composition today, as the sky greys and a cold rain starts to fall. Its working title is: “Long Island Blues” (Jude Hill online class project). In this case, the usual horizon line has been broken up (submerged?!!) by the wandering watery lines of shibori.

takin’ it slow

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Two lists for you today.

First, in defense of an upholstered chair as design board:

it’s there
it is soft — meaning: “will take a pin readily”
it is tattered — meaning: I don’t have to worry about ruining furniture here, and most importantly
at about 12 feet from the couch, it provides a view of the work while I am relaxing doing something else.

Second list enumerates a few insights that have allowed me to finally enjoy this project:

I can take my time
I can revise in a whole host of ways — by unpicking seams and replacing poorly-fitting fabrics, by abandoning whole chunks of pieced sections, and by appliqueing onto pieced sections
I don’t have to know how it’ll all come together at this point, and
I can trust that I’ll figure out HOW to connect it all up when the time comes.

In the meantime, I continue to make three to four side-designs with rejected sections, which also provides relief when the going gets tough.

where is the porch?

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A third iteration of the barn. Still not there.

Days, days, days…

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Whipping by. Turning into weeks. Months. I haven’t been swimming yet this summer. Blazing hot, here in the Northeast. Thank god for AC. A time to not-mind-so-much having a job indoors all day long.

We celebrated K’s birthday three times because of the comings and goings in our household.

Two round trips to Pennsylvania with a weekend inbetween. I promised I wouldn’t gripe if D. came home in one piece — and he did.

Most of the pictures I took were while going between 40 and 60 m.p.h. Most of them too blurry to bother with.

The last hour and a half of the drive to Woodward is very pretty — full of scenes like this one.

Lewisburg was having a street festival the night prior to pick up.

Lots of people were out and about and I saw fireflies and toads for the first time in many, many years. Why are there no fireflies or toads around here?!!