It’s a clear day! K is home and rattling around upstairs. I’m making coffee. Finn has his play date. K and I are loading the Subaru with step stool, drill, vacuum, tarps and baking soda and heading to Salem. It’s not The moving day, but we’ll ferry a couple of trunk loads over.
(but I have been all tied up — kids on break, garden attention-grabbing — just in the last few days I removed the dead inkberry, attended two track meets,
potted up a bunch of sedum, raked the side beds, planted some basil seeds, used garbage-snagged pieces of glass (– someone’s old fridge components picked up yesterday –) to make a casual cold frame, swept the side porch and readied it for summer morning reading, swept the bluestone, got the houseplants outdoors, grocery shopped twice, cleared up the south bed, made the garage passable again by moving shit around, started a new compost heap)…
During the construction of this quilt, which I am calling “Witness”, the artist Barron Storey — whose work I really love — started a “women and ropes” series. My “ropes” look more like threads, and lack the paralyzing tension that I had hoped to depict, but this quilt is, nevertheless of a “woman and ropes”. The cloaked witness is partially shown here:
On a lighter note, I am finding this business of having middle-aged eyes is adding a new dimension to design — the looking with glasses on, the looking with glasses off — something I never knew about because I had never worn glasses until middle age. Last night I noticed that the batik of the Witness’s face, if you blur your eyes, really looks like a face. I like it when things like that happen.
Here is the word added to the small Journal Quilt. I think of ‘freedom’ as something robust and tawny (who knows why), and yet here it is in a whispery pink. . . freedom as something subtle and fragile.
This is the finished piece.
The moon gave me a few problems. The chenille vine upholstery fabric was thick, and seamed, even thicker. Next time, lay flat and don’t seam? In any case, to cover the bump, I added lace. And, to balance things out a little, I tore some of the blue netting.
The lower lunar section reveals an inkjet fabric print of an antique map of the constellations.
“Free” has been on my mind in the wake of handling all of my free fabrics. “Free” is on my mind thinking about what holds me back. Something about spring sets a little piece of me free. So grateful.
Back when I was taking photos of urban scenes to adapt as decorations for a local after prom party, I also took a number of pictures of beech trees. They live in Brookline, just a street over from Beacon Street, and they are truly magnificent.
This quilt is small, about 8 1/2 x 11″. I used the bucket feature in Photoshop Elements 3.0 to change the background colors, which transformed the branch patterns into something resembling stained glass. I changed threads at least three times quilting the piece, which is a departure from my generally lazy approach to thread.
I’ve recently been back to visit these trees and have come to the conclusion that they are most beautiful when the branches are bare. This time of year, leaves are plentiful, obscuring the muscular structure of the trunks which I so love to look at.
