Mystery stitching -- did you do it?

Dabbling in the never-ending task of trying to clean out and organize my studio, I came upon a bag of hand stitching.  One piece I recognized as my own, from several years back, but three others were a total mystery.  On two of them I thought the base fabric looked somewhat familiar, from the days when I was using black walnuts for home-made dye, but the stitching was definitely not mine.

Very nice, but definitely not mine.  See details below.

I wrote two friends with whom I had loose collaborative agreements to do hand stitching together, and asked them whether they were the artists and if so, did they want the pieces back.  Neither one recognized any of the work.

So I'll ask everybody out there -- are you the mystery stitcher?  If so, (1) why is your work in a bag in my studio? and (2) do you want it back?

Last week on Art With a Needle

Last week started in frustration (trying to get going on my annual ornaments), took a break for a big Thanksgiving feast, then ended in a LOT of sewing.

I worked on ornaments, now that I have finally pretty much figured out what to do, plus two small postage stamp quilts that I want to put into the holiday show at PYRO Gallery and must be finished by Monday or Tuesday.

Every December we have a group show at the gallery, in which every member of the co-op has work on display, and we try to include things toward the inexpensive end of the scale to be more appealing for gift purchases.  I am mostly showing old work, because my artmaking is focused on a solo show that will open in mid-June -- not all that far off.  But I thought I would make a couple of new postage stamp pieces because they have sold well in the past.  So here they are, sewed together, awaiting their hanging rods.

Readers left a bunch of comments about not being able to find things.  Anne wrote: "That's what always happens when I try to clean up.  I can't find stuff!"  Rose wrote: "I can so relate to spending hours hunting for something.  Too often for me, it is something I have just had.  And then there are the times I spend half an hour looking for something I have had and haven't moved since I had it last!"

Carol wrote: "What I hate is when I think I am not going to use a tool anymore and gift it to someone.  Then a blog friend piques my interest again and I have to decide if I want to buy another one."  Amen, Carol -- and I wish I remembered who has my embellisher machine (aka needle-felter), which I did not give away but loaned, maybe three years ago?  and it has never come home...

Finally, Boomer Rose wanted to see exactly what I'm making for the ornament because she might be able to make some before Christmas.  I don't want to post photos of the ornaments until Christmas Day, because many of the recipients are readers of the blog and I don't want to spoil the surprise.  But Rose, if you send me your email, I'll send you pictures and helpful hints.  Same goes for anybody else who might be inspired to make some little goodies for your tree.

And there's still time (until Monday) to leave a comment and maybe you can be the lucky reader to get an ornament all your own! 

Here's my favorite miniature of the week:

An altered book 1, and happy birthday!

Quite a while ago a friend gave me a book and said "this looks like something that you might like to work with."  It's a strange book, beautifully printed on excellent paper.  Each two-page unit is not printed front-and-back on one piece of paper, but on the same side of a long piece of paper that is then folded on the outside edge.

Even stranger is the content.  Each eight-page section of the book has a single graphic theme, after which it switches abruptly to a totally different theme.  Many use collage, some use computer-drawn graphics, some human-drawn graphics in various themes.  Several of the sections include text that reminds me of my found poetry, pasted up in ransom-note style, some in French, some in English.

Sadly, many of the drawings and text are kind of sophomoric, the kind of drawings and remarks that I recall from seventh grade when there were 12 girls and 20 boys in our class, and the boys delighted in making rude noises and crude gestures behind the teacher's back.  My challenge to myself was to embrace the good parts of the book -- its gorgeous paper and printing, and many of the non-scatological illustrations -- but obscure the outrageous parts.

The book sat around for a while as I pasted a few things in, but it wasn't until my recent week on retreat that the project took wings.  Most of my work during that week consisted of sorting through piles and boxes of paper, deciding what I wanted to save and organizing it.  I realized that I was coming across a lot of bits and pieces that were too special to throw out, but didn't really go into any conceivable art project.  So I started to paste them into the book, and it started to take on a most engaging personality of its own.

I added some maps, of course, and photos that I had cut out for collage but seemed to want to play right now.  A wine label that I had peeled off and saved for many years, memorializing a great time with my brother in Australia (I don't remember that specific bottle or the specific occasion, so it's an archetype for so many good times and good wines -- and by the way, happy birthday to my favorite and only brother!)

A newspaper clipping, decades old, that I had saved because it is so concisely meaningless, and deserves to be saved forever.  A certificate of weevil-free sweet potatoes.

Travel brochures from Prague, advertising the medieval torture museum and the Kalashnikov firing range (or you can buy the Bullets and Karts combo, going next door to drive go-carts after you shoot).

Handwritten labels pinned to doilies that appeared in the grab bag.

All kinds of miscellaneous that I didn't want to throw away but also didn't want to keep moving from pile to pile, looking at them every couple of years and saying "oh yes, that's nifty."

The book isn't going to be just a scrapbook of random stuff; I hope it has some mildly artistic moments.  I'll show you some of them in a later post.

Serendipity today

I'm a huge believer in serendipity, aka never cleaning up your studio too much.  So many times I have found a piece of fabric or a button or a paper or a piece of rusty metal lying around and a few minutes later realize that it's just what I need for a piece of art in progress. 

The latest recurrence came about as I was sitting at my worktable cleaning up, and what appeared from under a pile of stuff but an empty slide mount.  I do have a box full of slide mounts that it could have been filed into, but that would have required me to get up, find the box, open it up, put it back.  Seemed like an awful lot of work for just one little piece of plastic -- simpler to just use it!  And anyway, I needed a break from all that cleaning up.

So I took some thread that was also sitting on the worktable and warped up a little loom.  What to put on it -- beads? thread of a different weight or color?  Plenty of stuff was within reach. 

Including a leftover bit of map from a collage.  I cut it into narrow strips and used that as the weft.  The weaving was fiddly because of course I didn't have heddles or any other mechanism to make a shed, so each thread had to be pulled up with tweezers for each strip of map.  But it was a nice zen hour, lost in the process (which after all, is why we've all become sewists and textile artists, isn't it?).

I'm making this my daily map.

A great week for divestiture

What a great week I just had!

First, I took a carload of fabrics to my friend Ann, whose quilt guild likes to make charity quilts.  I've given them four carloads in the last several months, and maybe this is even the last of the bunch.  I've saved out the Kona solids, and all the commercial striped fabrics, and the batiks, and the African fabrics, and some other stuff to precious to give away, but now I think all the other quilting fabric is gone.

Next, I took a carload of non-quilting fabric to my friend Alana, who teaches textile art at our arts magnet high school.  What a bunch of miscellaneous stuff -- upholstery samples, fabrics too heavy for quilting, cords, tapes, I don't even remember what all.  I drove up during textile class and the kids rushed out to the car and unloaded everything, which was delightful.

Then the construction guys started taking apart our old bathrooms.  I asked them to remove the cabinets carefully, rather than smashing them to bits, and advertised them on our neighborhood email list.

Some guy came over the next afternoon and took them away.  He sent me a thank-you message and said he had also taken the "vintage medicine cabinet" out of the junk trailer.  Couldn't believe it -- this fixture was low-end in 1963 and hasn't gotten any more charming in the intervening decades, just a mirror flanked by two naked vertical fluorescent tubes.  But somebody wanted it!!  What a thrill.

Good in the studio

Over the past several months I've been cleaning my studio, not because I've had a sudden attack of tidiness but out of necessity.  I have four fluorescent light fixtures in the studio, and they have been dying one by one.  When you lose one, you live with it, even if you can't see your design wall that well, and when you lose the next one, which happens to be the one over the work table, you start thinking about calling in the electrician.  But then you notice that your work table is silted over with two feet full of stuff, and you realize that the electrician isn't going to be able to get to the fixture to replace it.

So since Christmas I have been trying to get the worktable and its surrounds clear enough that I could have an electrician come in and replace all the fixtures.  Even the ones that (currently) were still working!  What a luxury!  Finally the moment arrived.  Look at him sitting on my worktable, with nothing besides him on the work surface!  (Well, at least in the area where he had to work.)

We put in LED fixtures and I am assured I will never have to change them out within my lifetime.  The studio is now bathed in light; things I haven't seen properly since last summer are radiantly in play.

It's not yet what many people might call "clean," but it's so beautiful that I can't believe it.

Cleaning the studio -- a milestone

Somebody left a comment on one of my recent "crabby" posts that said I must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed.  Truth be known, I've been getting up on the wrong side of the bed for months now; since Christmas my main "artistic" endeavor has been to clean my studio.

Now there is cleaning and there is Cleaning.  I recall without much fondness a week when I was helping my sister clean up her entire condo to put it on the market.  A couple of days into this task, the real estate agent called apologetically -- she knew we had agreed on next week to list it, but the perfect buyer had just walked in, and could she bring him over tomorrow?  OMG, what about the entire lower level, full of stuff?  We quick rented a storage locker, humped all the boxes and etceteras into the car, took three loads over that night, swept out the room, collapsed with Scotch.  The real estate agent couldn't believe it when she walked in the next morning -- what had happened to all the stuff????

That's Cleaning.  But that's not what I have been doing since Christmas.  I've been allowing myself rests and digressions because otherwise I would just burn the place down and myself in it in despair.  So every now and then I will stop, sit down and make more people out of the bits and pieces of fabric that don't easily go into one of the organized piles.

I have been giving my quilt fabrics away to a guild that makes charity quilts, and they say they're happy to get pre-cut strips and pieces, but I have been afraid that their tolerance for sorting through scrap bins may not be as high as my own.  So every now and then I'll stop, sit down and sort out a bunch of color-coordinated scraps to sew into rail fence blocks.  Mindless sewing, good therapy, uses up those scraps (but not fast enough).

And every now and then I'll stop, sit down, and make tie-up cords, either by braiding strips of leftover fabrics or by folding and stitching wider strips into stronger tapes.

But yesterday I hit a milestone -- my entire 5 x 8' work table empty of stuff.  Usually half of the table is covered with an old mattress pad, which makes it an ironing surface.  It hasn't been free of stuff since July so I took the opportunity to put it in the wash.

A whole lot of the previously free-floating stuff has been divested, or sorted into boxes, many of them neatly filed on shelves.  Some of it still is free-floating, but at least not on the work table.  Still a lot of cleaning and sorting to go, but a third of the studio has visible floors, neatly organized shelves, empty horizontal surfaces.  This has not been fun, but it is nice to reacquaint myself with the top of my table.

Feeling better about divestiture

The other day I wrote about getting rid of little bundles of fabric left over from clothes and curtains and things that I made decades ago.  I dutifully pitched the stuff, but it wasn't without some qualms -- not that I thought I would ever use the bits from garments I hadn't seen in 40 years, but it seemed so final to throw away things I had carefully saved all those years.  They seemed to be tangible connections to my past, and to accomplishments and pleasures that were very important at the time.

But then I had an inspiration.  I could save out some smaller pieces and make little people from them!

That struck me as the perfect way to retain my memories of beautiful dresses from the past, yet let the bundles of leftovers depart.

I had already put dozens of leftover bundles into the discard pile the previous week, and I'm proud to say that I didn't go back and retrieve them, but I did cut chunks of a bunch of remnants that I had just discovered.  Here are some of the little people I made from them:

Divestiture -- little bundles

I've been cleaning my studio since Christmas, taking an occasional break to make some minimal art but nothing serious.  I'm now accumulating my fourth batch of fabrics to go to the guild for charity quilts (and when I say "batch" I mean at least five cubic feet, maybe nine or ten...).  A huge pile of non-quilt fabrics is waiting near the back door for my friend who teaches high school art -- boxes and boxes of drapery and upholstery samples, fabrics too heavy or flimsy for the quilt guild, miscellaneous stuff of many descriptions.

I keep encountering boxes of things that I have carefully bundled up, sorted and packed away over the decades, because that's the kind of person I am.  (I don't think it reaches the level of "hoarder" but maybe I'm wrong.)  Like everybody I know who sewed garments, I would fold up the leftovers, tie the bundle up with a bit of selvage, and put it into storage.  My mother did it this way, my grandmother did it this way.

In retrospect, there doesn't seem to be much reason to do this.  What were we going to do with the bits?  I suppose you could theoretically make a patch if your blouse got a rip in it, but in all my 40 years of garment sewing I never knew that to happen.  But that's the way I did it.

It's been at least 20 years since I decided to give up garment sewing to concentrate on quilts, and 99 percent of the garments are long gone, but still all those little bundles were packed neatly away in boxes, neatly labeled as "silky remnants."  (Not silk, of course, but polyester...)

And last week, encountering them in my new spirit of divestiture, I realized that I should and could throw them away, as I arguably should have done in 1992 -- or maybe 1972.  I found the leftover bits from my wedding dress, and from multiple maternity dresses, and from the curtains and crib bumper pads from our first baby's bedroom.  I found many larger packages of garments that I had cut out and partially sewed together (or not) decades ago.  They all got tossed (well, not the wedding dress...)

And then in another box, just days later, I found the pattern for the wedding dress!

I kept that, too.  One of these days I expect I'll find the wedding dress itself, which I KNOW I never would have thrown out, but has been MIA for decades.

More divestiture

Many, many years ago I made a baby quilt which for some reason I decided to hand-quilt.  Don't know why; I was never that much of a fan of hand-quilting, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.   It was actually an experiment in quilting without a frame or hoop, the first time I had tried it.  (And by the way, if I ever have to do hand-quilting again I will do it hooplessly.)

I quilted maybe two thirds of it and got tired.  The quilt has been lurking about since -- OMG -- 1990; I know this because of the neatly embroidered motif in the corner.

Every couple of years since then I have come across this quilt and said to myself, I probably should finish this some day.   Yesterday I came across it and said go away.

So I bundled it up and gave it to my friend Ann for her guild's charity quilts.  I suspect somebody in that guild will be happy to finish the quilting.  And my stitches were nice and small, so if that somebody is a quilt snob she shouldn't be too ashamed to collaborate.  Maybe she'll neatly embroider her initials in the other corner.

Divestiture again

Time to clean up the studio.

Were there ever more depressing, discouraging words?  Strikes a klong of dark, cold dread up and down your spine, doesn't it?

Not that I really want to clean the studio, but I need to have an electrician come in and fix up my ceiling lights, all of which were installed at the same time and all of which are dying at the same time.  And to get to the most important fixture, he will have to stand on my work table, which means the top of the table will have to be visible, which means a midden of boxes and stuff will have to be removed.  So while I'm removing stuff from the work table, I might as well simultaneously be cleaning and organizing and finding stuff that can be given or thrown away.

Still dark, cold dread, right?

My first thought was to get rid of my calicos.  Years ago I pulled out all those sweet 70s tiny prints that I will never use and put them in the closet.  I've given them to new quilters who wanted something to learn on without having to go to the fabric store.  I've sent them to internet friends who wanted to finish quilts begun decades ago in similar fabrics.  A brainstorm: one of my fiber art pals is in a traditional guild that makes a lot of charity quilts, so I asked her if they might want my calicos.

When she said yes, I started packing them up.  It felt good.

And then I had another thought -- why not also give them some of my "better" quilt fabrics?  So I started packing boxes full.

I was pleasantly surprised at how little pain I felt in parting with these fabrics -- thousands of dollars worth of beautiful cottons that had called out to me in the past and had given me lots of pleasure over the years just knowing they were there in my drawers ready for a moment in the sun.  But I realized that I would never use them, and if I knew they would be going to a good home, where people would use them and love them, I'm OK with that.

I gave my friend a trunkload of fabrics a few weeks ago, and am accumulating another pile to hand off at our textile group meeting later this week.

Of course, empty drawers aren't worth anything until you fill them with something else that had been occupying other space, such as on top of my work table.  So now I'm trying to consolidate the fabrics I still have into the partly empty drawers, and organize them more usefully for my current quilting life.  Still lots of work ahead, but seeing those boxes go out the door has been liberating.

Cleaning the studio (sort of)

I will be teaching a workshop in curved piecing in October and the organizer wanted a sample that she could show at the August guild meeting.  That would be easy -- I have two or three quilt tops made with exactly the techniques that will be in the class, made at a long-ago Nancy Crow workshop and never quilted, but excellent for teaching purposes.

At mid-week I went to find the box with the curved pieces in it.  So easy, you might think....

I'll fess up, I have a messy studio.  Every year or so I get the urge to clean it up, and may devote days, weeks, even months to the task, but even the most enthusiastic efforts only put a small dent into the problem.  Often looking for something is the impetus I need to make a major assault, but the minute I find it I stop.

I thought I knew where the box was, but it wasn't.  Then I started looking into one box after another, searching.  I found all kinds of other things, and decided life would be better if I reorganized them and labeled the boxes with detailed inventories so it would be easier to conduct future searches.  Some of the things I found wanted to be given to friends: a bunch of beautiful polyester prints in dress lengths will go to the refugee/immigrant sewing class, a huge bag of wool yarn from Scotland that I never should have bought because I don't knit will go to my friend who does.  Some stuff I even threw away.

By now my recently clear worktable was entirely silted over.  One box was receiving neatly folded drapery-weight fabrics to be used for quilt backs.  Three were receiving works in progress, plastic-bagged and inventoried and sorted by some system almost clear in my mind.  One was receiving leftovers, plastic-bagged by quilt, all color-coordinated and ready for the next (smaller) piecing project.

I came upon a big bag of wooden spools that somebody had given me and took a break to put them on display in a type case on the wall that had some empty spots.  I came upon two dozen small pieced motifs from a workshop that I had for some reason pinned to background lengths of fabric.  I unpinned them, carefully sorting the pins back into my pin dish if they were still smooth, into a plastic box if they had rusted in place and needed a going-over with an emery cloth, bagged and packed the motifs, folded the background lengths and put them back in the box with the solid Konas.

At the end of the day some things in my collection were better organized, packed and labeled.  Some things were in process, awaiting future decisions.  Still others were in worse shape than they started, having been let loose but not yet grappled with.  And I still hadn't found the box with the curved piecing.

So I made a new sample and took it to the post office just before it closed.

Today I guess I have to go back in the studio and confront my unfinished business.  Want to bet that within the next two days I'll find the box with the curved piecing?

On retreat

Just got home yesterday afternoon from three days at my favorite retreat place and while I didn't accomplish as much as I had hoped, it was a very pleasant time with good friends.  As I did earlier this year, I left the sewing machine at home (just too big to shlep) and spent the time sorting and processing papers.

Here's what I brought with me:

The cardboard box on the left contained bits and pieces, mostly that had been piling up on my desk for months.

Since I've been doing daily collage for almost three years now, I have amassed a lot of pictures clipped from newspapers and magazines and a great filing system.  Many of the file folders from this system were in the middle cardboard box.

But the clips have a way of not submitting to the system.

I'll take four faces from my "faces" folder to audition for a collage, choose and use one, and neglect to put the other three back in their folder.  I'll cut something from the paper at the dining room table, carry it to my desk, but never get around to putting it in the appropriate folder.  The piles on the desk were getting overwhelming so a couple of weeks ago, in anticipation of the retreat, I cleared the desk into the cardboard box.

I'm happy to report that I got through the entire box and got everything filed.  But should I have even bothered?  I'm giving up daily collage in three weeks -- maybe I should have just thrown it all away.  But that's not the way I operate.  At least now all the folders are in order, and neatly stowed in a box with a lid.  They can sit in the corner and be right there, perfectly organized, if and when I need them.

Fortunately that's not all I did in three whole days.  I actually made some art, in addition to clipping and filing.  I'll tell you more about that in a later post.

A small accomplishment

Some weeks you accomplish a lot.  Some weeks you accomplish almost nothing.

This week has been the latter.  Not that I'm a terrible slug but I've had a bunch of other commitments -- a lecture, dinner with friends, the orchestra, meeting our son at lunch -- and not much has happened in the art department.

But this evening I roped my husband into helping me with a task that needs to be done every several months: redoing the quilt storage area, aka the third guest bedroom.  The bed has clean sheets on it, and if we ever needed three bedrooms for company I could theoretically convert this room into service, but it would require three or four trips to the storage locker with all the quilts that live on the bed and elsewhere in this room.

Most of my old quilts are rolled up on swim noodles and wrapped in sheets, but those still in the rotation -- likely to be sent out to a show or taken with me for demonstrations -- are stacked on the bed in the third guest bedroom.  As time passes, the stack gets messier and messier, as I pull out quilts from the bottom layers or dump newly arrived quilts on top of the pile.

Since I last organized the pile, several quilts have returned from two- or three-year tours or recent shows, and things were getting pretty messy.  I couldn't find a quilt I needed to photograph for my new book, although I had searched and thought I had looked everywhere, including the pile on the bed.  And a few quilts that had come home from shows hadn't made it out of their shipping boxes.

So yesterday we pulled everything off the bed and proceeded to remake the pile, with the biggest quilts on the bottom, everything face down to prevent fading.  We opened the shipping boxes, undid the rolls of quilts that had been taken to a workshop, pulled out quilts that needed to be rolled up and put into "permanent storage" and incidentally but happily, found the missing quilt.

I could theoretically do this task myself, except that my back starts hurting very quickly.  Like making the bed, spreading the quilts out is best done by two people.

Today I'll finish up the job, rolling up the older quilts for "permanent storage," putting the smallest quilts into under-the-bed storage boxes.  But meanwhile it makes me happy to contemplate this small area of my art domain that is perfectly organized and put together.

Change of pace

The two parts of making a quilt -- piecing the top, then sandwiching and quilting it -- require two very different processes, mindsets and workspaces.  When you finish one, you need to clean up all three areas, literally or metaphorically, before you can move on to the other.

Here's my sewing machine space in piecing mode, with a cutting mat and huge pile of stripes at hand, some cut wide for the "bricks," some cut narrow for the "mortar" in my piecing technique.

Underneath the machine's deck is a pile of tiny, tiny bits, probably too small for sane people to keep, but I always have a parallel project going, making little compositions onto my sew-off squares, and use the tiny bits for this purpose.

It took a day's work to get all the strips neatly folded and stowed away, then to get the large work table cleaned up from cutting.  All the uncut fabric had to be folded up and put away, then the table cleared off so the quilt could be laid out and sandwiched.

The card table that I set up behind my sewing machine to support the quilted bundles had also silted over since I had last needed it, and I had to put down a big plastic tablecloth to cover all the bumps and edges of the varying surfaces that could snag a tied quilt bundle.

But finally all my excuses were gone, and I had to actually start quilting.

Packing fever

The good news is you got into a show!

The bad news is then you have to get the quilt to the show.

Yesterday was a bad news day.  I had to ship two quilts off, which shouldn't be too big a deal.  I own plenty of pool noodles on which to roll things, plenty of long boxes, plenty of dowels and sticks for hanging rods, plenty of screw eyes in case I have to make a new rod.  I have a roll of clear package tape in every room of the house, with a scissors nearby.  But it took me the better part of an hour to get those two quilts on their way, not counting the drive (in the rain) to FedEx.

Didn't take too long to find them because I'd recently packed up almost a hundred quilts, leaving only those in current circulation on the bed.  But after trying 35 different pre-existing hanging rods, finding none to be the right length, I had to cut a new one and set screw-eyes.  I did find two rods of the right length for the other quilt, but one required a little remedial maintenance. 

Only had to root around for a minute or two to find the right length noodle.  Found a box just the right size quite easily, since the larger quilt had come home from another show in it and it was at the front of the box stash.  Found a nice fabric tube to put the roll in, because I had recently cut up an old sheet and made THREE such tubes, each one already labeled with my name and address.  Did I feel proud of myself!  Found several nice cords to tie up the roll and the package, because I had recently cut the hems off some curtains and made a dozen ties of various lengths.  More proud of myself.

As packing days go, this was a walk in the park.  Sometimes I have spent an entire morning on a frantic, prayer-punctuated expedition to find the quilt in the first place -- looking in drawers, boxes, rolls, piles, straightening up my studio to an alarming degree before the damn thing shows its face.  Sometimes I can't find a noodle long enough, and have to construct one by joining two shorter ones with a dowel for a spine.  Sometimes I have to build a box by cannibalizing cardboard from other sources.

Perhaps you have noticed that the operative verb in this narrative is "find."  It's not that any of these steps are difficult or even time-consuming -- once you have your materials and things at hand.  I remember fondly the mail room at my old place of employment.  Big empty counters where you could spread out your stuff and pack your boxes, sealing tape right out there on the counter 24/7. 

I suppose that in an ideal world I would have a big rack for my hanging rods, like at Home Depot where dowels of different lengths each have their own little compartment and you could instantly go to the 35-inch space.  It would go right next to the big empty counter with the sealing tape, under which would be a dozen empty long boxes in assorted sizes.  I'll invite you over when I get this all organized.  Perhaps in the next century.

Quilt storage revolution

Yes, I believe that cleaning the studio is an excellent form of procrastination, so I try to do it as little as possible.  Yes, I believe that too much organization is the death of creativity.  Nevertheless, every now and then I find myself sucked into the maelstrom of home maintenance.  This time it happened because I needed to get to a quilt at the bottom of my storage pile and that was enough hassle to make me want to change my ways.

I have always used one of my guest bedrooms as quilt storage -- everything was piled on top of a queen-sized bed.  Actually that's not a bad storage method, as long as you protect the quilts from the sun (I keep the curtains drawn and usually put quilts on the bed face down) and as long as you don't need something from the bottom of the pile. 

Which I do every now and then.  Sometimes I could just fold the upper quilts back and pull the one I want out of the middle without disturbing things too much.  Sometimes I yanked, just like that science experiment where you pull the tablecloth out and the dishes stay put, except that it never worked out quite as well for me as it does on TV.  Sometimes I had to dump the top layers on the floor and put them back after I got what I'm after, preferably with a helper.

But it's never very easy.  And so this time I decided this was dumb, my whole storage concept needed a makeover.

I spent a lot of hours last week sorting through the quilts, pulling out everything old for "remote storage," sorting them by size, and rolling them into what my husband always calls body bags.  Had to stop every hour or so because I was working on a bed, which was too low and gave me a backache.

But here's what I ended up with.

These eight rolls hold 72 quilts, and that's not everything I own.  All the new work, current enough to be entered in shows, will stay on the bed.  The most recent batch of show quilts, which have probably outlasted their shelf life, will go into one roll, easy to retrieve in case I need them.  All my small quilts are already sorted out and stored in under-the-bed boxes. 

You might wonder whether I have just traded one unwieldy pile for another.  Clearly the rolls can't stay where they are, blocking access in a second guest bedroom.  And no, I don't know where I'm going to put them.  They will have to stay horizontal, which makes it more difficult.  But I'll figure that out this week.

I know this is not the ideal method of quilt storage.  Actually, the ideal is something very similar to what I started with -- laying the quilts flat on a bed-like platform -- but ideally you have only a half dozen quilts in the pile, which requires a lot of platforms.  I know some people who roll each quilt individually, but I don't have enough space, nor enough pool noodles, nor enough old sheets, to do that.   I haven't cushioned between the quilts with archival tissue paper or insulated the rolls with muslin.  But they are rolled up neatly, and arguably safer from environmental insult than when they were lying on the bed.

Ideal or not, I feel very good about this accomplishment.  Not only will it make life easier when I have to get a quilt out for a show or demo, it gave me a feeling of freedom, that a burden had been lifted.  Now I'm hoping that my free feeling will translate into a new burst of creativity.

Cleaning the studio

I had to laugh at some of the comments left by readers of my post yesterday, assuming that my studio is now neat and organized, just because I said I'd spent a couple of days puttering around.  First, I spent most of the time braiding cords, not actually cleaning.  But more important, the messiness of my studio is legendary, and it would take a couple of hundred days of puttering around to actually achieve organization.  That will not happen in my lifetime.

Once I spent the better part of three months trying to clean and organize my studio, and did make major improvements, but then I realized that (a) the place was still not ready for the Fine Studios Magazine photographic team, and (b) I hadn't made any art in three months.  I came to the conclusion -- not sure if this is reason or rationalization -- that cleaning the studio can be one of the higher forms of procrastination.  If you say you haven't made art in three months because you've been cleaning your studio, people approve, whereas if you say you haven't made art in three months because you've been playing Spider Solitaire, they don't.

I clean on a need-to-know basis.  If I need the whole work table or design wall panel to assemble a very large quilt, I'll clear it off.  I do a great deal of cleaning and organizing in the course of searching for something I need, but when I find it, I go back to work.

Fortunately I must have the kind of brain that thrives on chaos.  I think some of this is genetic, but it was certainly exacerbated by my first career, as a newspaper journalist, in which you had to do your work in a large room full of ringing telephones, people wandering in and out, a dozen conversations going on within earshot.  I learned quickly to tune out distractions and focus on my work.

My first (messy) desk at my first real job.  The typewriter was manual; the balloon and the vacant look were temporary.  PS -- some years later I married the cute guy sitting behind me.

I've always thought that an empty desk was the sign of an empty mind, and eked out a successful career from piles of papers stacked on the desk, the bookcases and occasionally the floor.  Not as bad as some offices I've seen, and probably my studio is not as bad as some others.  But certainly not ready for the magazine.

In a sense, that brain vibe is probably related to much of my work.  Although I admire spare, minimalist compositions by other people, my own work tends more toward the termite end of the spectrum.  (Termite art = that which is composed of a bazillion tiny bits, put together in an obsessive manner.) 

I would love to have a beautifully organized, clean studio with everything in its place and all horizontal surfaces empty, ready for making art.  I'm just not willing to spend the time to get mine that way (and unless my studio were to miraculously triple in size, or I were to throw out much of my stuff, it's physically impossible).  So I've decided to grin and bear it.  And just writing this has made me feel a lot more energetic than I was earlier in the week.  Time to go downstairs and see if I can make some art instead of just braiding cords.

On cleaning the studio

The Quilt National entries are finished, photographed and mailed.  Now what's a girl to do?

It's not like I don't have anything else in progress.  When I decided in February to put my Quilt National eggs in the basket of fine-line pieced quilts, I had two postage stamp quilts (like Regatta and Memorial Day over in the right-hand margin of this blog) substantially underway.  I could probably get one of them finished in less than a week of work.  And I have a couple of pieced tops that I made three years ago, designs that I'm very proud of, all ready to quilt.

But somehow when you finish a huge project you aren't always ready to leap right in with another one, especially if no deadlines loom.  It's a good time to cleanse your artistic palate with a nice refreshing sorbet and not think too hard for a couple of days.  When I find myself in this pleasant place, my favorite thing to do is to pull out a bag of scraps and make something frothy, maybe a baby quilt.

So why did I decide instead to clean out my studio? 

Yes, it sure needed it.  I have spent several days puttering around, putting things away and cleaning, and feel a great deal of accomplishment.  My ironing board now has nothing on it but the iron!  The fabric I had out for the last four or five quilts has been put back in the drawers, and the small scraps and leftover bits sorted into ziplock bags for future use.  The wastebaskets are full and the walking space around my work table is considerably wider than it was two weeks ago.  Many items missing in action for months were excavated from the debris.  All the thread has been put away in its proper drawer, and I even rolled the thread ends back onto the spools.

Yes, an outside observer might still think that the studio was just vacated by hostile cops with a search warrant, but I recognize how much better it looks than it did two weeks ago.

I've never subscribed to the concept that a messy desk means a messy mind.  Sure, I'd love to work in a huge, clean, uncluttered studio where everything was in its place and I could serenely glide about finding anything I wanted in one minute flat -- wouldn't you?  But I'd also love to have that huge studio in the first place, with the acre of storage space, the nice cabinets and the army of elves to get everything organized, then come around behind me and put things away when I'm done with them. 

Several years ago I decided to clean up my studio once and for all.  I spent two months at that project, and the place did get a lot neater, but it never even approached that perfect state of bliss I thought I was supposed to crave.  Finally I decided I could either keep on cleaning, or make some art.  And decided I'd rather make art.

I have listened to many an artists' discussion about how we put obstacles in our own paths, and have decided that one of those obstacles is the need to clean out the studio before getting started on the next project.  What a convenient and effective means of procrastination!  Since then I have been searching for the happy medium, cleaning enough so the health department doesn't shut me down but not enough to occupy the best part of my time, energy and imagination. 

Besides, it hurts to be in the studio and not turn on the sewing machine.  How long can my current attack of cleanth last?  Stay tuned.