No, you can't be art after all

Several years ago I got the idea to save the empty prescription bottles that had finished their careers of keeping us alive.  I had a vague idea that I would assemble them into a huge sculpture, with all their different sizes and shapes (because god knows we have gone through a huge variety of medications since starting to get old).  I even tried holding some together with wire, after putting holes in the bottles with an awl.  Which turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, because prescription bottles are apparently designed to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis and chain saws.  The art project never has materialized, but the prescription bottles keep piling up.

Does this remind you of any art projects that may be resisting arrest in your own studio?  Have you ever put things away for a specific purpose -- or maybe just a vague idea -- that never happened?  I think we all have UFOs sitting there out of gas.  A lot of people feel compelled to finish them, even if they don't want to.  My friend Robin is in a group that has pledged to finish a UFO every month, on pain of financial penalty if they don't meet their deadlines!

I think this is kind of a dumb idea, with all due respect to Robin.  Yes, I have frequently put projects aside because they aren't coming along properly, or I get tired of them, and sometimes when I run into them months or years later they call out to me to be finished.  Sometimes the idea that eluded me so long ago springs to mind.  Sometimes the thought of mindless but useful sewing appeals, if my emotional state needs mindless but useful sewing.  But I firmly do NOT believe that there is a moral obligation to finish everything you start.

Especially as you get older.  Understanding that you have a limited number of days of art left in your life, do you want to spend them finishing up some ugly damn quilt or stupid knitting that arguably you should have known better than to start in the first place?  Or do you want to spend them making something that will stretch your abilities, challenge your creativity, and give you pleasure in the task?  I go for the second door.

I kept saving those prescription bottles, though, even while admitting intellectually that the huge sculpture project probably wasn't a good idea, and that I didn't even much want to do it any more even if I could figure out a plan.  The process of saving the bottles had taken on a life of its own.

Then yesterday my daughter-in-law sent me a text:  "Do you have any empty prescription bottles we can have?  A friend of ours is collecting them for part of a service project."  Well, did she come to the right place!

Seems the friend, a pharmacist, is assembling care packages for elderly people in food/pharmacy deserts.  They're putting OTC medications like aspirin, allergy and heartburn remedies, purchased in bulk, into the bottles to distribute.

Here's what I  have collected so far:

I suspect there are that many again more stashed in other places in the studio.  I will resume the search.

Update:  I found more:

How to make a face mask

No, this is not a tutorial.  This is a critical review of many tutorials out there.  In times of trouble, sewists are always happy to step up and do something helpful, even if it might not be all that helpful (see my previous crabby posts about sending quilts after earthquakes here or here).  But now there's an opportunity to do something that might even be helpful -- make face masks for healthcare workers who can't get them from the normal supply chain.  The New York Times devoted a full page in today's paper to writing about the phenomenon.

Many hospitals across the country are asking people to sew and donate masks, and many sewists are responding with patterns and tutorials.  I spent a discouraging couple of hours looking at some of the directions and videos out there, and I think a lot of time and fabric is going to be spent in aid of masks that aren't going to be all that effective.  (What a tragedy that the president won't sign an order to mobilize production of masks by people who know how to make masks, instead of expecting us to straighten out paper clips to make shapeable nose bridges.)

First off, there's a huge range of quality being pushed in these directions and tutorials -- and by that, I mean the quality of the mask in actually blocking virus particles.  At the low end, fabric masks that kind of fit sort of snugly across your face, probably a little bit nicer than just tying a scarf bank-robber style.  At the high end, masks made from HEPA filter vacuum cleaner bags that match N95 respirators for efficacy (click here for the video).  In the middle, a whole range of patterns and materials that are probably better than the bank robber approach.

Second, there's a huge range of quality in sewing techniques and directions.

Low end, how about this PDF posted by a hospital in Indiana that begged for masks from the community.  Apparently the sewists figured out how to operate despite these "directions," because two days later the hospital begged people to stop bringing masks and give them to some other place.

I'm not sure what that rectangle at the bottom of the page is supposed to be -- a pattern?  Do you think a diagram or two would help people figure out how to put it together?

I found it interesting to watch how the sewists in the various videos actually sew.  You can sure tell the difference between people who sew a lot, and people who get roped into sitting at a machine to make a video.  In one video made by a hospital, the woman at the machine was sewing elastic into the corners of a mask.  Of course, she had the right sides together and when she neared the first corner, she stuck one end of the elastic in between the layers and sewed it in.  Then when she got to the next corner, she had to reach her fingers in between the layers to fish out the other end of the elastic and get it in position, which took her a painfully long time, since she couldn't see what she was doing.  Guess she hadn't thought to pin both ends in place while everything was in full view.

In a video made by another hospital, they got a young guy from the local maker space to sit at the sewing machine.  He carefully stitched back and forth once or twice at beginning and end of each seam to make sure everything was tight, never mind that in two minutes he was going to secure those seams with another seam crossing them.  And he spent at least a minute carefully snipping off the thread ends from every seam before he turned the mask inside out and sewed it shut, where the thread ends could have happily lived undisturbed forever.

Other tutorials showed good sewing technique but faulty clinical insight.  One sewist said that masks should be made in two colors so nurses can wear the light side out, and then when they go to see the next patient, they can turn it and wear the dark side out.  NO! NO!! NO!!!!  More than 140 people left comments to set her straight -- the two colors enable the nurse to put the mask back on correctly if it has to be taken off for a minute.

Masks seem to come in two general designs.  One is a simple rectangle, with pleats at the sides to gather in the vertical fullness that goes down over your chin.  The other is a "duckbill" -- think a bra cup over your lower face -- that is shaped with a vertical curved seam from your nose down.  The duckbill apparently provides a little more protection but requires a little more sewing.  Some designs have interior pockets that can be stuffed with additional filtering materials, such as paper toweling or tissues.

The good news, according to one of the videos I watched, is that firmly woven cotton alone will filter out about half of the virus-sized particles.  And that regular nonwoven interfacing, sandwiched into a mask, provides an excellent additional filter.

I'm not ready to start sewing masks, although I might make some for my family if things progress badly.  But if I were going to, I wouldn't just grab the first tutorial directions that popped up on my google search.  I'd kick the tires on several before deciding which one would give the most bang for the buck.  And I'd use up some of those beautiful batiks in my stash.  Lord knows, they're tightly woven...

A good deed

I struck up a conversation with a friend at a party Friday night and she told me how she goes to the Greyhound bus station several mornings a week to see if any asylum seekers are on their way from Texas to New York or Chicago.  Yes, there are still a few people being admitted to the U.S. with asylum claims, and put on buses to go somewhere and wait for their hearing date.  And a network of saints on earth has spring up to help these unfortunate migrants on their journey, much as the Underground Railroad helped an earlier generation of migrants.

The buses come up from Texas and stop in Memphis, but since that stop occurs at 4 a.m., nobody meets the bus and there's nobody to call ahead and tell the Louisville people what to expect.  So my friend or somebody from her network is there every day to see if anyone needs help.  Some days there are no seekers on the bus, some days there are three or four.  The morning of our conversation, my friend met a young couple and their 2-month-old baby.

The buses stop here for 40 minutes, time for the greeters give out water and sandwiches (there is no food service at the Louisville bus station, or anywhere in its neighborhood).  They try to have warm gloves and caps on hand, since most of the migrants are not equipped for cold weather.  If more help is needed, somebody will pass the word to the network in Cincinnati; the couple with the baby didn't have coats but probably the good people two hours up the road were able to find some.

I asked my friend if they have a lot of babies come through, because I happen to own a lot of new baby afghans that I would like to give away.  I like to crochet while watching TV or talking with visitors, and a couple of years ago I went on an orgy of using up piles and piles of yarn that were occupying drawers and boxes and bags in every corner of the house.  She said that would be wonderful, because it's often cold on the bus.

So yesterday I hauled out my bags and tubs of afghans -- and realized that in my usual slapdash construction approach, they all had thread ends hanging out where I had started, stopped, or changed yarn in the middle. 

I spent two hours watching a movie on TV and weaving thread ends in with a big-eye needle, and got five afghans ready to deliver at a meeting this afternoon.  I think there are eight more in the TV room waiting to be finished, and I hope I can do that before too long.

This made me feel really good.  Yes, this project clears out at least one cubic yard of stuff that I am thrilled to divest.  But it also allows me to demonstrate in a very small way that although our government may be cruel and hostile to the tired and poor people at our borders, many of us ordinary citizens welcome them through the golden door.

Good cause, bad execution

I got a fat package in the mail from a religious group that runs a school on one of the big Indian reservations.  Unpacked it to find:

three greeting cards with envelopes

a calendar, a sheet of stickers and a certificate of appreciation with my name

a dreamcatcher

two cute plastic tote bags and a ballpoint pen

And of course a fundraising plea -- would I please give them $25 to help them serve the children.

You have to wonder, of course, how much it cost them to buy and package and mail all this stuff.  Not to mention how much it cost to hire the marketing genius who thought up this campaign. I'm sure it's designed to make me feel guilty -- look at all this great swag I've scored, I have to pay them back.  But for me it has the opposite effect -- if money is so scarce, why don't you spend it on the children instead of sending me plastic tote bags?  What kind of weird, stupid decision-making is going on at this institution?  Why would I support a charity with such cynical and wasteful ideas?

Direct mail is one of the most easily monitored and evaluated forms of marketing ever invented; you know exactly how many of Letter A you sent out, and exactly how much money you got in return.  If a direct mail pitch doesn't work, you rewrite the letter and try another pitch.  So there are obviously enough suckers out there who are responding to the tote bags and dreamcatchers to make them keep doing it.  But I wonder how much will go to keep the perpetual motion direct mail machine in motion and how much to the Indian school.

Oh well, the two-year-old will love the tote bags, and maybe the ballpoint pen will write OK.  The rest goes straight in the trash.

Unexpected marketing

I've always been skeptical of the"awareness" approach to marketing and fundraising.  Instead of contributing to breast cancer research or screening or treatment, people and organizations wear pink ribbons or use pink boxes or string bras in public to promote "awareness."

It's hard to think that many adults in the US are not aware of breast cancer, or any of the other afflictions that are the subject of "awareness" marketing.  But they persist.

Such as these luggage-cart tugs spotted at O'Hare, with pink breast-cancer-awareness ribbons painted on the hoods:

The blessings box

I went to a meeting at a downtown church, and was intrigued to find two glass-front boxes on the sidewalk in front.  One was the standard Little Library box, with some books in it, but the second was labeled "Blessings" and contained a couple of bars of soap and some packages of cheese crackers.  The neighborhood gathers a large number of homeless people, with various overnight and day shelters and soup kitchens, as well as freeway overpasses and secluded camps, so this seemed like a good way to dispense small useful things to those in need.

The next time I was in the neighborhood I brought a big bag of hotel soaps and shampoos that had been accumulating in my cupboards.  The box was empty and I was happy to restock it.  I was corresponding with my daily email pal and remarked that for those at the lowest end of the ladder, soap could be a luxury.  She wrote back, "but where will they use the soap?"

I decided I should be responding to more immediate needs, so the next time I was at the grocery store I bought eight jars of peanut butter.  That seemed like a good offering: nutritious, won't spoil, stand-alone if necessary.  I drove past the box a couple of days later and the PB was all gone, so apparently somebody wanted it.

I mentioned this to my son, who has way more knowledge of downtrodden people than I do.  He said food was always welcome, but maybe I should think about some other supplies that might be hard to get and warmly welcomed.  He suggested bandaids, painkillers, toothpaste and toothbrushes, tampons, hand sanitizer, wet wipes.  Also shoe sole inserts, because when you can't afford a new pair of shoes, the inserts make the old ones a bit less awful.  And, of course, sox, underwear, gloves, toboggan hats.

On our next grocery trip, while my husband browsed the produce, I browsed the pharmacy and found two bags full of things for the blessings box.

We've always given money to several agencies that help the homeless, but somehow I feel more personally connected now that I can put things into the box and see that they have been taken and used.  I'm going to try to keep that box stocked; maybe next time, a whole case of PB, and a lot of tube sox. 

Perhaps there's a blessings box in your town; if so, I recommend it for your charitable impulses.  Especially on very cold days.

A goat named Kathleen

Just checked my email and was intrigued by a message with the subject line "A goat named Kathleen Loomis."

I have donated to the Heifer Project before, following in the footsteps of my parents who would give a sheep or chickens to poor families in faraway places as Christmas gifts to their grandchildren.  When our grandchild turned six last year, we thought he was old enough to understand the concept of charity, so we donated a goat and had the project send him a personal letter.  (A nice touch -- I got to write the message, and they printed it out with a goat picture and mailed it to him.)

Afterwards, his mom reported back that a few weeks after the letter arrived, he wanted to know when the goat was going to arrive and where they would put it, since the back yard is kind of small.

Oops.  I said maybe we did this too early -- maybe he isn't old enough to understand how this works.

No, she said, he understood and was fine with giving the goat to a poor family, but he thought after they had it for a while it would be nice if he could have it for a while too!

So this year the organization is trying hard to get me to donate again, which I plan to do, but haven't gotten around to it yet.  They have been sending me emails for the last week or so, including this one, which explains "We're expecting newborn baby goats on the Heifer Ranch this spring.  We're going to name our next baby goat after one lucky donor who makes a tax-deductible gift before midnight tomorrow.  Will it be you?"

To be honest, I'm not sure I want a baby goat named after me.  I already have a baby human named after me (well, it's her middle name, but still...) and a goat seems like a step backward.  I wonder whether this is going to turn out to be a successful fundraising approach or not.

The daily people get ready to assemble

I've written before about my "daily people," little sculptures made from leftover fabric bits.  I started making them as a 30-day project for my art book club, but when the month was over they kept coming.  I've tapered off since then, and haven't made any in several weeks, but a new challenge has brought them out of their shoeboxes and on their way to public display.

The occasion is a fundraising dinner honoring Jon Fleischaker, a local attorney who has specialized in First Amendment cases.  Artists have been invited to decorate the tables with something related to the First Amendment, and when I was asked to participate last week I thought of my little people.  I've thought all along that I wanted to eventually display them in a crowd, and since the First Amendment guarantees the right of the people peaceably to assemble, there you go!

Now to find the appropriate base, and construct some kind of supports so they can stand up.  Maybe some of them will carry signs.  Maybe I'll need more of them, especially men (since so many of the ones I've already made seem to have skirts -- not that I've deliberately tried to make women, but that it's easier to construct skirts then legs).  I'll probably want to hold a casting call and reject some of them who don't seem to play well with the others.

here's a new guy made from the strips I cut off the bottom of Isaac's Cub Scout pants

I'll keep you posted on what happens next!  The art has to be installed on October 17 so I have to get going.

My favorite things 33

Many years ago, the League of Women Voters saved my life.  I was back from three years living in Germany, but feeling like a stranger in the city we had returned to; instead of a young single woman working at an exciting career, I was a slightly less young married woman with an almost-two-year-old, no job and precious little to fill the day besides library books, grocery shopping and changing diapers.  Life seemed not particularly rewarding, it didn't look like that was going to change any time soon, and I was feeling desperate.

My friend Dot Ridings, called me up one day and ordered me to come to a League meeting next week.  The next thing I knew, I had a job doing the newsletter and was thrilled to be able to spend several hours each week with adults talking -- and doing something -- about affairs of substance.

Dot went on to a distinguished run as national president of the League of Women Voters and several other high-power posts in journalism and non-profits, but at the time she too was a young mother, on leave from her own career and searching for something meaningful to fill the gap.  She told me the League had saved her life, and if would save my life, and she was right.

The League became so important to me that after my second child was born, we detoured on the way from the hospital to visit the office before he even got home.  The first child remembers fondly being a brat on camera while I was being interviewed by a TV reporter about voting procedures.  Both children remember stopping off at the polls on the way to or from school so they could be lifted up to "help" me vote; sometimes the whole carpool got to "help."  The League had a little dummy voting machine, about the size of a ream of paper, that I would take to school for demonstrations as election days approached.

Eventually I held practically every job there was on the local board, including president, and when we had a major remodeling job, I rescued this sign from the dumpster, and now it hangs outside my office.  It had hung over the back door of the League building for decades, inviting women to come in and put their formidable, but so often underutilized, talents to work for the public good.  It's hard to remember how quickly society's expectations have changed, how within my own adulthood the majority of educated women did not have paid employment, did not have that many outlets for their energies and intelligence and ambition.

For so many other women, as well as myself, the League -- and other volunteer organizations focused on social change and good works -- was indeed an ENTRANCE to a world in which our skills and energies were developed and appreciated.  I treasure those years of volunteer work and the organization that was, and is, almost always on the right side of every issue.  Would that today's political scene still valued the informed participation of citizens in government.

Protesting art, yet again

I guess it's sort of a good sign when people protest art -- at least it shows they are aware of art.  But many protests strike me as wrong-headed.  For instance, I just read about a protest of an artist from Mali who has an installation in Athens as part of Documenta 14, the big international show of contemporary art.

The artist, Aboubakar Fofana, set up natural indigo vats and dunked 54 lambs, turning them various shades of blue, to represent the 54 countries of Africa.  The lambs are grazing in a pasture during the run of the art show.  Sounds fairly benign to me, but animal rights activists have vandalized Fofana's studio and disrupted his opening presentation.

Since indigo is harmless (how many of us have walked around with blue fingers after a dye session and lived to tell the tale?) one might wonder what was so offensive about the stunt.  The vandals helpfully explained in a blog post, "You choose to say nothing about confinement, nor the massive murders of the industry, and you added to the humiliation (by using the sheep) as objects in the spectacle."

Hmmm.  So if I make a piece of art about an elephant, and I choose to say nothing about poaching and the illicit ivory trade, I deserve to have my studio destroyed?  (Did these activists protest when Chris Ofili got famous by incorporating elephant dung into his works?)  What if I make a piece of art about Germany, and I choose to say nothing about Hitler?

I think this installation, as described in my favorite online art newspaper, Hyperallergic, is delightful.  Fofana said, "I want to show something else with this special flock of lambs, and that is beauty.  Wherever African people move, we bring with us our culture and our traditions, and we fuse them with what is local.  And the new places we come to are richer and more beautiful for this fusion.  Out of the necessity of leaving, new cultures and traditions are born, nothing is static and nothing changes without creation.  Indigo itself is something which has travelled throughout and out of Africa along trade routes for thousands of years."

I believe that there's an important place for protest in today's world -- heaven knows there's plenty wrong going on -- and perhaps the industrial practices of the sheep industry belong in that category, although I have so far seen no evidence.  But this protest, and so many others I've read about recently, strike me as purely opportunistic.

It seems there are people with a cause who survey the world solely to identify a key word -- sheep! World War 1!  Ebola!  narcissism! -- and then do their damnedest to write an op-ed or get booked on a talking-head show or launch a Twitter hashtag or vandalize an artist's studio to flog their own cause or plug their new book.  Makes no difference whether the sheep in question is being mistreated or not, whether the new book actually has anything to do with the current event being "commented" upon.

Like so many other innocent bystanders in trainwrecks of various shapes and sizes, art gets trashed as collateral damage.  Oh well.  Only those who care about art are disturbed.

Lots of shelves

My husband flagged a story in Saturday's New York Times about the complicated rules on forgiveness of student loans for people who work in public service.  It grabbed his eye because our daughter-in-law (and her student loans) works for Legal Aid.  When he passed the paper along, I was way more interested in the photo than in the story.

New York Times photo

Here's Jessica Schreiber, who started a nonprofit called Fabscrap, which collects and recycles "pre-consumer textile waste" from designers, garment manufacturers, decorators and others.

I looked up the organization, which is based in New York City, and learned some things I hadn't known.  Such as that in New York, if more than 10% of the waste of a business is textiles, it must recycle.  The waste that Fabscrap collects is sold to designers, students, teachers, artists, sewists and quilters, and I guess anybody else who wants some.  Some are sold online.  Certain materials are shredded for insulation, carpet padding, moving blankets and other industrial products.

Here's the good news for those in the New York area: if you volunteer to help sort the stuff that comes in on the trucks, you can take home anything you want, for free.

But all I could think of when I saw the photo was that Jessica's stash looks kind of lame -- all those shelves, so little fabric!  Any self-respecting quilter of my acquaintance, even me, post-divestiture, could come up with a better-populated backdrop for a fabric-related portrait.

Just a little turmoil

I've written about the quilt I'm making to enter the SAQA "Turmoil" exhibit, and thanks to my husband being gone and not having to make meals or otherwise be sociable, I have finished sewing the top.  I think it looks pretty good; I'd give it a B in the category of for the first time you try something new.

Interestingly, the first time you try something new can fall anywhere on the quality spectrum.  I have looked back at some of the "number one"s in my longer series and thought they were embarrassingly crude (the technique hadn't yet been refined by practice) or embarrassingly simple (I hadn't yet figured out how to add complexity).  On the other hand, I have looked back at some "number one"s and realized that I hit a home run the first time out of the dugout, and much as I tried, I could never recapture the magic.

Here's one that I thought was great --

Crazed 1: Tricolor

I've made more than 20 in this series and while some have been pretty spectacular, I was never able to make another with this lovely character of different widths of the fine lines.  This quilt was sold out of the SAQA@20 traveling exhibit and I've always been sorry that it's gone.
But I digress.  I realized that the red turmoil quilt had become something I wasn't anticipating -- shapes made entirely out of pieced fine lines.  Arranging the shapes into a composition turned out to be easier said than done, especially since I did no advance planning and some of the shapes ended up sewed into larger expanses of background so they couldn't be shifted around without a lot of ripping and resewing.

But anyway, the top is done.  Now to decide how to quilt it.

I took some of my leftover bits and sewed a small quilt, just 6 x 8 inches, to donate to the SAQA Spotlight auction at their conference in April.  (If you're a SAQA member and want to make something small and non-threatening for a good cause, check out the Spotlight requirements here.)

(Actually I want this photo to be turned 90 degrees clockwise, but Blogger isn't letting me do that.  Tip your head to the left and see what you think.  And don't be distracted by those wider strips at the corner; the outer 3/4 inch will be hidden underneath a mat.)

Making the tiny quilt served three purposes: first, to use up the leftover bits; second, to donate to the good cause; and third, to test quilting approaches.  This particular quilting approach, in which I generally follow the lines of the piecing, worked just fine on a 6x8" piece, since I could easily turn it under the needle when the direction of the piecing changed.  But it would be impossibly tedious with a larger quilt, so I need a new approach.  I'll keep thinking.

Divestiture 3

Ten years ago I took a workshop from Nancy Crow in which we were supposed to make a vertical composition 4 feet by 8 feet in black and white, contrasting areas of small, complicated piecing with areas of larger, more serene expanses.  I begged permission to make mine horizontally instead of vertically, as I have problems on ladders, and came up with the idea of a semicircle, which of course would fit perfectly into a 1x2 area.

Black Planet, in progress

I liked my black and white composition but never got it completed in the two days allotted, let alone sewed together.

Then we were supposed to replicate the composition but add neutral colors to the B&W.  I got this far in the workshop and never returned to either of the pieces when I got home.  My design walls at home are nowhere near as expansive as at the Crow Barn, and I got distracted by finishing up my alphabet series for a solo show later that year.

Brown Planet, in progress

(Brown Planet, still pinned to its design wall backing from the Barn,  subsequently got passed along to my internet pal Norma Schlager, who finished it and entered it in Houston, where it won a prize.)

When I returned to the Crow Barn the following year I also returned to the exploding planet motif.  My first try was a disappointment.  I had wanted to get it sewed together, in contrast to the two previous Planets, and didn't take enough time. I liked the colors but thought the composition was too crude and didn't like the way the circle was cropped at the right.

Blue Planet, in progress

I took that one down and started a second one.

second Blue Planet, in progress

This one I worked on at home and finally finished in 2011.  I wasn't thrilled with the composition (probably should have stopped piecing four inches down) but it was a workmanlike effort and I thought it might just be appropriate for some second-tier show.

Blue Planet, in progress five years later

The bigger problem was that it didn't match any of my other work.  Right after I began the two blue planets, I started working with my fine lines technique, which has occupied me for the last eight years.  As the fine line series progressed, I became more and more reluctant to show work that was not related, especially since I had no immediate plans to continue with the exploding semicircle motif.  So Blue Planet sat on the bed for years all by its lonesome.

When my fiber art group took on its community service project to provide art for our local Child Advocacy Center, I thought maybe Blue Planet had found its destiny.  And here it is, in the lobby at the reception last night.

It's hard to see in this photo, but there's a bend in the wall and the quilt fits perfectly on that panel with about three inches on each side.

Several people asked me if I had made the quilt for the space.  I said no, but maybe that was the wrong answer.

Divestiture 2

I wrote earlier about my fiber and textile group's community service project to make art for a local children's agency.  I went through my piles of old quilts and found several to donate.  Here's a pair of quilts that I made to illustrate a concept.

I never did anything more with the concept, until today, so this post can be both a show-and-tell and a project lesson.

At the time I had recently acquired a huge pile of solid strips, which got to me in a convoluted way. Many years ago Caryl Bryer Fallert (now Fallert-Gentry) taught two week-long workshops at Quilt Surface Design Symposium.  Week one dealt with strip piecing, and all students had been asked to bring in a bunch of strips to contribute to a communal pile.  They apparently brought in way more than they were able to sew, because when week two rolled around and my workshop occurred, there was still a big pile of strips on the table.

Caryl said we were all welcome to use the strips, and I did -- in fact, it sent me down the road on a long series that I should write about sometime.  On Friday afternoon Caryl announced that she wasn't taking those #@%&* strips home with her, so if anybody wanted some, take them!  You know me well enough to know that I did, and I worked with them for several years.  Probably still have some stashed away somewhere in my studio.

So back to the project lesson.   Start by making five log cabin squares, all the same size.  I didn't own a digital camera at the time and therefore wasn't obsessively documenting process steps, so you'll have to take this part on faith.  My five log cabins had alternating logs of black and bright colors, with logs of varying widths.

Stack the blocks up in a pile and slice across them at an angle.  Carefully separate the two piles by an inch or so, keeping everything in the same orientation.  Take the top piece on one of the piles and move it to the bottom of the same pile. You now have five top halves and five bottom halves, but if you take the top pair off, they don't match one another.  Sew the pairs together.  Now you have five blocks, each with a fracture seam in the middle.

Press the blocks, shuffle them and stack them up again, with all the seams going vertically.  Slice across the pile on an angle, crossing the first seams.  Again, separate the two piles, move the top piece on one of the piles to the bottom, and sew the new pairs together.  You now have five blocks with two fractures in the middle.

Each block looks like this:

But since I had made five blocks, I got this little quilt plus a bigger quilt out of the project.

As I look at the pictures, I don't understand how I managed to get those different angles on the cuts.  There should have been only two slices in the entire project, so all the angles should have been the same.

Maybe I did the slicing in two separate batches.  Guess I'll have to deconstruct the photos and figure out what happened. And if I ever want to teach this technique I'll have to make a new sample with simpler planning. But not today.

Divestiture 1

My local fiber and textile art group does a community service project every year or so in which we make art for some worthwhile agency to decorate its premises.  We have work hanging in a cancer hospital, a forest/nature preserve, a substance abuse treatment center, a hospice and a children's home.  This year we're working with an agency that helps abused children with medical and psychological care and with a facility where children can be interviewed by one person on videotape and then not have to testify and be cross-examined in a courtroom.

The agency has just moved to a new home, with lots of long, long walls totally devoid of artwork.  In fact, their recent accreditation hinged on the promise that we were going to provide plenty of art.  In addition to making the place look more friendly, the staff will use the artwork as a fast way to build rapport with children as they are escorted to the treatment and interview rooms, and to quickly gauge their verbal and emotional states in advance of the actual encounter.

Many of our members did artwork onto canvases, which were provided in two sizes, but anybody with larger works to donate was welcome to do so.  I took the opportunity to go through my piles and piles of old quilts and was able to come up with a baker's dozen that I was willing to part with.

First, I found a stack of little quilts from 2001 and 2002 that don't say anything and don't go with one another, even though they're all exactly the same size, 15 1/2 inches finished.  I seem to recall that the plan was to make a sort of sampler quilt, in which they would be individually quilted, but then sashed together.  I was using bits and pieces from scrap bags, leftovers and wherever, so there was no coherence.  Fortunately I abandoned the idea of putting them together, and put bindings and sleeves on each one.  Whereupon they have sat in a box for more than a decade doing nothing.  I think they'll look fine in the children's facility.

Here are two based on Margaret Miller's great quilt recipe, "Strips That Sizzle."

Here are two where I was experimenting with strip piecing, then cutting the strips sets on the diagonal and re-piecing.

More strip-piecing-then-cutting-again, and leftovers from a baby quilt.

Here are two very traditional patterns.  One block is about as long as I can work with a traditional pattern before getting bored and mixing it up somehow.

I'll show you more of  my donations in a subsequent post.

Surface Design Association conference 2

Another presenter whom I enjoyed getting to know at the SDA conference was Laura Sansone, who teaches at Parsons The New School for Design and has started a project called The Textile Lab, intended to raise awareness among fashion students and the public about natural dyes and local textile production.

Here's Laura taking her setup to a New York City greenmarket, where she and her students proceed to collect various castoff materials like carrot tops and cook up pots of dye.

In addition, she is trying to encourage local textile production among small farmers along the Hudson Valley north of the city.  New York has many alpaca farms, as well as sheep, and leather can be made from the hides collected at meat slaughterhouses.  Laura sees many similarities between the local food movement and local textiles, to improve quality and foster economic development and environmental sustainability.

Laura wants to encourage designers to become more aware both of local production and of reuse and recycling.  Her classes work closely with Green Eileen, a venture that collects and resells Eileen Fisher garments; a favorite activity is to use (locally produced, of course) wool roving to needlefelt over holes in garments as a combination of decoration and functional mending.

Laura is a smart and dynamic artist and teacher, and I liked hanging out in her workshop and playing with needlefelting.  Here's my (sadly) unfinished work of art.

But I can't wholly buy in to the cause.  Just like local foods, local textiles are a tiny niche activity that may deliver fine quality and lots of romantic feelings, but also is expensive and self-limiting.

You can't feed the United States from local truck farms, nor can you clothe us from local sheep.  (Among other things, we probably don't want to wear all that much wool, especially in the summertime.)  And even if we could produce enough stuff to go around, most of the people couldn't afford the clothes or the food unless the farmers worked for slave wages.  Nor do I suspect that most of the people in the US could afford to buy resold Eileen Fisher clothes, even though they cost less than they did the first time around.  (The website provides no price info, just says they're "affordable.")

I hate to be so cynical in the face of such vigor and enthusiasm but maybe I'm just too old to get thrilled at hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show projects.  I know that change often starts with small local efforts and sometimes gathers enough momentum to have much larger impact.  But I don't think all the carrot tops in the world are going to ever replace Procion.  Whether we should even want them to is another issue.

What do you think?  Am I being too curmudgeonly?

Surface Design Association conference 1

I spent the weekend at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, in Gatlinburg TN, at the biennial conference of Surface Design Association.  It's the first SDA conference I've attended so I have to take it on faith that it's a greatly different model than past conferences that have been held in big-city hotels.  Instead, we met in the mountains, at a low-budget, low-amenities art/craft retreat center where we sat amid the looms and saws of artisans, an atmosphere that I found very comfortable.  The amenities may have been sparse but the food was great and the company stimulating.

I attended the conference mainly as a patriotic duty; I serve on the SDA finance committee and know that making the gathering a success was important to our fiscal well-being.  Had I read the agenda more closely I might not have come, because it was a highly focused conference about social engagement as part of an art practice.  If you've been reading my blog this summer you know that I'm feeling a bit jaded about social engagement art (click here for my story) and I was purely an observer of these efforts, not a believer.

The presenter I most enjoyed and admired was Carole Francis Lung, an art professor who maintains a second persona as Frau Fiber, self-described as a former East German garment worker and illegal immigrant.  Frau wears an attractive Eastern-bloc type of uniform and appears in character to raise awareness of injustices in textile manufacturing, and to help people learn to sew and fix their own garments instead of throwing them away.  Her motto is "Stop Shopping, Start Sewing."

She calls this effort the Sewing Rebellion and travels around with a bicycle-cranked treadle sewing machine so she can set up shop in random neighborhoods and mend people's garments or teach them to make their own repairs.

After a wonderful presentation to the whole group, Frau (as she's familiarly known) led a breakout session in which she invited us to become "Faux Fraus," take the oath of solidarity and bring the Sewing Rebellion to our own communities.

I was sad that I was not able to swear this oath on my sewing machine as the other workshop participants did.  I subscribe to all the principles of the Sewing Rebellion in my personal life -- you should see all the mended garments I proudly wear out in public, and one look at me will convince you that I have long ago Stopped Shopping.

But this is not my crusade.  My crusade is to liberate every quilter from having to use other people's patterns and insofar as I have any energy or inclination to take on social awareness projects, that's what I'm going to work on.  Nevertheless, I am in love with Frau and her cause.  It was great to hear about her efforts, and I wish her all the success in the world.

More about other presenters in subsequent posts.

Completely different (the portrait)

I seem to be on a revolutionary streak this spring, wanting to make art that doesn't resemble anything I've done in the past.  I made two small art pieces (here and here) by stitching directly onto cotton duck with no batting or backing, and was excited by the way the machine stitched line is neither straight nor precise (I guess I could get it to be that way if I tried hard enough, but I don't want to).

Having finished those two pieces, I wanted to keep going, and the obvious choice was to use the new technique on a small piece that I had agreed to make for the annual auction of the Louisville Visual Art Association.  We were given 8x8-inch canvases for the project.

I had a small piece of canvas left over from one of my little stitched pieces, just big enough for the 8x8 format.  I made this little guy by stitching onto the canvas in several colors, then stitching it to a piece of beige cotton, which I stretched and stapled to the base canvas.  Then I covered the staples by wrapping some twine around the edges of the canvas.

It doesn't take much dense stitching to make the underlying canvas bulge and buckle, which is particularly noticeable on his bulging eyes and eyebrows.  The 3-D effect is something I need to play with more in the future.

I sketched the face and embroidered the eyes and mouth with free-motion stitching, but everything else was done with a straight stitch.

I love this little guy so much that I'm not sure I can part with him, even though I don't have much time to start over (and would have to acquire a new 8x8 support).  Probably my best approach is to donate this guy to the auction as planned, then make a bunch of siblings in the same technique.

Note: I wrote this post several weeks ago, the day I finished the piece, but have held it for publication now since the auction, held last month, is supposed to be anonymous.  Only after you buy a piece do you get to turn it over and see who the artist was.  Of course many artists are quite recognizable by the cognoscenti, but I'll bet that nobody who knew my work would have identified me as the artist of this piece.  And that makes me happy.  I was also happy to learn that the piece was purchased during the first hour of the auction.

Disrespected again

It's been a while since I encountered one of those totally off-the-wall, in-your-face rude remarks from an ignorant jerk who thinks handicrafts are the epitome of irrelevance, so it was probably a good thing to get my periodic bucket of water dumped on me.

This one came from an unexpected corner, an article in our local magazine about philanthropy.  It was one of those too-clever "flow chart" features that purports to help you decide which local charity you should contribute to.  It starts out by asking "Do you like people?" and if you say yes, you get three choices:  helping kids, helping whole families, helping overseas.  With each choice, the arrow directs you to a box with several charities.

The flow chart continues; if you don't like kids, how about animals? (Humane Society)  If not, how about trees?  (arboretum)  How about the arts?  (orchestra, opera, ballet, etc. etc. etc.)  Not nearly enough to fill a two-page spread, so we have lots of smart-ass sophomoric "repartee" to take up some space.

Finally we have made our way through every local charity they could think of, and getting back toward the starting point.  "Does injustice piss you off?"  If you answer "Fuming just thinking about it." it points you to the ACLU.  But if you answer "Nope." the next box reads, "Fine.  Here's what you're gonna do.  You're gonna donate to the local chapter of the Embroiders' Guild of America."  And to add insult to insult, they misspelled it!  (It's really Embroiderers', of course.)

Yuk, yuk, LOL!  Isn't that a thigh-slapper?  Isn't that the most bizarre and stupid thing you could possibly think of for a final put-down?

We are not amused.

Out the door!

Ken's cousin and his wife visited last week and she mentioned that her main volunteer project is the food bank at her church, which mainly serves homeless people.  She said that they also collect clothing and although it is the dead of summer, she's starting to search for warm winter things.  That made me happy, because we own lots and lots of clothes that I would like to give to people who could use them, but I have a hard time finding a charity that will accomplish that.  Most of them seem to sell the clothes you donate, or worse yet, send them to Africa and sell them.

So I spent a half hour going through our closets finding things for Dee to take home with her.  Then I asked if she would like to have some afghans.  She said that would be fabulous, and that made me happy too because I have lots of them lying around, usually made from leftover yarn that I got at grab bag at the fiber and textile art group.  But there's more -- when I searched through a closet in the guest room I found two quilts neatly folded on hangers.

One of them was a project from decades ago in which I recycled an old skirt, a torn pillowcase, a couple of old shirts, some sewing scraps and a lot of threadbare boxer shorts.  I really liked the looks of it -- the old fabrics had a lived-in feeling that seemed restful and calm.  We used it a lot as a lap throw but it had been in the closet for years and I was more than happy to part with it.

the recycled quilt -- front...

...and back

The other was also decades old but I don't think it was ever used, probably because it was downright ugly.  Where the recycled quilt had a coherent character, this one was just a miscellaneous mess, because I hadn't learned much about design in those days.  It wasn't even quilted, just tied (but the binding was neat).

the miscellaneous nine-patch

Here's the loot, just before it was loaded into garbage bags.  One old and three new afghans, one old and one new quilt, and a lot of clothes, some of them even new.

Leaving us with a good feeling and a lot of newly empty drawer space.