Two new quilters show their stuff

Today I get to share with you two quilts made by the younger generation -- one of the best things that can happen to our favorite skill and pastime is to pass it along to the kids.  Anna Shanahan writes from Australia that she and her two girls read my Rail Fence book over the holidays and chose some fabrics to turn into quilts.

Sophia, who is 11, wanted a star effect, and her mom suggested a pinwheel layout with rail fence blocks.  She liked blue and purple, and after a discussion on color theory they decided to use yellow and orange for the edge rails for a high-contrast palette.  Sophia developed an interesting technique for sewing the blocks: first she sewed a very long strip of blues and purples.  "She sewed the yellow rails onto the ends of the long strip, then cut or unpicked the blocks off the ends, and repeated the process. She seemed to enjoy it, and stuck to it pretty well. Once she had her blocks, she fiddled around with the layout, then sewed it up."

Sophia's quilt in progress

Sophia's finished quilt top

Imogen, who is 8, liked two quilts in the book that were made from very fat rails alternating with very thin.  Anna writes: "We discussed the beautiful fabrics used, and the thin rails. Then we had a look through the fabric here to see if there was a biggish piece of something she found exciting. She seized on the planet fabric, then went about choosing fabrics to insert. She'd been involved in the earlier colour theory conversation, and went about making her choices with great confidence and assurance. I was quite surprised, and frankly delighted to see the decisions and choices she made. It's been really interesting to let other people make use of the fabrics here.

Imogen's quilt top

Imogen's quilt top (detail) 

"I wasn't confident to let her use the cutter, so she marked the fabric where she wanted it cut, both for the main fabric and the contrast rails. Then she sewed the strips into blocks, put them up onto the wall, and decided what order to put them in. She was struggling with the long, pieced seams, so I put those ones together. However, she loves pressing, so did all the ironing work."

"It's been a fantastic and achievable process for everyone. The girls are really proud, and want to show their friends how to do it. I think we'll be having another workshop next holidays. I like that the quilts are so different to each other, and to what I make. It took very little input from me, despite their lack of previous experience.  And the girls are already planning their next pieces."

What a great story!  There's nothing quite so exciting as to help a child learn a new skill, and watch her use it with confidence and fun.  Good work, Sophia and Imogen!

Not fun / not art?

Earlier this week I wrote about my daily art project, which requires me to collect text from the newspaper or other printed sources and paste it up into a "poem" or other presentation.  I said I was feeling overwhelmed by the collection and sorting of my raw material, and still didn't feel as though I totally understand where this project is going.

One of my readers left a comment on the post:  "I see a daily art activity as being something FUN with little to no background work.  What you are doing doesn't sound like fun and it doesn't look like art."

(So I take it she's not going to do a project like this in the foreseeable future.)

I thought about this comment for a while and decided I needed to write about it.  Not so much to have a debate, but to make sure my own thoughts are in order.  Having committed to this project, with 327 days left to go, I would like to feel that I've made a good decision and am going to accomplish something, even if I'm feeling a little iffy right now.

I've been doing daily art for all but one of the last 17 years and I've learned that such projects usually surprise me.  I think I know what I'm planning to do, and then it doesn't work out exactly that way.  I encounter obstacles, which either get overcome or get creatively avoided.  New ideas sneak in and make themselves at home.  I learn things and incorporate them into my daily practice -- and often they slop over into the rest of my life and art.  So feeling in early February that I don't quite understand what's going on is perfectly normal.

I differ with the reader on the part about "little to no background work."  If something requires no work I'm not sure it's worth committing to doing it 365 times.  True, I don't want my daily project to take up two hours, but I also don't want to dash it off in two minutes.  To my mind, the point of an art project, daily or not, is to stretch your brain and your art muscles, to do something that challenges you, or improves your skill, or produces something worth having, or all of the above.  I don't do art for fun, I do it to say something, to learn something, to make something.

That's one reason I commit to a daily project rather than just promise myself "I'll make some art when I can."  The fact that the daily art gets made even when I'm sick, or busy on another project, or on an airplane, gives substance to the work, a new dimension that wouldn't be there if I just made stuff every now and then.  The fact that some days obviously involved more work than others is part of the texture of the project.

So yes, I'm having fun, if you define "fun" as feeling good about what you're doing, that you're accomplishing something.  The fact that I'm wrestling with logistics is part of the fun; the fact that I figured out how to use sticky notes to organize my little cuttings is part of the fun.  Each time I discover a new trope -- such as this one, in which I present every name that appeared on the front page of that day's newspaper -- it's exhilarating, realizing that I'm going to come back to that again, and over time it will be interesting to compare the different versions of that trope.



But is it art?  In some ways it's very little different from my collage projects, where I used text every day.  I've given myself new latitude this year to focus on the words rather than the images, which reflects my growing interest in poetry and poem-like wordplay.  So maybe the art is a little less visual this year and a little more verbal, but it's my project and if I say it's art, it's art.  (Isn't that the whole point of postmodernism?)

Stay tuned.  I'll be making this stuff for the rest of the year, and I'll keep you posted.  Meanwhile, you can see all my daily art here.

And to everybody -- thanks for reading, thanks for commenting!

Daily text project update

So my daily art project for this year is text on a 4x6 index card.  Not much in the way of rules, thus leaving me lots of room for experimentation.  I'm liking some of the pieces I've come up with, but I have yet to come to terms with this project.

It's taking up way too much of my time!

Unlike the daily art rules in 2015, I'm not required to find the text for today's piece today.  And it would be impossible to come up with some of the poems from a single day's newspaper.  Instead, I'm on the alert for a dozen or more words or themes which I cut out and file for future use.  For instance, I'm still collecting "early" and "late" even though I made a whole book on that theme last year.  And now I'm collecting "easy," "sad," "transparent," "heart" and "poetry."  I'm collecting "Bruce" for my brother and "Lynn" for a commissioned project.  I'm collecting questions, especially very short ones, and parenthetical remarks.  And several other things.

If my husband has already read the newspaper (we each initial the sections as we finish them) I will cut the phrases out as I encounter them.  If he hasn't, I'll mark the ones I want to cut out and come back later.

I end up with piles of cutout words and phrases littering the table, demanding to be sorted and filed.  My husband took a 10-day vacation, during which I resolved to get caught up on a lot of cleaning and organizing, so I now had little piles of cutouts at not one but four places at two different tables!

I realized long ago that dealing with tiny cutouts is difficult -- you have to spread them out to see what you have before you can proceed with "writing" your poems.  Last fall I had them sorted onto trays while I was working, and then put them into envelopes when I was in collection mode.  But then when it's time to dump out the envelope you have to sort them and spread them out.

Finally I figured out that I could sort and store the cutouts by using the sticky side of sticky notes.  And realized that I could tape six sticky notes onto a large index card to be able to see lots at once without too much shuffling through different pieces of paper.

So after a week of serious cutting, sorting and pasting, I have many of my clippings easily at hand and not occupying our entire eating spaces.  But I'm still worried that this project is taking up way too much time.  I don't ever intend my daily art to occupy my life, just take a little time in between "real" art.  I haven't gotten to that point yet, but I better figure out how to do so pretty soon.

You can check out all my daily art at my daily art blog.

My favorite things 6

My paternal grandfather, who died long before I was born, was a blacksmith and also went on the road as a salesman for the De Laval Company.  Gustaf De Laval was a Swedish engineer who invented many varied devices, including a submarine and a nozzle that tapped a steam turbine at supersonic speed (invented in 1890, the nozzle is used today in rocket engines).

He also invented milking machines and cream separators, which greatly eased the backbreaking labor of dairy farming.  That's what my grandfather sold to the farmers of central Michigan in the 1920s and 1930s.  Like any good salesman, he had a bag full of giveaway crap to lay on the potential customers.

The giveaway that I remember from childhood was this set of metal cow and calf, which came in an illustrated envelope.  You took the animals out of the envelope, then carefully pulled their legs apart just enough so they could stand up.  When I was little, my grandmother's toy/junk box had at least one set of these in action, which we could play with.  But at some point in adulthood I acquired a mint-condition envelope of unbent, unhandled cattle.

I bent the legs just enough to let them stand inside a frame, along with their envelope.
  
These are Jersey cows, although the ur-cow of my childhood was a Holstein.  As a barely verbal kid I was infamous among my parents' friends for knowing the different breeds of cows.  One time my godmother said "Look, Kathy, there's a cow!" And I allegedly said "That's not a cow, that's a Holstein."

Well, we spent a lot of time in those days just driving around in the country, looking at the scenery.  And there wasn't that much scenery to look at besides the cows.  So why not concentrate on the details?

Why magic cross stitch is hard... at first

I wrote yesterday about my "magic cross stitch" approach -- stitching from the back of the fabric.  I didn't think this would be at all difficult to learn but I was wrong.  If you want to try this kind of stitching, I'll try to give you a tutorial and hope that you aren't confused too.

If you were doing running stitches from the back of the fabric, of course, you wouldn't be confused in the least, because the front and back of the work look the same.  But cross stitch is a different animal.  On the front, it makes Xs, but on the back it makes boxes or ladders.  And it's surprisingly hard to visualize what's happening on the front when all you can see is the back.

That's the magic, of course -- not knowing exactly what's going to show up on the front of the work.  But it can be frustrating, until you get into your rhythm.

Look at diagram 1 -- we're making a single cross stitch.  The darker, thicker blue line is what we see from the back of the work.  The thin, pale blue line is what's happening on the front.  All you see from your side of the work is your knot, one horizontal line, and the thread emerging, ready for the next stitch.  Maybe it's easy for you to visualize the cross on the other side; maybe not.

In diagram 2 we're making a whole bunch of cross stitches in a column.  What we see as we stitch is a double ladder of horizontal stitches -- one set as we go down the column, a second set as we come back up, completing the crosses.

In diagram 3, we're making random crosses, not in a column or pattern, just scattered here and there.
If you're looking just at the back of the work, you may be totally confused!

If you can perfectly visualize the crosses on the front of the work by looking at this, you're better than I am!

So here's my advice.  Always keep your needle on top of the fabric. Never stab down, then move your hand underneath to grab the needle and stab back up.  If you make each stitch as a scoop -- down, then up in the same motion -- you can always see whether your needle is going on the diagonal.  And as long as your needle is always on the diagonal, you're going to get a cross-stitch pattern.  Even if you don't eventually cross that stitch to make a perfect X, the diagonal will fit into your overall pattern and look great.

If you want to make a whole column of cross stitches, I recommend that you use a mantra as you stitch so you don't lose your place.  You'll start at the top of the column, work down, and then come back up later.   If you're right-handed, put your needle in and tell yourself "southwest, east, southwest, east."  The first stitch goes diagonally down toward the southwest, then on your side of the work, you go to the east and put the needle in again.  Coming back up the column, your mantra is "northwest, east, northwest, east."  Lefties say "southeast, west" going down and "northeast, west" coming back up.

Let me know if this approach works for you!

Pat your head and rub your stomach...

Last week I taught a workshop for my local fiber and textile group, on a subject that I thought would be easy as pie.  I called it "Magic Cross Stitch" but really it was only the technique of filling your cloth with cross stitches by working from the back side of the fabric.

Why do this?  Actually I started out by stitching blind, a technique that Dorothy Caldwell famously teaches on the first day of her hand stitching classes.  I took it to extremes several years ago when my dear friend and art pal Terry Jarrard-Dimond took a class from Dorothy and loved the blind stitching.  We decided to each stitch blind for 12 hours -- one of us on black fabric, one of us on white.  Here's the finished pair:

Equinox: Night and Day

My half was the night; Terry's was the day.  She mostly used seed stitch; I mostly used cross stitch.  Read more about this project here.

I loved this stitching; it looked so weird, so random, so unplanned.  But it took way too long; that number of stitches would take me perhaps two hours if my eyes were open.  The other ten hours were spent untangling threads, making sure the thread lay flat against the fabric, avoiding loops, making sure the stitches weren't too tight, getting the thread unwrapped from the buttons of my shirt.  Almost all those tasks would have been unnecessary, of course, if I hadn't had a blindfold on.

So I thought of another way to achieve the surprise, the random and weird look of the blind stitching but without the hassles of blind thread management.  I worked from the back of the fabric, not the front.  Even though the cross stitch is so simple, it's amazingly difficult to visualize from the back of the fabric what's happening on the front.  I did a lot of "magic cross stitch" a couple of years ago, after finishing the blind stitching, and I loved the results (the project is still in process).

I thought this would be a great technique to share with my fiber art pals, and arranged to lead a workshop.  I'll tell you about it tomorrow!