Piecing fine lines -- a nifty technique

I had the pleasure of leading a workshop over the weekend for Loose Threads, a small group of fiber artists from the Evansville IN area.  We worked in several varieties of fine line piecing, and it was great to have an enthusiastic bunch of sewists who were happy to keep cutting and piecing when others might have been ready to call it a night and go to bed.

Every time I teach a workshop I learn something -- maybe a new technique that a student shows me, maybe a new way to explain or organize my own presentation.  What I learned this time around was to make good use of what we came to call "test strips."

When people make slash-and-restitch compositions, it's essential to contemplate what's going to happen before you actually make the slash, because there's no going back if you change your mind.   I confess that when I was doing a lot of these quilts, I would usually just lay down a long ruler over the quilt, stretched flat on my worktable, and if I could find a straight course across the quilt without running into obstacles such as a preexisting seam intersection, I would go ahead and cut.

Do as I say, not as I do.  I recommend that my students put their work up on the design wall, as their designs get more complicated, and audition different pieced lines before they cut.  Here's an example of how most of them would proceed: use a strip that you've already cut for a fine line, and slap it up on the design wall.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that the strips auditioning on the wall are three or four times as wide as the finished pieced-in line is going to be.  So they don't give an accurate idea of how the quilt will look.

A better idea, we realized, is to cut "test strips" that are the width of the finished line -- about one-eighth of an inch, rather than one-half inch as in the quilt above.

With accurate test strips, you can try different cuts, stand back and get a much better picture of what you have in mind.  Here are three possibilities we auditioned for one student.  In a very close view, you might see the pins or fingers holding up the test strips, but otherwise it would be hard to differentiate the real lines, already pieced, from the hypothetical ones.

We had such good results with the test strips that I'm going to incorporate that method into every fine-line-piecing workshop I ever teach again.  If you work with fine lines, I highly recommend this approach!

The best thing about it: you have to invest less than one inch of fabric into enough test lines to audition many, many cuts.

Fine-line piecing in Tokyo

I wondered at first about teaching a workshop entitled “piecing very fine lines,” which I did in Tokyo last week as part of my Quilts Japan Prize.

Would it appeal to anybody? Would there be enough substance to make people think they got their money’s worth? The technical issues can be covered in ten minutes, and we segue quickly into using people’s own designs without much guidance from me. I was happy to discover that the workshop attracted enough people to warrant a second session, and really happy to discover that the participants did beautiful things with the concept.

I wrote a couple of months ago about my anxiety to discover that many of the workshop participants apparently would want to piece by hand rather than by machine. I did figure out how to adapt the technique for hand-piecing, and sure enough, a few people did want to work this way. But as I had suspected, most of them realized the potential of the sewing machine; one or two even started by hand and switched to machine after one or two seams.

The workshop was equipped with Juki machines, one for every two participants. You probably know of Juki as a workhorse industrial machine; many quilters have long been enamored of its quality but you have to search around to find one, maybe used. Now the company has put out its first machine for the home market, and it’s a beauty. The company also provided two or three technicians for the workshop, to show people how to thread the machines and otherwise hold the hands of those who might be wary of the technology. If anybody walked into the room hesitant about machine piecing, they certainly had the opportunity to lose those doubts.

We had given minimal instructions on what fabric to bring, so in addition to solids many people had prints or stripes. I have worked almost exclusively with solids in my own fine-line quilts and it was fun to see the different effects that came from more adventurous fabric choices.

Because many of the workshop participants are teachers themselves, they were confident in striking out with the technique. (The workshop even included two former Quilt National artists, Harue Konishi and Chiaki Dosho.)  Here are several of the more ambitious pieces that were made in the six-hour class. I am sorry that I am unable to supply names with most of these photos, both because we did not have nametags and because the studies were pinned to the board anonymously.

Above is one of Harue's pieces; in no time at all she had whipped out two very different, very complicated little studies.

Here’s a piece that seemed quite Japanese in its feeling, thanks to the elegant lines and graceful curves – in fact, it made me think of a kanji character drawn with a very fine brush. I could see myself making a lot of these little “characters” and combining them into expanses of “text.”

Here’s one where the plain vanilla web of fine lines was interrupted by a stripe of complex piecing.

In all, it seemed as though everybody had fun and made some lovely little studies.  I hope they will use the technique again in their work.  I also hope I have the chance to teach fine-line workshops again -- but next time, sewing machines only, thank you.

There's still time!

Still time for you to sign up for Quilting by the Lake, the annual quilt and fiber teaching extravaganza that's held in Syracuse NY at the end of July.  QBL, sponsored by the Schweinfurth Art Center, has been going on since 1981 and each year has a bunch of talented teachers to share a wide variety of quilting approaches and techniques.

This year I will be one of them -- if enough people sign up for the workshop.

I'll be teaching a two-day and a three-day workshop -- two days on improvisational strip piecing, three days on fine line piecing.  You can sign up for one or both.

If you've never attended a week-long workshop and are not sure you're up to that long a commitment, psychologically or financially, it's nice to be able to take a shorter class as a tryout.  That's how I started attending elite workshops, with two-day classes at QSDS in Columbus OH, which made me realize I would enjoy something longer and more intense.

Other people simply prefer shorter workshops, which may fit better into busy schedules or pinched budgets.  Shorter classes also let you "try out" a teacher or a technique that you're not sure you want to invest a whole week on.

Would you enjoy taking one of my workshops at QBL?

Here are two blog posts (here and here) that I wrote about a fine line piecing workshop that I taught in Florida a couple of years ago.  It was two days, and we'll have three days at QBL so imagine that you'll accomplish even more.  Here's a blog post about an improvisational strip piecing workshop; again, we'll  have an additional day at QBL to explore that process.

Not only will this fabulous opportunity to spend two or three or five days with me expire in July, your chance to sign up for a public workshop may expire forever after this particular gig.  I've been wrestling for years with the question of how much and where I should be teaching, and have about decided not to pursue teaching at QBL or the Crow Barn or other venues where individuals can sign up for workshops.  I'll tell you more about my thinking tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Upstate New York in summer is a nice place to be.  Sign up for a workshop!!  I'd really love it if you sign up for mine, but if you must, sign up for somebody else's; lots of good teachers on the menu.  Here's the link to QBL; #17 and #18 are my workshops.

How -- and why -- I fixed my quilt

A month ago I wrote about a quilt top that I finished piecing but wasn't happy with.  I wrote "I think it's repairable, with a lot of fussy, fiddly ripping and remaking."

Shannon left a comment: "I wonder if you would be willing to share some of your critical thought processes or just general thoughts about what makes something good or not.  I struggle with this pretty often with my pieces.  Sometimes it's very clear that something isn't good, but when it's not so obvious I have a harder time.  I also really struggle with differentiation between pieces that are "good" and pieces that I just like.  I would love to hear your thoughts on this!"

I promised that I would talk more about this top, what I thought was not-so-good and how I fixed it, and last week I finally did pull it off the design wall and worked on it.

Here's the quilt in its original state, in mid-July:

When I evaluated the top, I realized I liked the inset effect of the multicolored lines in the northeast quadrant, but there were two parts of the composition that seemed weak.

In fine line quilts, of which I have made upwards of 40, I like the offset zig-zag effect that happens when you slice across an older seam and the two sides slip a bit before you sew them back together.  To me, that's the magic of this construction method (I even named a sub-series of these quilts "Fault Lines" because they reminded me of how the earth slips a bit in quakes).  But as more and more lines cross one another, the grid gets sloppier and sloppier.

So when I looked closely at this top, I realized the balance was off between the zig-zaggy lines of early seams and the straight lines of the latest seams.

First, I didn't like the wide area shown in the yellow circle.  It seemed too blowsy, too wide compared to the closer grids in the rest of the quilt.  I didn't like the contrast between the straight line on the right of that area and the wobbly line with multiple offsets on the left.  Worse, the straight line on the right went smack across the entire quilt, which emphasized its straightness.

You will notice that farther to the left is another wide area, with a looser grid than in the other three quadrants of the quilt.  But that one doesn't bother me, probably because it's near the outer edge of the quilt.

When I look at these designs I often see city maps, and I guess as you get toward the outskirts of town you expect the street grid to break down and the "blocks" to get bigger, but the yellow area, right on the main drag of this "city," bothered me.

How should I fix that?  I finally decided that the simplest way was to add another vertical road through the middle of the blowsy area, so it wouldn't be so wide and call so much attention to itself.

My second complaint was that vertical line that went clear across the quilt from top to bottom with no offsets.  I had originally planned that the fine line that went horizontally, shown in the blue circle, would be stitched back together with an offset where it crossed the vertical.  That would have put a zig into that long vertical line.  But I was careless in sewing, and the vertical line ended up just as vertical as before.  Yes, I noticed it at the time, but decided it was good enough.  (Bad decision.)

When I came back to reconsider and remake the top, I took the blue-circled seam apart and restitched it, adding the offset that was supposed to be there in the first place.  It would have been simpler to make this fix had I not compounded my initial sloppiness by slicing across the seam at the blue arrow.  I had to take apart the left-hand vertical seam, then make the cut-off segment longer so I could offset the blue-circled seam toward the right.  But when it got all sewed back together, the long vertical line in the center of the quilt now had an offset.

Then finally I added three more lines along the outer north, east and south edges.  I like the crossroads to be squared off; I think it makes the composition look more finished and balanced.  And the line at the north edge allowed me to put one more zig into that main vertical line, breaking it up a little more.

Here's the final version, ready for quilting:

International Threads challenges 1

Earlier this year I wrote about my participation in International Threads, a group of eight artists in four countries.  We had our first public show last week at the Prague Patchwork Meeting, and I'm just off the plane coming home from that visit and other stuff in Europe.

When we formed the group two years ago there was some discussion about what kind of work we wanted to do.  I said I wanted the themes or prompts to be sufficiently open that I could use these small pieces (16 x 32") as a way to work with ideas already on my to-do list.  For instance, I didn't want to have to make a Baltimore album type quilt, riff on the theme of Hello Kitty, or to make a faithful rendering of a photograph, because those approaches would never be on my artistic radar screen.

I am pleased to report that the format worked out exactly as I had hoped.  I never "had to" make a piece that didn't advance my own personal agenda, and in fact some of them turned out to be important steps toward new approaches in my "real" work.  Let me show you all seven pieces, over the next several posts, and tell you what I learned with each one.

The first prompt was "red," and I decided to use it to see if I could successfully use print fabrics in my fine line piecing. I'd previously worked with commercial stripes and a few small-scale geometric prints, but never with bold patterns like the big polka dots in this quilt.

Red Fizz, 2013































I love this quilt, even though I don't think it was totally successful. The large prints like the polka dots seemed to work better than the allover prints that read as solids.  But I liked the way the different prints each had their own bit of real estate and how their territories got all zigzaggy around the edges.

The second prompt was to use all gradations of gray and just a tiny bit of color.  I'd been working with commercial stripes on a couple of huge quilts and accumulated quite a stash of neutrals.  And I had been mulling over next steps in my fine line piecing -- I'd explored a lot of variations on the theme and was wondering whether I could do something dramatically different.  I decided to eliminate the middleman and let the fine lines pile up on themselves without any intervening backgrounds.

Linear A, 2013































I love this quilt even more than Red Fizz, so much that the minute I finished it I decided to make it again three times as large.  The result was Linear B, 42 x 73", the same composition but big enough to have a real impact.  I'd like to make it again, big, in a more colorful palette and play with the precarious balance of the pile.

Linear B, 2014














I'll show you more of the International Threads quilts in subsequent posts -- stay tuned!

Permission granted -- or maybe not

A couple of years ago I taught a class in fine line piecing in Boston, after which one of the students, G. Wong, made a couple of quite large quilts using that technique.  She wrote me last year to ask permission to enter her quilts in a show, and then wrote again last week to tell me that one of those quilts won three ribbons at the Vermont Quilt Festival in June.

G. Wong, Going on a Trip 2

And she wanted permission again, to enter the Road to California show.  I responded to her email immediately and said "I'd be happy for you to exhibit any of your fine lines quilts at Road to California, or anywhere else.  I don't feel that I own this technique any more than any other teacher "owns" whatever she teaches."

Then I looked up the new show rules and had second thoughts -- not about giving her permission, but about being asked to give permission.  Apparently this big show has changed its rules, redefining categories and including a strict new "copyright release" form.

I'd like to think that these new rules will crack down on the indiscriminate copying of other people's photos or paintings into quilt format, practices which have bothered me in the past.  However, I suspect that for every copycat work that doesn't get entered in Road to California, at least one will come up with enough paperwork to do so anyway.  (I am not so much bothered by copying photos without permission as I am by copying photos period.)

What does bother me about the new rules is not the first paragraph, which reads "If you use the designs, photography, art, pattern or quilt created by another person as the source of your design, you must obtain that individual's written permission....  This applies whether you have copied, altered, or used only a portion of the design."

OK so far -- but then the second paragraph says "This is considered derivative work, which by definition is 'something that is based on another source' and 'imitative of the work of another person.' Designs are considered intellectual property and are covered under the copyright laws of the United States."

Now think for a minute, and show me any painting ever displayed in any museum, or any quilt ever displayed in any quilt show, that isn't "based on another source."

After I thought about this for a while I wrote my student back again and told her "I don't think your quilts in any way infringe on my copyright.  I don't believe that you can copyright an idea, and you certainly have not used my designs, photography, art, pattern or quilt in making yours.  I also don't believe that their definition of derivative work is helpful in this situation, as just about every quilt ever made is based on another source.  I don't consider the fine line piecing technique to be my intellectual property and would never dream of suing you.

In the interests of protecting artists' rights I would prefer that you not sign the copyright release, since I do not believe you are infringing upon my copyright or that I have any potential legal claim.  I think you should check the "maker's original design" box on the form.

I understand you may be hesitant to follow my preference, since the show organizers have defined "copyright" so broadly, in which case feel free to submit my earlier email if you are asked for it.  But if you're feeling feisty then I encourage you to submit this as an original design, which I believe it is."

I wonder what effect these new rules will have on the quality of work in the Road to California show.  Will it cut down on the quilts that simply copy a photo?  Will it cut down on quilts made from patterns or copied from somebody else's quilt?

And I especially wonder how other teachers will respond when their former students or the purchasers of their book ask for permission to enter a quilt made with those ideas.  Will they ask to see a photo of the quilt to see whether it's a slavish copy or just a vague sorta-copy?  Will they deny permission?  (And if so, will they announce that fact far enough in advance for people to not attend the workshop or get their money back?)  Will they charge for permission?  Will they hold their former students and readers in artistic indentured servitude for years or decades?

Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic.  And I'm not sure what motivation is behind the new Road to California rules, or what they're trying to weed out.  But I'll check on the winners when they're announced in January and see whether the rules have delivered an excellent crop of work, or just more of the same-old, same-old.

What do you think?  

Collaboration project 5

I have been working with fine-line piecing for several years, but almost always with solid colors.  Recently I did some "fracturing" of screenprinted text.  While I was studying with Dorothy Caldwell recently she suggest that I start with a huge expanse of text rather than just a bit. 

But I had a better idea as I returned to my seat and passed the workstation of my friend Shelley Brenner Baird, whose screenprinting I have always drooled over. I asked her if she would consider a collaboration -- she making the fabric, I piecing in the fine line fracture pattern.  She agreed, and here's the result:

Fault Lines 5
Shelley Brenner Baird and Kathleen Loomis

Shelley's fabric was only 36 inches wide and I was concerned that it would turn out too small, since piecing in the fine lines takes up fabric.  So I augmented it with some orange fabric that I had dyed several years ago.  I love the color scheme, and was particularly pleased to note that it matched the silks of the Belmont Stakes winner, Ruler On Ice.

Good save!

Several years ago I participated in a kind of round robin quilt design project organized by Terry Jarrard-Dimond.  After she sewed the finished composition together, I asked her if I could have the leftovers, because I just love sewing leftovers into quilts, especially leftovers from other people's projects.  I always think that the energy those others put into their work carries over and gives my work a new aura that I wouldn't get entirely on my own.

I sewed those leftovers into two separate quilt tops (see them here) and eventually quilted and finished one of the tops (see it here).  But the second top languished.  It ended up in my workshop box, being shlepped around to workshops around the country so people could see the back side of my fine line piecing.

Here it is on the wall when I taught at the Crow Barn last fall.

My students wondered why I had never finished it, and we talked about its compositional failures as an object lesson.  I said I didn't think the top half really matched the bottom half, and I didn't have enough of the blue and gray leftovers to really give those colors an adequate presence in the quilt.  I said I loved the yellow area at the top -- and then I blurted out "I really should cut this into two pieces!"

You have probably had such an experience yourself, where you are surprised to hear what comes out of your own mouth, and later realize that it was true.

So as the workshop went on, I took my seam ripper and opened the quilt top into two pieces.  Earlier this year I got both of them quilted and finished.

Fine line piecing has always reminded me of aerial landscapes, and these have names to reflect that.  I don't know if I would try to exhibit them as a pair, but that's a possibility.

Left Coast, 2015

Flyover State, 2015

It's taken almost five years to progress from leftovers to finished art, but I'm happy with these.  I've always believed that if you wait long enough, and keep your work within view, it will tell you what it wants to become.  And that's what happened here.

Second-guessing the jury (or myself)

The Quiltart list has been talking about entries for prominent shows, and somebody said she was told that Quilt Visions jurors wanted to see three quilts to see if an artist was developing a particular voice.  Several other people opined that if so, this was awful, not fair, etc. 

“Maybe I'm being a curmudgeon,” one wrote, “but I also wonder then, how someone who is new to the art quilting world but produces good stuff is going to send in three worthy entries. There has to be a first time.  I also know several quilters who produce incredible work, but are incredibly slow – their pieces tend to be big and they are not prolific.”

I have to weigh in against the curmudgeon.  The last time I served on a jury we had a discussion on just this subject and decided that we had a bias toward the artist who has produced a body of work.  That’s an indication – not proof, but an indication – that the person is dedicated, serious and developed beyond the early stages of experimentation.

So how about the slow-but-wonderful quilter?  Well, perhaps the person who has produced only one great quilt in the two-year allotted time span for Visions or Quilt National is at a slight disadvantage.  After all, it means only three seconds in front of the jurors’ eyes instead of nine on the first run-through, which reduces the chances of making a good impression.  But if the quilt is really great, it certainly can overcome that disadvantage. 

But wait.  The slow-but-wonderful quilter is not the one that I’m biased against.  I’m biased against the quilter who has three pieces, but the pieces don’t seem to be emanating from the same brain.  That’s the situation that sends me little whiffs of “dilettante” or “beginner” and makes me wonder if this person is ready for the exposure of a premier show.  If I were contemplating an entry to an important show and I had only one excellent piece, I think I’d enter just that one rather than the excellent one plus two unrelated, not-so-great pieces.  I might even enter just one rather than an excellent one plus two other unrelated excellent ones.

Does this mean jurors are prejudiced against beginners?  Well, in my opinion, yes.  Not because they’re beginners, but because they haven’t yet reached a level of accomplishment that deserves recognition.  In the quilting world there are plenty of venues for beginners, but Visions and Quilt National are not among them. 

 

There is such a thing as paying your dues before you get the good opportunities.  I don’t advocate that artists should send a resume along with their digital images and entry fee, but it usually doesn’t take a resume to differentiate an apprentice from a journeyman.  One tipoff is that whole "body of work" concept.

 

Many quilters who want to play in the big leagues of Visions and Quilt National spend a lot of time psyching out the juries they’re trying to impress.  Should I submit a body of work rather than unrelated pieces?  If so, which body of work?  What if I only have two pieces in the body of work?  Maybe we’re overanalyzing the situation and shooting ourselves in the foot, but hey, you have to have something to think about when you’re lying in bed in the middle of the night not sleeping.

I had serious conversations with myself at the beginning of the year when I knew it was time to get busy on my Quilt National entry, which is due in early September.  My problem was having three distinct bodies of work. 

One was the “postage quilts” like those at the top of the right column of this page.  I liked that work a lot, had had very good luck with it recently in juried competitions (Quilt National ’09 and Fiberart International 2010), and had two new ones in progress. 

 

A second one was the fine-line piecing that I have been doing for several years, most recently a couple of huge quilts for an invitational exhibit curated by Nancy Crow.  Earlier quilts from this body of work had a so-so record with juries, accepted in two nice shows (one of these, Crazed 1,  is shown farther down in the right-hand column) but rejected in two others, including Quilt Visions, but I thought I was on a roll coming off the year of work I had put into the latest pieces.

A third one was a new 3-D approach that I had been thinking about but had not yet executed.  I thought it would be exciting and different, and would probably appeal to juries because it wasn’t like everything else they would be looking at; even if it wasn’t great it would get extra points for originality. 

 

I knew I wanted to submit all three entries from the same type of work, but which one to choose?  After much agonizing I decided to go with the fine-line piecing.  Perhaps I was foolish to abandon the postage quilts, which were on a winning streak.  But I want my quilting persona to be firmly grounded in piecing rather than in “novelty” approaches, and three novelty quilts in a row in big shows might dangerously signal that I had abandoned my roots.  Similarly, I thought it was too risky to spend eight months on a totally new approach that might turn out to be a failed experiment.

I suspect a lot of other quilters have gone or are going through similar agonies of decision-making about Quilt National, either several months ago as they decided what to work on this year, or now as they decide which of their finished works they will use for their entry.  And the joke is that we have no idea why a particular juror, or a particular jury, is going to decide yes or no.

Will the strategy work?  Will the Red Sox win the World Series?  Stay tuned for the drama of October. 

Not exactly recycling...

I've been trying for the last several months to get rid of things that I no longer need, but keep coming across boxes of stuff stowed away in closets and under worktables.  Sometimes it's straight to the grab bag pile, but other times I find work in progress, often things that I started in workshops years ago but never finished.  And often those things aren't half bad, just not exciting enough to have made me work on them once I came home.

I've thought, seriously, that perhaps my next body of work should be using up all those partially pieced expanses.  Because my fine-line piecing is so complicated and labor intensive, there's an awful lot of work invested in those little bits, and I hate to flush it down the drain.  Uncut yardage can always be donated for charity quilts, but who wants to inherit a bunch of little modules of varying shapes and sizes that cry for more intricate piecing to match?

Last month I found a box with leftovers from an experiment in piecing with stripes.  It happened at the Crow Barn in 2007 or 2008.  I was struck by this array of batiks in the fabric store, variations on brown and chartreuse. I was just starting to experiment with striped fabric as the very fine lines separating my small shapes, so the striped fabric was also appealing.  I also bought a chartreuse fabric marker so some of the white dots in the brown-and-white fabric could become green.

I sewed up a bunch of samples and was unimpressed.  I have never been a fan of brown, and though I love chartreuse, there was too much just-kinda-plain-wishy-washy-green in this bunch of fabric.  But I carefully folded and bagged up everything and took it home with me, to languish for a decade.

Last month as I unpacked that box I decided maybe the samples weren't that ugly after all.  And there were a lot of modules already sewed together.  I was in the mood for some therapy sewing, so I started sewing them together.  I even found, in another place, that chartreuse fabric marker, which miraculously still had enough juice in it for a lot of new dots.  I went through my stash of striped fabrics and found several in greens and yellows to use as the fine lines, which added a bit of interest and pep.

Halfway through I realized that I needed to make a quilt for my International Threads challenge, on the theme of "integration," and this could be it.  So I made the piecing fit the IT size, quilted it up, and sent it back to Europe with Uta Lenk, who was visiting.

Not a masterpiece, but finished. Actually, not half bad -- I like the graphic contrast of the light and dark, and the many different variations on the simple three-color palette.  And I love how all that long-ago sewing paid off in the end.  There's plenty more unfinished piecing where that came from, and maybe I'll start working with those UFOs.  I have enough square footage already sewed to occupy me for the rest of my life.

Workshop report 1 -- large-to-small

The workshop I taught last week in Ft. Myers was on fine-line piecing, the technique I have been using almost exclusively for the last six or seven years.  Although all my fine-line quilts follow the same basic approach -- separate two bits of fabric with a pieced-in very skinny line -- I have experimented with lots of variations on that theme.

I've sorted them out in my own mind into two buckets, which I call large-to-small and small-to-large.

In large-to-small, you start out with a large piece of fabric.  Cut a slice through the middle of it, piece in a very skinny line of fabric, and sew it back together -- now you have two smaller areas with a line in between.  Repeat -- now you have three or four smaller areas with lines in between.  Repeat, repeat, repeat, ending up with ever-smaller areas and ever-greater complexity.

That's what we did on Day 1 of the workshop.  After people got comfortable with the sewing technique, they concentrated on design.  And after they had worked for a few hours on a composition, they were challenged to add a second color.

Here are some examples of what they came up with:

Remembering Lynn

One of the people in my piecing class at the Crow Barn last month was Betty Goodwin, whom I have known for several years.  Even if you don't know her, you may know of her as the donor of a major prize at Quilt National, the Lynn Goodwin Borgman Award for Surface Design. Lynn was Betty's daughter, an avid quilter, and the two had frequently attended workshops and quilt shows together, enjoying the opportunity to spend time together without the distractions of family and chores.

Lynn Borgman














Lynn died unexpectedly in 1999 after supposedly routine outpatient surgery and it was left to Betty to deal with her fabric stash.  A lot was given away but Betty kept some things, including many, many yards of the old Pointillist Palette fabrics in every colorway that had been produced.

She brought some of them to our workshop, wondering if maybe she could use them after all those years.  Well, why not?  What better way to remember your loved one than to  bring her into the room with you as you work with her fabric.

Betty used the pointillist fabric for this exercise in fine line piecing, and it proved to be an interesting experiment in value contrast.  Notice how the fine lines pop out in some places and disappear in others.  She also achieved a nice effect by cutting the center panel out of the piecing and flipping it around.

Before her death, Lynn had been planning to attend a workshop that required a lot of strips, so she had methodically cut them to size and packed them in storage boxes.  Betty had kept those too and brought them along.

She sliced the strips even narrower to use as fine lines in the piecing.  Here is the composition in progress; the print strips made beautiful delicate lines to set off the solid color blocks.

Here's Betty with her work for the week:

It's always energizing to have the spirit of someone else in the room while you're making art, one reason why I love to work with other people's leftovers.  Although none of the rest of us had the pleasure of knowing Lynn, we felt her presence and love with us in the room.

The series returns - 3

I wrote earlier this week about how series progress, and how my fine-line piecing has gone through some phases of trying out new things.  One trend was to go from monochrome backgrounds to more complex color placement that starts to have figure-ground characteristics.  Another is to use stripes instead of solid colors.

Fueled by a new stash of striped fabrics, I decided what I had to do next.  It has been relatively simple to use stripes in the format of small "bricks" joined by fine-line "mortar."  I've made three quilts like this so far, and they're built up small-to-large, with tiny bits of fabric joined into modules.  I've kept the gridwork pretty much rectangular, so construction is straightforward, if time-consuming.

Crazed 8: Incarceration, 2010, detail

But now I decided it would be a challenge to use stripes in my large-to-small format, with diagonal lines instead of rectangular gridwork.

I wanted to work huge, as usual, but not huge-all-in-one-piece, since I find such pieces difficult to quilt.  So I decided to make four panels.

As long as the work was going to be in four parts, I thought it would be interesting to have the composition progress from part 1 to part 4, starting out simple and calm and becoming more complicated and chaotic.

So here's part 1 on the left, calm.  All the stripes are horizontal, all the fine lines cut from the same fabric, the different color areas gently abutting, the values restrained and similar.  And the beginning of part 2 on the right, getting more roiled up.

I realize that in my past works I've only had to make one kind of transition at a time.  In the detail shot of Crazed 8 above, for instance, I'm transitioning from a dark blue palette to black-white-neutral.  That's a piece of cake (well, it took some practice, but I've gotten it down pat by now).

But in the new piece I am going to make at least five transitions (at least that's what I think is going to happen; I reserve the right to change my mind as the work progresses).  First, I'm going to change from relatively large pieces between the fine lines to smaller pieces.  Second, I'm going to introduce a whole range of values.  Third, I'm going to use the whole color wheel.  Fourth, I'm going to mix up the fabrics within a given area, maybe even more than I've done in Crazed 8 above.  Fifth, I think I'm going to let the stripes be vertical and diagonal as well as horizontal.  And all the while, I'll be using a format of diagonal lines, much more complicated than rectangular grids.

Panel 1 was easy, but already in panel 2 it's hard work.  It's difficult to do two things at once, even though right now all I'm doing is trying to introduce a couple of new fabrics in a lighter value and break up the expanses of a single background fabric.  Haven't even gotten off the blue/green palette or let the stripes go in different directions.  And of course when you work in fabric you're constrained by the fabric you own.  No medium green?  Tough.

I have no idea what's going to happen next.  My "sketchbook" consists of words only -- the paragraph above with the five transitions.  So I'll have to keep cutting and sewing, one section at a time, and see where the fabric leads me.  I'll keep you posted.

Form, Not Function 3 -- more prizes

Rounding out the list of money prizewinners at FNF:

Margaret Black, Curb Appeal 6, 89 x 82" 

If you like obsessive piecing, you'll love this quilt!  It kind of reminds me of my own fine-line piecing, with lots of small bits surrounded and joined by very skinny strips, but Black's is less controlled, more improvisational than my own.  I spent a lot of time in front of this quilt trying to discern a pattern to the color concentrations.  And as an obsessive piecer myself, I went into zen state trying to figure out the order in which she sewed it all together!  Almost everything in the quilt is solid color, except for one or two commercial prints and a couple of batiks that read as stripes. 

Kathy Nida, Womanscape, 82 x 54" (detail below)

Nida's work, familiar to anybody who has attended a major quilt show in the last decade, features her trademark angst-ridden women with visible innards, plus a host of tiny details that make total sense only to a surrealist mind.  Figuring out what this quilt is about is more difficult than I have found in many other Nida quilts; it seems to have many themes, including pollution, patriotism, rape, feminism, contraception, pregnancy and windbag politicians.  And I'm sure I missed some.

I didn't inspect every seam in the quilt, but it's largely if not entirely done with raw-edge applique, zigzag stitched with invisible thread.

Deborah Hyde, Persephone (Jenn), 48 x 77" (detail below)

The image is entirely made up of pieced squares of commercial fabrics, cut to one inch, stitched to a half inch.  She has carefully chosen colors to create a pixelated image, but it's even better than pixels -- when she needs a color change in the middle of a tiny square, she fussy-cuts one from a printed fabric to get, for instance, a red lip divided diagonally from a dark green shadow.  Everything is done in piecing except a bit of dark threadwork on the eyelashes, brows and very fine lines of the face.

But wait, there's more!  Under the picture is a traditional Around The World quilt pattern, executed subtly in different colors of the same value.  Having once composed a fussy-cut graphic quilt of half-inch squares myself, I can testify to the tedious difficulty of getting all those squares mapped out, cut and kept in the right position as they're sewed.  This is a tour de force of piecing.

More about fine lines

Last week I wrote about a new piece I've begun in which my pieced fine lines, heretofore always used as separators between larger pieces of fabric, have taken on a new role, simply sewed to each other with no intervening large pieces.  Some of the comments left on that post suggested that I must be nuts or masochistic or both, which may have some validity.

I'm pleased to report that despite the labor-intensiveness of the construction process, it's going together easily and happily.  Here's where it stands now.

But this seems like a good time to mention that if you're at all intrigued by pieced fine lines -- that is, if you're a bit nuts yourself -- you might be interested in a workshop that I will be leading at Nancy Crow's Timber Barn next fall.   We'll start with the technical aspects of piecing very fine lines (not at all as hard as it looks) and then experiment with different ways of assembling large compositions with fine lines.

In my mind I divide the possibilities into two approaches.  The first one I call large-to-small, in which you start with a large piece of fabric, then slice it apart and sew the pieces back together with a fine line pieced in between, over and over until you end up with the surface fragmented into lots of smaller bits.  The other one is small-to-large, where you start with small pieces and sew them together with a fine line pieced in between, over and over until you get a large expanse.

I recently taught this as a two-day workshop, and participants were able to make one small example of each approach.  But I'm excited about having a whole week in which to more fully explore the many different ways of using fine lines, not just as separators but to "draw" shapes and figures.  I hope that in a week people will be able to move past my own processes and start to find their own voice.

The Crow Timber Barn is simply the best workshop facility in the world for making art quilts -- with big work tables and huge design walls for every participant, and an atmosphere that combines serious intent with a lot of fun.  I hope a bunch of you will be able to join me next fall for this workshop.  Maybe Santa Claus would help you be one of them!

Revisiting the past

We were talking at my support/critique group the other day about revisiting old work.  Some in the room opined that they felt compelled to finish what they start within a relatively short period of time.  If they didn't, they lost the flow and could never return to that work.  So if they didn't know how to resolve a piece, they would have to do SOMETHING pretty quickly, even if they still weren't sure it was the right solution.

Others said they often put a piece aside if they didn't know how to proceed.  I am in that group, so I will be able to expound on this way of thinking more than I can about the other.  In fact, I have been in revisit mode for the last two months, ever since I took a whole box full of unfinished projects to a master class with the objective of finding out which ones were worth completing and if so, how.

Some of the stuff in the box was there because I had hit a wall and didn't know what to do next.  Some was there because I hadn't yet had time to execute what I planned.  Some was there because I wasn't sure whether the piece was good enough to bother with.  Some was there because I'd frankly forgotten about it.

The good news is that I found several projects to finish.  I'd like to show you one of them, because it taught me some lessons.  I started this project several years ago and did a good bit of piecing, ending up with two large pieces that were clearly supposed to fit together along the diagonal in the center.  I had stitched a black strip to one of the pieces, planning to sew it to the other piece.  Here are the two pieces on the wall in May, in their intended orientation.

You can see why I got this far and stuffed the damn thing in a box.  What to do with all those raggedy edges?  I had been trying to end up with a rectangle but had done a bad job of it, especially along the bottom.  I seem to recall that this made my head hurt and I gave up.

So on to the lessons.  The first is never to allow your piecing to be separated from the bits and pieces of matching fabric that you're working from.  Unfortunately I didn't put the rest of the pale pink into the box with the finished pieces, and a good hour of searching last month failed to turn it up.  So already I had painted myself into a corner.

Some of the lessons are more positive.  I realized that some of the factors that had made me despair of finishing Pinkie in the first place had gotten less worrisome during her years in the box.  Lesson: when you think something is awful, put it away and reconsider it later.  (It may still be awful, but often it's not.)

I had started with a big piece of fabric, hand-dyed in a pale pink that was not uniform.  It wasn't mottled, but it did change color from side to side, some places lighter than others.  When I started cutting into the fabric and sewing it back together with a black strip between the pieces, my thought was to keep all the pink pieces in their original orientation.  So if I cut a slice of pale pink off and sewed it back, it would still be next to the matching pale pink, and the finished quilt would have the same gradual, subtle changes in color as the original piece of fabric.  But as the piecing got more complicated, I managed to lose that thought.  Paler pieces ended up next to darker ones, and the color differences became much more prominent. Years ago, I was unhappy with the effect.  But when I looked at the piece again, I decided I liked it. 

Another good lesson is to keep your teabags away from your fabric.  One day I had a cup of tea at the sewing machine and in some clumsy way managed to touch the teabag to the piecing.  Oops!  I decided I'd have to take out that part and repiece it with non-tea-dyed fabric.  But that never happened.  Upon revisiting, I decided the quilt had a distressed look to it and the tea stain fit in just fine.

But how to finish this poor, distressed piece?  My search didn't turn up any more of the original pink, but I did find some other pink, a bit darker but equally distressed in character.  And I noticed that the beige fabric I'd been using for another quilt also seemed to fit with the original pink -- that's a hunk of it in the top photo, on the design wall to the right of the pieced areas.  I had to use the new stuff around the edges to make the quilt rectangular, so it ended up with a "border" on three sides.

In the course of finishing this quilt I realized how much I have learned about the niceties of fine-line piecing in the course of making 20-some quilts.  This very early effort deserved a D, and had I not loved the design so much I probably would have turned it into placemats.

The back of the work was just too messy, with thread ends and fraying edges of the black fabric that would probably show through.  I spent a couple of hours with my tiny scissors trying to clean it up, but realized it would take all year to get it perfect.  So I decided to quilt in black and hope that the work would be hung in dim light so nobody would notice.

My final lesson came when I finished quilting and pinned the piece to my design wall to block it.  In my mind the quilt had always been a short, wide horizontal rectangle, but I had to turn it sideways to pin it to the wall.  And in the couple of days that it hung there in my peripheral view, I realized that it really wanted to be vertical!  It's often hard to change the way a piece sits in your head, especially if it's been sitting that way for years, but worth a try.

So here's the finished quilt, tea stain and all (I might put another stain or two on just to make it look deliberate instead of accidental).  Most of the things that bothered me the first time around don't bother me at all this time.