Someone else's trash becomes my treasure

Last year my good friend moved to Atlanta, and realized that she owned a whole lot of stuff that she didn't want to take with her.  So she held an open house of sorts, in which friends were encouraged to take home anything in two big upstairs rooms.  I of course could not resist, and found all sorts of treasures, including but hardly limited to a guillotine blade paper cutter and a 1950 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary.  I've been using the paper cutter for myriad projects, and cutting up the dictionary for art.

But today I want to talk about a special find: a huge box full of the ribbons and medals that my friend's daughter won in a long and successful swimming career, spanning many years from childhood through high school.  The minute I saw them I knew they were perfect fodder to be turned into "postage stamps" for a grid quilt.

The ribbons were two inches wide, with woven selvages, already a bit stiff with some kind of sizing, but I backed them with nonwoven polypropylene for a little more substance.  As soon as the backing was sewed to the ribbons, I sliced them into squares with a pinked-edge rotary blade, and then continued with many more rows of stitching in different colors.  There was no fraying or raveling (a big improvement over previous postage stamp projects) and the gold letters and pictures sparkle when the light hits them right.  

I watched a great deal of trash TV last August while mindlessly feeding hundreds and hundreds of squares through the sewing machine, and eventually counted and bagged all the finished squares and stashed them away in a big shoebox.

I pulled the shoebox out again in April and started sewing the squares together into a grid.  Having learned from experience that the larger the quilt, the more tedious it is to sew it together, I decided to make three separate panels and hang them as a tryptych.  It was so easy to put these smaller panels together that I zipped through the final assembly stage in less than a week.

And now the finished quilt -- "Competition" -- is hanging in the 20th Anniversary Show at PYRO Gallery.  I think it looks great, and it was probably the most painless major piece that I have ever made!  

 

Lots of boxes 1

My new show consists of several "collections" of collage and assemblage, fancy words for putting a variety of miscellaneous junk together and calling it art.   I've been drawn to this form of art for a long time; maybe it started as a way to rationalize keeping boxes and boxes and piles and piles of miscellaneous junk instead of throwing it out.  But I have learned that miscellaneous stuff, no matter how appealing each piece may be when scrutinized closely, doesn't become art until you have a good way to fasten it together forever.

And for me, the go-to answer has always been to put the disparate parts into boxes.  

I have been doing this for several years, mostly using pre-made new wood boxes that you get at the craft store, and several of those boxes made it into my gallery show.  But the project got turbocharged when Pamela Mattei, a long-time fiber pal, was seized by the desire to clean out her garage and basement during early pandemic lockdown.  Early last summer she gave me five huge cartons of old cigar boxes, which I immediately started filling up for art.

Some of the boxes had slide-off lids, which I slid off to use for other purposes, leaving me with six-inch cubes to wallpaper with maps, photos, book pages, sheet music, fabric or other flat stuff.  Then I populated the boxes with things that wanted to be together.

Here are some of the cigar-box cubes that made it into the show:

Pink Specs Box

Bingo Berry Box

Some of the cigar boxes were hinged, and I took them apart to give more five-sided "rooms."

Trio Box

I'll show you more of my boxes in other posts.  Meanwhile, if you're near Louisville, I hope you can drop in and see my show at PYRO Gallery, 1006 E. Washington St.  Gallery hours are noon to 6 Fridays and Saturdays, 1-4 Sundays through the end of May, and by private appointment. 

The show is open!

Yes, friends, I have gone radio silence for the last week and a half, getting ready for my show at PYRO Gallery.  Got all the work packed up and carted to the gallery, unpacked and arranged and spaced out (and pleasantly surprised to discover how nicely it fit into the room) and hung on the walls.

Lights arranged (what a huge difference it makes to have a real pro in charge, one who isn't afraid to go way up on the tall ladder).  

And finally ready for company!

We're still operating under the state pandemic rules, so masks inside, but we were able to hold an outdoor reception in the garden behind the gallery.  This was the first time PYRO has done a reception since March 2020, and we knew some people would give it a miss for fear of encountering a crowd inside.  Happy to report that everybody kept their distance indoors, and the rain held off all afternoon for those outside.

I'll show you some of the pieces in the show in future posts.  Meanwhile, if you're near Louisville, please visit sometime before May 30.  Gallery hours are noon to 6 every Friday and Saturday, and 1-4 Sunday.  Or you can email me for a private appointment any time.

Long time coming

A few years I bought two wood painting panels, 8 x 8 x 1.5 inches, and wanted to experiment with adding more paint to my collages.  I had always had a mental block about considering myself to be a "painter," but something changed.  So long ago that I forget what it was.  

I started by pasting down some card-weight scraps of paper to make a textured surface.  Then I slathered blue, black and rust-red paint over the top of everything, making a point of not mixing the different colors too uniformly.  I had some scraps of map left over from cutting shapes for previous collages, so I pasted them on top.  I took the panels to my drawing/critique group and they were not amused.

The map scrap, which I adored, was too prominent, people said.  The other panel was a good background but nothing much was happening on top of it.  I took the panels home and reworked them.  I cut just the roads out of some maps and pasted them on top.  I grayed out the too-prominent map shape (which I still adored) with diluted black paint.  I did some other things that I have forgotten.  Now it was me who was not amused.

The panels sat around my studio reproaching me.  Shortly before pandemic lockdown I was asked to be part of a project in my textile and fiber arts group in which we each took some paper from a haul of antique piano rolls and were supposed to do something with it.  I left this task till the last minute and the night before the meeting I did some lame experimentation, cutting the paper, weaving it back together, writing on it with a calligraphic pen (the ink bled into the paper).  Realized this was lame, and that very afternoon, before the meeting, I grabbed one of the wood panels and collaged some piano roll paper over the top.

After I showed what I had done with the paper, the audience was not amused, especially since the other presenters had done far more imaginative things with their samples.  I took the panels home and put them back in their corner.  

Kathleen Loomis, Black C

Then a month ago I decided it was time to stop playing around with these panels and actually finish them.  I had unearthed a bag of tiny collages that I had made a long time ago, and decided that one of them would go beautifully on the panel with the piano roll paper.  Then I made a little weaving from two vintage books, mounted it on some handmade paper that an art pal had given me, and put it on the panel with the map shape -- now further grayed down with a layer of cheesecloth over the top. 

Both pieces were clearly not made in an afternoon -- they show the traces of several different iterations underneath what became the final versions.  I wish I had been documenting all the steps along the way, none of them particularly successful, but I was clearly modeling "If at first you don't succeed...." 

Kathleen Loomis, Blue Courage (note heart-shaped map scrap at lower left)

Finally I was amused!  The two pieces will be in a show at PYRO Gallery, of work that all the member artists made during the coronavirus lockdown.  

The show opens tomorrow and will be up throughout April.  The gallery will be open for visitors every weekend, and we'd love to have you drop in if you're anywhere near Louisville.  I'll meet you there by appointment if you can't make it during regular hours, or if you're still cautious about being out in public spaces.

Finished at last

It's been years since I started a series of cross-stitched pieces that were largely worked from the  back side of the fabric.  I like this technique because you can't exactly see what you're doing, thus leaving yourself open for surprise and serendipity.  I have been almost done with three of these pieces for months and months, but kept them at hand to work on while watching TV.  They kept getting more and more densely covered with cross-stitches and french knots, but there was always room for some more.

But finally I needed to finish them for a show.  One of my fellow artists in PYRO Gallery invited the rest of us members to have work in his show, titled "Organic Forms."  As I thought about my supply of finished work, there was very little that would fit that description, except the three cross-stitched pieces that definitely looked like gardens.  

After considering fifteen different ways of potentially mounting or displaying the pieces, I finally decided to mount them on stretched canvases, covered with silk.  The smallest piece fit nicely on a larger canvas with complementary color as a surround.

Kathleen Loomis, Blue Garden

But the two larger pieces were bigger, and I didn't want the finished presentations to be huge.  So I used 12x24" canvases available at the craft store (at 50% off) and decided to just let them overhang.  You know, the way foliage and flowers often escape from their appointed places to sneak into the rest of the landscape.

Kathleen Loomis, Night Garden Blue

Kathleen Loomis, Night Blooming Cereus

The show will be up at PYRO Gallery, 1006 E. Washington St in Louisville, through the end of November.  Opening hours are limited but we're always willing to meet visitors by appointment and we'd love to show you all the art.

Up against the wall!

PYRO Gallery is preparing for our first show since we closed abruptly in early March.  It seemed like the perfect opportunity to unveil my new postage stamp quilt, which is not only new and big but timely, because it's about coronavirus.  (I wrote about this quilt in April when I first started working on it.)

And so this afternoon my wonderful, tall and handy son helped me install it on the tallest wall in the gallery.

The lights haven't been adjusted yet so this isn't a very good photo, but you can see 169 little postage stamp bits socially distanced from one another.  (Some are more vigilant and compliant than others, just like actual humans.)

To make it hang properly, the columns needed to be weighted, and I wondered how to do that.  Then I found a whole bag full of rusty washers shaped like coronaviruses!

The show will run from August 6 through 29, at 1006 E. Washington St. in Louisville.  The gallery will be open from noon to 3 pm on Fridays and Saturdays, and the entire show will be up on the PYRO website for virtual visitors.

Plague diary April 13

I started out the pandemic believing, thanks to diligent research, that fabric face masks weren't effective against viruses.  Then as time passed, conventional wisdom pivoted in the face of adversity and guess what, fabric face masks are wonderful.  So I have been sewing masks for friends and family for a couple of weeks now.

This week PYRO Gallery, the artist cooperative that I am a part of, decided to launch a Go Fund Me campaign to help pay the rent while we're closed.  We haven't been able to open the gallery in a month, and of course don't know when that will end.  The show that was supposed to be up now, in which each of the 18 PYRO artists invited a guest to exhibit, was canceled a month ago.  The show that's supposed to open in early May is probably not going to happen.

And then in mid-June, my solo show is supposed to start, but I don't think the chances are good for that schedule to hold.  (And I'm not sure I want it to... the thought of a big opening reception and gallery talk and workshop is kind of frightening.)

As part of the Go Fund Me, I offered to make face masks as a premium for any donation over $50, and already I have a dozen orders to fill.  So I'm back in the studio sewing.  Decided to upgrade my mask ties from the 1970s bias binding to fancy material, since the masks are advertised as super-duper special unique artist-made, so this afternoon I'm folding and pressing strips while watching trash TV.

If you'd like a super-duper special unique artist-made mask for your very own, we'd be very grateful for your support of PYRO Gallery.  The coronavirus is laying waste to so much that we love, and I hope that our art will survive and prosper when we come out the other side of the pandemic.

More on Vickie's quilts

Last week I wrote about Vickie Wheatley, whose quilts are on display at PYRO Gallery in Louisville  through March 21, and promised to show you some of the interesting ways she finished and mounted her small pieces. 

She made a lot of little four-block quilts with leftovers from her much larger "Anxieties" series, finishing to about 12 inches square.  Some she finished with dense black zigzag stitching, then mounted on a black canvas, with maybe a quarter-inch of canvas showing around the edge.  If the light isn't exactly right, you can barely tell where the quilt stops and the canvas starts.

Some she faced, then mounted on a pale wood panel.

Here she zigzagged the edges with a variegated thread, which gave the effect of a striped binding.  Again, mounted on a pale wood panel.

Vickie also made a bunch of quilts with a wonky circle design, like these:

Rather than quilting the leftover circle blocks, she used them as the base for intricate hand-stitching.  Some were mounted in fabric-backed frames with raw edges. 

Others had black binding, again in frames.

If you can't find a piece that fits your particular decorating vibe, you aren't really trying! 

Great quilts on display

My dear friend and quilting pal Vickie Wheatley has a great show of her bright, intricate quilts at PYRO Gallery.  I have been working closely with Vickie for more than a year and it is a particular thrill to see pieces that we spent all day rearranging on the design wall finally on the gallery wall.  But I was most interested in the variety of small details in the many pieces on display, which so clearly show her trying out new things and progressing in her body of work.

For some time now Vickie has been exploring a design that starts with strips of random black and white piecing that make a "road" diagonally through the middle of her block.  Once that's in place, she fills out the corners of the block with colored strips.  When she sets the blocks in fours, you see a big diagonal grid of black-and-white roads, or maybe a bunch of colored squares or diamonds floating above a sea of black-and-white, depending on how you look at it.

Then she adds a twist: she sticks little miscellaneous bits and cuttings under the quilting thread.  And I do mean little -- some of the bits are only a quarter-inch wide.  The contrast between these wildly irregular bits and the meticulously pieced quilt top adds excitement and texture.

As the series progresses, you can see her experimenting.  In #1, the black-and-white strips are cut to a strict 45 degree angle, but in #5 they're wonky.  In #4 she has put so many bits and cuttings on top that you can barely see the underlying pattern of the blocks. 

Anxieties #1: Imperfections

Anxieties #4: The River Lethe

In #3 and #4 she adds sashing between the blocks, and cuts some of the square blocks into rectangles before sashing.

Anxieties #3: Breakdown

As you can imagine, when you sew strips together and then cut triangles from them to make the corners of your blocks, you end up with a lot of leftovers.  Vickie sewed more than a dozen small quilts from the leftovers, and it was fun to see how she varied their colors and personalities, even though she was working from the same huge scrap pile.

In the next post I'll show you the many different ways Vickie finished her small pieces for display at the gallery. 

Meanwhile, the show is up at PYRO Gallery through March 21.  Well worth a detour if you're anywhere near Louisville!

Last week on Art With a Needle

Seems like I didn't do anything all week except work for PYRO Gallery.  I did a shift of gallery-sitting on Sunday, went in on Wednesday morning to hang my work, made the gallery tags for everything in the new show, printed them out and helped affix then to the wall on Thursday morning, went back Friday noon with a few more tags that for some reason hadn't been finished in time, came back at 5 to help set out the food for the reception, talked with dozens of people during the reception, made a few wall tags for new work that replaced things sold at the reception, and then back again to work a shift this afternoon.

It was an exhilarating week, because we had a very successful opening, but I am looking forward to not setting foot in the gallery for the foreseeable future.

Three of my pieces sold last night, all of them the little postage stamp hangings.  This morning I rooted around in my boxes and found one more postage stamp piece that I hadn't taken in, and found another one pinned to my design wall, which with 15 minutes work was ready to be hung.  So I hung the two new pieces in the holes left by the sold work.

six postage stamp hangings, before the opening reception

minus three, plus two, this afternoon

A comment on the blog this week from Rose, who noted my mention of my broken ankle and told me about HER broken ankle last year.  I had it so much easier than she did, and so much easier than a lot of other people I have talked to who broke ankles or other pedal bones.  I am so fortunate -- it could have been so much worse.  I guess we're getting to the age range where it's so much more common to fall, and to suffer consequences.  I wish for all my friends and readers a great new year, free of broken bones and other misfortunes.

Here's my favorite miniature of the week:

On the wall for Off The Wall

PYRO Gallery's new show, which opens tomorrow, is called Off The Wall, because if you buy something, you can take it off the wall and take it home with you right away.  Usually work purchased from a gallery show has to stay in place till the show closes, but we recognize that holiday gifts can't wait till December 28.

All the PYRO artists have work in this show, and I had hoped to have some new work ready to put up.  But between the broken ankle and the long cruise, I've been out of commission too much to get a lot made.  Besides, I need to hoard my new work for my solo show in June.

So I have a wall full of oldies but goodies, plus two new little postage stamp quilts.  I got them hung this morning but the wall tags aren't up yet.

If you're anywhere near Louisville, come by and see the show!  We're open Thursday through Saturday, noon to 6 pm.  The opening reception is this Friday, December 6, 6 to 9 pm.  PYRO is at 1006 E. Washington St. in Louisville.

Keith Kleespies' puppet art

A wonderful show opened at PYRO Gallery this past weekend, by four artists working in various mixed mediums.  Of particular interest to fiber fans was the installation by Keith Kleespies.  Recently Keith was rooting around in his bookshelves and came upon a catalog for a show in England, sent to him many yeas ago by a friend and shelved without having been read.  This time he opened it and was enthralled by the story of artist Andrzej Kuhn, who as a child was caught up in the evil of World War 2 and spent a decade as a refugee in the exotic landscapes of Kazakhstan, Iran, Palestine and Egypt before ending up as an artist in England. 

Keith decided to make a children's book from the story, which would be illustrated by puppets.  And the puppets are now on display at PYRO (he still needs to make a few more before the story is complete).  The puppets have papier-mache heads and hands, and clothes made from all kinds of grab bag and second-hand-store fabrics and garments.

I loved the way he turned shirt sleeves into puppet shirts, complete with collars and closures.

Keith has a good way with his people, whether drawn as cartoons or executed as 3-D puppets -- humorous and whimsical without being at all  cutesy (a hard balance to strike).  The installation will make you laugh, and maybe after you read the explanation on the wall, make you cry. 

Don't miss it!  At PYRO Gallery, 1006 E. Washington in Louisville, through September 17.