A message from Alison 2

I wrote earlier this week about exchanging messages with Alison Schwabe, a longtime internal pal who lives in Uruguay and commented about my Memorial Day quilt that consists of 4000+ tiny American flags.

And once she got on the subject of flags, Alison wrote some other things worth sharing.

"Lately with all the USA election commentary on our cable channels here, CNN and BBCWorld, the stars and stripes of your flag have been the core of all the graphics, obviously, and I'm no stranger to US elections coverage, but this season it's been striking to me that any combination, any arrangement, of star+stripe+red+blue+white is a visual shorthand for a statement of your country.  I don't mean depictions of the flag itself, everyone has things from tea towels to clothing patches, coffee mugs etc etc with our national flag on.  I mean the elements which combine to make up the flag design.  You see it in fabrics and clothing, sunglasses, household objects, all kinds of things in addition to the bunting and stuff that's rolled out for electioneering events at all levels.  Even the round carpet in wherever it was Biden was speaking from last Wednesday night was red and blue with central white star!  I'm not aware that any other country's national flag has spread out so much from its actual flag format."

I am a flag junkie and have used flags a lot in my art, as well as taking photos of them any time I can.  So Alison's comments made me think about the ubiquity of the flag's elements.  Even the nicknames of our flag -- The Stars and Stripes, The Red, White and Blue -- demonstrate by metonymy and synecdoche how the elements instantly conjure not only the whole flag but the nation itself, a linguistic shorthand as well as a visual one.

I've begun a series of quilts called "Stars and Stripes" in which I'm exploring how you can use those two shapes and how much you have to change them around before it no longer reads as a flag.

I'm planning to make six quilts in the series.  Here's number one, obviously a flag:

Number two, a little less flag-like, but still pretty obvious:

I think this next one is going to be number four, and if you don't see it hanging from a flagpole, you probably wouldn't read this as a flag, thanks to unflaglike grays:

Alison mentions the use of flag elements in household stuff.  She's right -- add the colors to some sort of star and stripe, and you're totally "patriotic," as witness this stuff I found in a Walmart some years ago near Fourth of July, never mind that it was all made in China. 

A message from Alison 1

Recently I struck up an email conversation with Alison Schwabe, an internet pal who lives in Uruguay, whose blog I read.  She announced that she got into Quilt National 21 and lamented the fact that this time around she probably won't be able to go to the opening festivities next spring, as she had for all the previous QNs she was in.  I sent her congratulations and mentioned that I couldn't remember which of those celebrations she and I both attended -- the only time we have met in person, to the best of my recollection.

Alison wrote back and said "I think we might have both been at QN09 where your wonderful piece Memorial Day was hung so impressively there in prime position near the entry! ...I imagine it is in a collection now?"

Funny she should mention it, because just this month Memorial Day went off to its permanent home, at the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.  IQM is attempting to acquire as many as possible of the big prizewinners from all previous Quilt National shows, thanks to a grant from the Robert and Ardis James Foundation, and my quilt qualified because it won the Quilts Japan Prize at QN09.

It was a bittersweet task to pack up Memorial Day and send it away forever.  Yes, it will be seen by many, many more people, and be taken care of in much more archival fashion than it has been for the last nine years, packed in a box under my guest room bed.  But mothers always worry a bit when their babies grow up and leave home.

Here's a peek of it, still beautifully wrapped in a sheet from when I last had it out in public, and as it went away to Nebraska.  (Because the quilt consists of 4,083 tiny bits, hanging by threads, it's extremely difficult to fold it properly.  When I sent it off to QN I had three friends and a very large table to help me.  When I took it off the wall almost four years ago, my son and I struggled for a long time on the floor to get it refolded.)

Alison said she looked up Memorial Day in her QN catalog, "and remember being amazed that each of those tiny patches is a suggestion of a US flag, of red/white striped fabric with a tiny little piece of navy fabric in the top LH corner of each.  You had several different red/white striped fabrics, and I think each piece was double sided?  I didn't remember that the final row was incomplete... and I can't even wrap my mind about how you made that!"

She's right, each of the thousands of flags is a little quilt, made with red/white stripes on the front, plain green denim on the back, and a lot of stitching.  I had found a bunch of different R/W striped fabrics, and a bunch of different navy fabrics with little white stars or dots or random speck patterns to simulate the union of the flag.  And I had also bought a yard of an old Nancy Crow fabric with actual tiny flags to accurate scale (and made my homemade flags in the same size).  

The final column of the quilt was incomplete because the quilt marks the number of US troops who died in Iraq.  The count starts at our invasion in March 2003 and ends on Memorial Day 2008 -- 4,083.  All the columns had 70 flags except the last one, with only 23.

How I made that -- yes, it's hard to imagine the process.  It took me several "postage stamp" quilts to work out a process, and if you're interested, here's how I do it.  But after you've figured that out, it's just a case of sewing, sewing, sewing, sewing.  As I was trying to finish this quilt in the summer of 2008, I realized one day that my right knee was extremely unhappy.  Who knew that the sewing machine foot pedal was enough work to cause repetitive stress injury?  I finished the quilt with my left foot on the pedal (surprisingly difficult) and the knee rested up to normal, so a happy ending.

Thanks, Alison, for prompting my walk down memory lane -- and congratulations on your QN triumph!   

Happy Fourth of July!

Our morning walk today was over the Big Four Bridge, a pedestrian route across the Ohio River, which is reached by a circular ramp to take you up to bridge height.  Many others had the same idea, including this group of runners.

Flag time

Long-time readers of my blog know that I am a flag junkie -- I love the flag, I love photographing the flag, I love making quilts using the flag both as visual motif and as metaphor.  If you love the flag in all of its roles, you can check out my past posts here.

Two years ago I was feeling frissons of dismay about what was happening in the country as the presidential election approached.  I made three flag quilts to express different nuances of that dismay.  And I will confess that I was pissed off that none of them was juried into Quilt National, because I thought they were far stronger works than the quilts I have had accepted into that show in the past, and because I thought that artists who spoke out against the sorry state of American democracy should be given as wide latitude as possible to have their work shown.

Fading -- 59 x 99"

Today I'm feeling dismay again -- or perhaps I should say yet.  It was brought very close to home last week when a guy with a gun attempted to enter a black church, and when nobody answered his knock on the door, went down the street to a grocery store and murdered two black shoppers.  This is a grocery store, a few miles down the road from my house, where I have shopped many times.  A couple of days later, another guy with a gun shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, in a neighborhood where I have walked and shopped and eaten and driven through.

What dismays me today?  Let me count the ways --

The fact that we have almost as many guns in this country as people (except a huge proportion of those guns are owned by a relatively small proportion of people).  The fact that so few politicians have the guts to stand up to the NRA, although the great majority of people in the U.S. want stronger gun regulation.  The fact that our president throws gasoline on the flames of white male resentment every time he opens his mouth, ranting against immigrants, Muslims, people of color, women, anybody with the slightest deviation from standard sexual identity.  The fact that he trashes and insults our allies, the democracies of the world, while expressing his love for dictators and bullies such as Kim, Erdogan, Duterte, Putin.  The fact that the Republican party goes along with every outrageous word out of the president's mouth.  The fact that so many avowed Christians have decided that they love a thrice-married, perpetually lying, self-confessed sexual assaulter because they think the ends justify the means and this is the way to ban abortion.

Flagging -- 98 x 54"

My parents, along with their entire families from the day they immigrated, were Republicans.  They were decent people, as were most of the people in that party.  The Republican party used to pride itself on its commitment to principles.  When Nixon hit the fan, it was because his fellow Republicans, dismayed at the revelation that he had lied and obstructed justice, announced they could not support him.

I do not see that commitment to principles any more in the Republican party.  Instead I see previously decent people who have decided to sit down with the devil, perhaps uneasily but boy, are their butts firmly attached to their chairs!  They have sold their souls to the NRA, to the big money PACs, to the pharmaceutical and gambling and oil lobbyists.  They have pinned their election strategies on keeping as many potential Democratic voters as possible from registering and voting.

More Equal then Others -- 82 x 97"

My only hope is that we're having an election next week.  And although our constitutional system is deliberately rigged to favor the voters in small states and dilute the votes of those in large states -- in other words, most of the people in the country -- I still have hope that decency will prevail.  If we miss this chance, we may not have another.

Disappointment in the museum

We drove over to Evansville IN on Saturday night to attend the opening of the 45th Mid-States Craft Exhibit, a venerable juried show that the Evansville Museum has sponsored for many years.  This show appears every other year, alternating with the Mid-States Art Exhibit (which doesn't accept textiles).

I was pleased to have one of my big flag quilts accepted for this show, and was looking forward to the visit.  Six years ago this week I was planning to attend the opening of the same show, and even receive an award, but found myself in the hospital instead for sudden surgery.  So this was a chance to remove a jinx.

As we walked through the museum, we passed signs:

But when we got to the Mid-States room, and I took out my camera, the guard leaped on it.  No photos.

But this is my piece!

Sorry, no photos.

An onlooker summoned the museum director, who said of course it would be fine for me to take a picture of my own quilt.  She explained that they banned photography because the museum doesn't own any of this work and they didn't know whether it would be OK with the artists to have their work photographed.

This explanation was more mystifying than reassuring.

First off, why do artists enter juried shows?  Presumably because they want their work to be seen, by as many people as possible.  (At least that's why I enter.)  And in this day of social media, having your work posted online has the potential of reaching far more people than just those who come to the museum.  Which is presumably the reason why the museum posts those "Snap it share it" signs.  So presumably artists would be happy to have their work photographed, and with any luck, distributed online.

Second, I don't believe I have ever entered a show where I didn't expect my work to be on display for public consumption (including photos).  Yes, some shows are picky and ban photos, but I've always thought this was (a) wrong-headed and (b) because they want to sell catalogs.  For shows that don't have catalogs, like the Mid-States, I am especially interested, as an artist, in having the show documented as widely as possible.  I know my work is going to be displayed in public, and I expect -- even hope -- that people may want to take photos.

Finally, if in fact there are artists who might have reasons to want their work NOT photographed -- which I have a hard time imagining -- show sponsors can take care of that in an instant by putting a line on the bottom of the entry form.  "I understand by entering this show I give permission for my work to be available for photography by the public."  Many shows have similar disclaimers on entry forms for allowing images to be used for public relations, so why not require that we allow use by public photography?  What's the difference?

Please don't protect me from the public!!!  If I want my work not to be photographed, I can easily deal with that by not entering the show.

I am sorry that I can't give you a review of the show, as I customarily do when I get to visit shows and museums that many of my readers can't.  There were interesting pieces on display in the Mid-States, and I would have liked to share my responses with you. 

Chicago art 2 -- Latin American fiber

I apologize for taking so long to get back to my visit to Chicago several weeks ago.  In mainstream museums I always like to keep an eye out for art made from fiber, and I found lots of interesting examples.  Today's three artists are all Latin American.

Rafael Ferrer, A Flag for the Straits of Magellan, detail below

This work, made in 1972, is an imaginary flag for Puerto Rico, the artist's birthplace, which he envisions not as a U.S. territory but as a faraway independent place.  Hung far up in a dim corner of a dark gallery, the flag was hard to see; the sign said it includes fabric, rawhide, leather, wire, pipe cleaners, rope and various other stuff.  The triangular shape, 3-D surface and midnight colors made it considerably more exotic than your run-of-the-mill flag.

Vivian Suter, Untitled, detail below

Hanging right below the triangular flag is this large unstretched canvas by an Argentinian artist who lives in Guatemala.  Her shtick is to apply the pigment, mixed with glue as a binder, with a machete, and to leave it outside to weather.  I'm not sure exactly how she achieved the distinct raised effect, or even whether we're seeing real shadows or just 2-D differences in value, but I like the subtlety of the patterns.  I wished for more light and a better view (I adjusted the exposure so the detail shot is lighter than in real life).

Arturo Herrera, Behind the House III, details below

What could be simpler -- get some wool felt, cut out some shapes, hang it on the wall.  He may have used a laser cutter because the edges are perfectly finished; very little trace of the artist's hand in this piece.  According to the sign, the shapes are "abstracted from popular culture and children's literature."  That may be an overreach, but the shapes are beautifully drawn and composed, and the slight distance away from the wall allows shadows to punctuate the image.  The kneeling figures are not part of this installation, although they look right at home. 

Southern Accent 1 -- unraveling

Last week I went to the Speed Museum in Louisville for the last day of a blockbuster show called "Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art."  I wish I had gone earlier in the run so I could have gone back again; there was much to see and think about and I will have more posts, but let me start with one artwork, described as a "sculpture and performance piece."

Sonya Clark, Unraveling





















It's a found Confederate battle flag which the artist is slowly unraveling by hand.  She started in 2015 on the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and has been working on it ever since.  For two hours on the last day of the Speed exhibit, visitors were invited to help Clark unravel.

Each person was greeted with a handshake and introduction, and then set to work unraveling, side by side with the artist.  For a couple of minutes each visitor worked, chatting with Clark about the project, then parted with a hug.

Of course I had to be there for this performance, and I said I wanted to work on the white, "to unravel some white privilege."  I was surprised at how difficult it was to take the tightly woven threads apart with no tools -- at home I would have grabbed a seam ripper or awl to grab the weft threads and pull them away, but with only fingernails it was hard to get a grip.  When I commented on this, Clark responded metaphorically that it's hard to deconstruct racist history.  I wondered how many times she had made this comment to her visitor/collaborators in the many hours she has spent shoulder-to-shoulder on the project.

I was thrilled with this idea of taking the flag apart.  The project hits all my hot buttons: U.S. history, lingering racism in the south, flags, and of course, fabric.  During the time I waited in line for my turn at the flag, I couldn't help but think about the art project that I participated in a couple of years ago at a museum across town, where volunteer artists mended people's clothes.  In both cases, the time spent in conversation between artist and visitor was intended to be meditative and connective.

I don't think the flag unraveling was conducive to much meditation.  It turned into quite the mob scene (which is wonderful in itself, because how frequently do you find mobs in museums, but I wondered how much time many of the visitors spent looking at the art).  With a long line of people waiting behind, there was pressure to unravel for a very short bit and then move on. 

As you approached the head of the line, museum staff with clipboards took your name.  As you worked, photographers came in close.

After you departed, reporters asked for your reactions.

By contrast, the mending project offered much more intimate time for conversation -- simply because there were so few people who came by.  But there were more than 100 hours of artist-on-duty time in that project, compared to only two hours for the flag.

We asked one of the guards who herded us into line whether the crowd was bigger than they had expected; he said nobody had any advance idea what was going to happen.  He seemed cheerfully overwhelmed, but I wondered whether he would be equally cheerful at closing time when dozens of people still in line would have to be turned away.

I would have loved more time with my hands in the threads, and more time to talk with the artist, but when the museum presents a "relational" project as merely a two-hour event there isn't much relating that's going to happen.  As we waited in line we also talked about Marina Abromovic's massive relational project at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, where she sat in a chair silently contemplating a visitor sitting across from her -- seven hours a day, six days a week, for 700 hours in total.

I'm sorry Sonya Clark didn't have the chance to spend more time with her art piece and with museum visitors, just as I was unhappy that Lee Mingwei hopped a plane to Tokyo after installing the mending project, delegating the visitor-relating to us volunteer artists.  Strikes me that both of these projects, brilliant in concept, suffered for want of boots on the ground.

Not crabby at all this week

I was crabby last week trying to do entries where the system seemed eager to block me at every turn.  But I'm happy to report that one of the shows has already done its jurying -- perhaps the fastest jurying in modern history -- and one of my flags has gotten in.

Fading, 2016, 59 x 99"

The show is the 45th Mid-States Craft Exhibition at the Evansville Museum in Evansville IN.  I'm always thrilled to have fiber art accepted into an all-medium show, although this one, being a "craft" show, is more accurately described as almost-all-mediums -- ceramics, metal, textiles, wood, enamel, glass and mixed media, but not painting.

I've been in this show once before and was sadly prevented from attending the opening festivities because I was awaiting emergency surgery the next morning.  I've not even been inside the museum, despite having both dropped off and picked up my quilt for that show, because the place was under renovation and I arrived at an off hour and I think some other obstacle as well.

I'm hoping for better luck this time around!

My big question now is whether the museum will let me display the quilt the way I did at Pyro Gallery earlier this year, simply nailed to the wall, or whether I'll have to add a sleeve and supply a rod.  I loved it nailed to the wall -- so flat, so smooth -- but we'll see whether the museum staff is up for the challenge.

The show opens December 10.

My favorite things 27

Faithful readers of this blog may know that I am a flag junkie so you can imagine how exciting it was for us to buy a 20-foot flagpole for our front yard six years ago this week.  And what a nifty flagpole it is.

Instead of raising the flag with a rope, the traditional method, with this model you raise the flagpole!  It telescopes into five-foot sections, so you start with a very short pole, hook your flag onto rings with clasps, and then raise each section one by one.  When each section gets fully extended, you turn the pole an inch and it drops down into a groove that keeps everything in place.

Our house is set back from the street and the street numbers, although they're six inches tall, are affixed to the wall and unless you know where to look you could easily miss them.  So it's nice now to be able to tell people "we're the house with the big flagpole."

After we got the flagpole and wore out our first 3x5-foot flag I upgraded to 4x6, and when that wore out I wanted an even bigger one, but was told that the wind forces up that high are too strong for a bigger flag, which would apparently fill like a sail and float our entire yard away in a gale.  Didn't want that to happen, so we're making do.

Happy Fourth of July!

Famous in my little pond

Sometimes you can go for years without anybody noticing how great you are, and then sometimes the gods of fame smile on you.  Last week within a couple of days I got to be interviewed on the local arts radio program and then was featured in the daily arts blog, both sponsored by Louisville Visual Art.

I refuse to listen to myself on tape so I can't swear to the quality of this recording, but I do recall the conversation as being relaxed, serious and interesting.  You can listen here.  Do not be put off because the caption calls me "athleen."  At least they didn't call me "athy."

And here's the blog post, which includes great photos of some of my flag quilts.  This one got my name right and had a nice write-up of my work.

All in all, a lovely ego trip.  

All my flags flying

Here are the "installation views" of my flags on display at Pyro Gallery through February 18.

We'll be having a gallery talk at 12:30 on Saturday, January 14.  If you're in the vicinity, drop in and visit!

Memorial Day 

at left, More Equal Than Others; at right, Fading

Flagging

Installing the show

Today is the opening of our show at Pyro Gallery, so Tuesday and yesterday were installation days.  How hard could it be to put up four quilts?  Heck, I've hung shows with 40 quilts in a single day and been out of there well before cocktail hour.  But I hadn't anticipated how much harder it is to hang REALLY BIG work -- or more accurately, REALLY TALL work.  It doesn't really matter how wide something is, but things get difficult fast when you have to get farther up on a ladder.

Fortunately I invited my very tall son to help, and there's a very tall ladder plus a regular ladder plus a stepstool in the back closet.  The stepstool came in handy because I am forbidden to climb ladders until my broken toe heals (also forbidden to drive my manual transmission car, lest pressure on the clutch knock the bone out of alignment).

One of the four quilts is 97 inches tall, one is 86, one is 82, and one is a short and squatty 59 inches tall, which still required me to go up on a stool to hold up one side while Steve secured the other.  So how does a person forbidden to use a ladder help the other guy?  I stood on the stepstool, nice and flat on my bad foot, then climbed onto my good foot one more step up the ladder.  Steve did lots of moving the ladders while I stood in place holding things.

The task was made easier by the fact that I decided not to hang two of the quilts in the conventional way from a sleeve and stick.  Instead, we simply nailed them to the wall.  Since the quilts are quite distressed to begin with, with spots and holes and mended places and raw-edge seams, I figured nail holes wouldn't make any difference, and it's sure easy to get those suckers up on the wall fast.  And if the side bulges a little or the bottom edge ripples out, just hold it down with another nail.  You've never seen a quilt hang so perfectly flat against the wall!

Things worked out pretty well until the last and tallest piece, which had to be suspended from the ceiling molding.  This one had a sleeve, and a brass rod extending about an inch out on either side.

The quilt had to hang above a credenza, which didn't seem sturdy enough to stand on, and probably wouldn't have been tall enough anyway.  The credenza was immovable, so we could only get the ladder so far in from either side.  Steve had to climb way up, then lean in perilously to get clamps positioned on top of the molding.  We hung loops of fishing line from the clamps, then slipped the brass rod into the loops.

As we were proceeding toward the actual placement of the quilt we realized -- how would I hold up the free end of the brass rod while Steve moved the ladder around and climbed up on the other side?  We rooted around in that back closet and came up with a paint scraper on a 6-foot pole, with a hole in the handle so it could be hung on a hook. The free end of the brass rod fit neatly into the hole, the handle was rubberlike so the rod didn't slip, and voila, I could hold the rod up at ceiling level while Steve went up and down and around and did all the hard work.

The flags all look wonderful, three of them displayed for the first time and on walls big enough to hold them properly!

The show opens today, with the gallery (909 E. Market St. in Louisville) open at noon and the reception from 6-9.  If you miss that, tomorrow is the First Friday gallery hop and we'll do it all over again!  And if you miss THAT, we're doing an artists gallery talk on Saturday the 14th at 12:30.  I hope to see you at one or more of these events.

Happy Veterans Day

Cave Hill National Cemetery was decked out in flags on a beautiful sunny day, marking Veterans Day.  This cemetery has both Union and Confederate soldiers' graves.  (Kentucky remained in the Union, but there were many Confederate sympathizers among the population and several large battles fought in the state.  In fact, the historians' joke is that Kentucky did not secede until after the war was over.)

I had never been there on a flag holiday before and thus had never seen this version of the Confederate flag.  Called "The Blood-Stained Banner," it was adopted on March 4, 1865 as the third official flag of the rebel government.  This came at the very end of the war, and so few people ever got to see it in use.  But apparently this is the favored version for ceremonial purposes, at least by the people who set out the flags at Cave Hill.

Interestingly, I have visited cemeteries in South Carolina where the graves are decorated with the more commonly known Confederate battle flag, alongside the American flag.

 I'm not sure what to think of displaying the Confederate flag in "official" usage, nor do I know who put the flags in the national cemetery for the holiday remembrance.  I was pleased to see South Carolina remove the flag from the statehouse grounds last year and believe that it has become a symbol of racism and ignorance.  When we look back on the Civil War and count the horrible death toll -- more than all our foreign wars put together -- we do not distinguish between the sides.  Far too many people, both military and civilian, died in this needless war, and although many of them renounced their American birthright and citizenship, we did seek to heal the nation's wounds when it was all over.  Do we pick open those wounds again by posting Confederate flags on the graves?

I do not subscribe to the "Lost Cause" narrative of the Civil War, in which the South was deemed pure and noble in its endeavor.  I believe the war was fought to defend slavery, not to defend the magnificence of state's rights, and that most of the men who were conscripted into the Confederate army were pawns and victims of their leaders' greed and racism, just as were the slaves.  The Civil War was a terrible act of treason, and perhaps the winning side should have been less forgiving.  But our better angels prevailed -- thank you, Abraham Lincoln -- and we sent the losers back to their farms to get on with life.

Visiting war sites and cemeteries always brings tears to my eyes and pain to my heart.  So many times we have been forced to take up arms to defend our country.  And now and then we are conned into taking up arms for no valid reason.  In either case, people die.  You might want to seek out a national cemetery today and drop by to pay your respects.  The soldiers were told they were doing the right thing, and perhaps they were.    

The last gasp

I hung what I'm calling "Quilt National entry #1" on the wall in my front hallway in mid-April and it does make a dramatic statement.  Actually two dramatic statements: first, "I'm knocking your socks off!!!!" and second, "I sure don't hang straight."

Ever since, I have been hearing both those statements every time I walk by, and avoiding the issue of the second one.  Meanwhile I sewed Quilt National #2 and Quilt National #3.  Then to further postpone the inevitable, I sewed some workshop samples, and dove into my back storage room to go through boxes.  I found at least a cubic yard of stuff to give away or throw away; I unpacked, sorted, catalogued and repacked a half dozen boxes of stuff; I piled stuff all over my worktable for subsequent sorting, cataloguing and repacking.  I watched some Olympics.  I mended some pants.  I read books.

But yesterday I couldn't avoid it any longer.  I scheduled my date with the photographer for next week, took #1 off the wall and tried to figure out how to make it hang straight.

Laying it out flat on my worktable was out of the question; the table isn't really big enough, even if it hadn't by now been piled with stuff two feet thick.  Probably not having a big enough work surface was the reason why the quilt went together poorly the first time.  My living room floor turned out to be an excellent substitute, since its straight boards make a working grid. (No wonder it didn't hang straight -- notice all those ripples on the left-hand white stripe?)

Unfortunately then I had to get down there on the floor to work, which I probably could have done gracefully, easily and painlessly twenty years ago but sure can't any more.  I got a little stool to sit on, in lieu of kneeling or sitting on the floor.  And I got a chair to lean on to help me get onto and off of the stool. I didn't know whether to feel pathetically helpless or extraordinarily comical.  Probably should have had somebody shoot video and go viral on YouTube.

Simply cutting the threads that held the white stripes to the red stripes made a huge difference, and cutting some slits into the white to hike up the right side was even better.  But how to pin them together securely enough to hold up for the sewing machine without crawling all over the quilt?

Aha -- an idea.  I decided to take the quilt to the photographer without totally sewing it back together first along the verticals.  It will hang straight from its rod for the shoot, and then I will leave it up on his wall while I pin the bejesus out of it and take it home for its final stitches.  I'll let you know how it turns out.

Finished!!

Faithful readers may recall that I've been working on my three entries for Quilt National since early spring, and that all three are American flags in varying degrees of attenuation.  I am thrilled to report that I have finished the third quilt, and after a bit of remedial stitching on the first one to make it hang better, I will be ready for photography.  And practically a month ahead of the September 1 entry deadline!

Here is #3 on the living room floor, the only horizontal surface in the house big enough to hold it.

All three of the flag quilts were exercises in using leftovers.  The ingredient list includes:

- a red blouse, almost sewed 25 years ago but never completed
- many pairs of blue jeans, contributed by members of my local fiber and textile art group
- an old white lab coat, contributed by my art pal Paula (snatched from her doctor husband)
- an old huck towel, with holes, contributed by my art pal Marti
- a piece of the ancient linen purchased in Europe by my art pal Joanne who graciously shared her treasure with me
- all the leftover bits of batting from years and years of quilts, some pieces almost big enough for a small quilt, others as small as an inch or two wide
- all kinds of fabric, acquired god knows how or when, that weren't worthy of staying in my stash
- red and white tulle from my stash
- various pieced samples, made by me or others, that never graduated to being used in a finished quilt
- an old patchwork pillow, made in 1971 and used so hard it wasn't fit for anything; I took it apart and discovered that it had been foundation-pieced onto a white dish towel, which became a white stripe
- leftover bits of white fabric trimmed from various projects over the decades and never thrown away
- shiny polyester thread left over from last year's Mending Project at our local museum, contributed by my art pal Ramona, who works at the museum and couldn't bear to throw the stuff away
- many, many, many spools of my own leftover thread, much of it so old that the quilt police would tell you never to sew with it.

Here's what the back of quilt #2 looks like, with all those leftovers:

Here's what I purchased new for the three quilts:

- a yard each of red and blue tulle
- a spool of off-white thread

I am sorry to report that I also bought four spools of blue thread at a clearance sale, thinking I would use them on the third quilt, but I didn't like the way they looked and never used them.  So I guess I'm a good ten bucks in the hole on this project.

Happy Independence Day

To celebrate Independence Day, our local newspaper wrapped its front section in a special patriotic cover:

On the back was a feel-good patriotic quiz featuring many of the questions asked on citizenship naturalization exams.  If you can answer "what is the capital of the U.S.?" you can feel patriotic and intelligent.

On the inside of the wrapper sheet was a two-page gun ad.

If I had prepared this patriotic quiz, I might have included the question "On average, how many Americans are shot to death every day?"

Answer:  "91"

Or maybe this one:  "what are the two most universally ignored words in the U.S. Constitution?"

Answer:  "well-regulated"

Using up leftovers

Perhaps you noticed when I showed pictures of my second flag quilt earlier this week that the back of the piece is quite a mishmash.  I'm deliberately using up leftovers in all phases of my flag quilts -- leftover chunks of batting, leftover and recycled fabrics for the quilt tops, and miscellaneous fabrics for backing.  Since I'm constructing the quilt in modules, it's easy to find some poor misbegotten piece of fabric the right size, or augment it, to back a small module.  Sometimes I'm using pieced work that never made it to prime time as backing.

The yellow composition at the top was made several weeks ago for my drawing and design class -- I got permission from the teacher to do some color exercises in fabric instead of in paint.  Then it made a fine quilt backing.  The log cabin square at the bottom came from somebody else's leftover bag.  The rest of the fabrics were given to me by somebody who wanted to get rid of her stash and didn't know that I don't much use commercial prints.  Except they were perfect for this project.

So here's what some of the back looks like now that the modules have been cut into stripes and rejoined.

My stash of fabric that was too good to throw away but not what I would ever use on a quilt top has gone down considerably, and I'm delighted with the scrappy, miscellaneous look.  Since these quilts are flags, I'm calling the backs melting pots.