Lots of comments

There were lots of comments on my two latest posts, and rather than just leave a reply comment of my own, where probably nobody would see it, I'll take this post to reply to everybody. (That's one feature that I like in Instagram: if you comment on a post, and subsequently somebody -- the original author, or another reader -- replies or likes it, the system will tell you, even if your comment was made long ago.) 

I wrote about all the reading that I've been doing since lockdown, and how I have come to like e-books better than paper.  Shasta Matova commented:  "There is a time for both, so I don't try to make a choi8ce, but I too like ebooks especially when the library is closed.  Besides the benefits you mentioned, they remember where you left off and give you definitions for words I don't know."  

Idaho Beauty wrote:  "There are times when (e-book) is the only way I can get a book through my library but I don't enjoy it nearly like I do holding an actual book and turning the pages by hand rather than by swiping (and I do hate that sound that is sometimes added to mimic the sound of an actual page turning)."    

Idaho, I too would go crazy with that kind of sound effect.  I always keep the sound turned off on any kind of device, turn it on only if I want to hear something.  I'm sure there's a way you can adjust the preferences in your ebook to deep-six that feature.  It took me several months before I figured out that I could stop the system from showing me passages that other readers had highlighted!  First off, I don't care what other people choose to read and remember, and second, I was really cheesed at how stupid most of the highlighted passages were.

I also wrote about my newest quilt project, a memorial marker for all the U.S. military dead in Afghanistan since 2001, as well as memorials to those dead from covid.  Robbie commented: "I applaud you for all your effort on these projects!  Hope they can all be displayed and appreciated by so many."  Norma Schlager wrote: "I especially like that you are using uniform material on one side and other fabrics on the back.  Can't wait to see how this one turns out."  Martha Ginn wrote:  "Very appropriately dark, drab and sad -- an apt description of this conflict."

Cindy wrote: "I find your work a lovely tribute to those who are gone.  Not morbid in the least."

Irene MacWilliam wrote:  "I think my mind works somewhat like yours.  I am living in N Ireland and wanted to do a piece in memory of all those who had died in our 'troubles' conflict between 1969-1994... This piece has just been bought by our museum which has a collection to do with The Troubles.  I do a lot of work to do with conflict and how it affects families."   Irene, good for you!  I think that one of the most important jobs for artists is to witness to the stupid and destructive things that people do to one another.

Jenny wrote:  "Lest we forget: Afghan casualties from Western intervention amount to around 240,000 whilst Iraqis account for around 200,000...  a companion quilt perhaps?"  Jenny, you're right, war tends to be far harder on the civilian population who just happen to be standing there in the way than it is on the actual soldiers.  It has always been thus, but with modern weapons the killing power of each soldier is vastly greater than it was in past wars.  I can't imagine how one might go about marking that number of deaths; once you get into five figures the total has outgrown any technique that I might use.

Since I last posted, I've finished all the little bits for the Afghanistan memorial -- 2,461 is the number I'm going with. 

Thanks to you all for reading, and for commenting.  It's always good to hear from those at the other end of the cyber-talk!

Another Afghanistan quilt

I wrote earlier about a project that I'm working on now, a postage stamp quilt to mark the US military dead in Afghanistan.  But I am reminded of another quilt I made several years ago that is also about Afghanistan.

In 2015 I had the pleasure of attending and teaching at a big quilting show in Prague, along with my dear friend and art pal Uta Lenk.  Uta had arranged for the show to display a bunch of quilts by International Threads, a group of quilters from four different countries (US, UK, Germany and Israel).  After I said I would come to Prague, she promoted teaching gigs for each of us, which didn't make us rich but did pay for our hotel rooms and a bit of spending money.

Uta in the International Threads exhibit

In between teaching and hanging around our exhibit, we hit the vendors, and discovered a booth selling embroideries made by women in Afghanistan.  We were intrigued by the work, and when we found that many of the embroideries were made by the same woman, Nasrin, we decided to buy eight of them for the members of International Threads, which would be the theme for our next project.

I chose the embroidery with the most abstract and geometric design, and when I made my quilt, I echoed the gray-blue-turquoise-white palette, the bold zigzags and the half-square-triangle sawtooth edging, adding some yellow to pep up the composition.  I called the quilt "Nasrin's Magic Carpet."

With Afghanistan in the news again, I thought it would be a good time to pull out the quilt again and put it up in public.  It's hanging at PYRO Gallery right now, through the end of this month.  And of course I thought about Nasrin and her friends and family, wondering how they have survived through six more years of war and oppression.

After Uta and I bought the embroideries we sent them to our fellow members and I copied from the package the name of the nonprofit that distributed them: The Guldusi Project of Embroidery.  When I looked it up on the internet this week I learned that the organization was begun in 2002 by a German artist.  They have embroidery projects in several rural Afghan villages, and when I paged through the website I was excited to find exactly the kind of embroideries we had bought.

Uta's Nasrin square

You'll notice that the center portion of each square is a kind of mesh, the kind that's used to make the eye holes in a burka. The website confirmed that this type of stitching is called tsheshmakdusi (tsheshmak = eye, dusi = embroidery) and only a few women in a village in Laghman Province use this stitching in their work for sale.  This had to be the source of our Nasrin squares.

Red pin marks Laghman Province

And yes, when I looked through the thumbnails of work on this page of the website, I found one using the same palette, chevrons and sawtooth border, that was labeled "03Nasrin."  Unless there are many women with the same name doing very similar embroidery for the same nonprofit organization, this is indeed our artist.  At least, that's what I'm going to believe.

Uta has also been remembering her Nasrin quilt recently; check it out on her blog. 

   

Afghanistan memorial

I have never been one for working on just one project at a time.  Some of my art friends find focus by finishing up one thing before starting on the next, but that's way too controlled for me.  I like to have several things going at once, picking up whichever one is closest to hand without walking up or down the stairs, whichever one is most conducive to stitching while talking with family and friends, whichever one fits my mood of the moment.

I've posted several times about my coronavirus memorials, marking each death in Kentucky with a french knot onto a roll of vintage bandage gauze.  I finished the 2020 memorial a few weeks ago (2,662 dead) and almost immediately started on a 2021 version (7,575 dead and counting as of this week).  I've finished January (1,083 dead) and am almost done with February (892 dead).  But the small scale of the knots got to be tiring, and I yearned for something bigger, faster, and involving the sewing machine.

So for the last few days I have been working on a new project, a memorial for the U.S. military dead in Afghanistan.  Longtime readers and pals will know that I did a similar piece in 2008 counting the U.S. military dead in Iraq, which traveled extensively with Quilt National '09 and is now owned by the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln NE.  It had a flag for each death, referencing the flag-covered coffins that came home from that war.

Memorial Day, 2008, 86 x 100"

This one will be similar in format -- a single little quilted rectangle for each of the dead, held together with stitching in space -- but different in materials and concept.  

Memorial Day, detail

The brother of one of my dear friends and art pals was a career Navy man, serving as Chief Surgeon for the group of ships supporting the Theodore Roosevelt in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq war, and then on the ground in Afghanistan at the hospital in Kandahar.  After he retired a few years ago, he decided to divest his old uniforms, and through his sister, they came to me for purposes of art.

At first I wasn't sure what to do with them but with the impending end of our Afghanistan adventure I thought that war needed a memorial as well for the troops who served and died.  Cutting up the camouflage uniforms will give me the fronts of the small quiltlets for this memorial; the backs will be made from a large variety of fabrics, to remind us that every one of those uniformed dead was an individual, a person with hopes and dreams too soon cut off.

The death count is suprisingly inexact, (perhaps because so many of our military and support activities were outsourced to contractors and it's hard to tell who's military and who isn't)  and there will probably be a few more in the coming days and weeks as we attempt to make a final exit, but it's somewhere in the vicinity of 2,400.  A lot fewer than in Iraq (4,431 dead since 2003; there were 4.083 when I made my Memorial Day quilt in 2008).

This compulsion to count the dead probably sounds morbid and obsessive.  I don't think I'm particularly preoccupied with death, certainly not in my daily life, where I have been blessed not to be closely touched by the coronavirus or the war, and where I've lost only one close family member in the last decade.  But the historian and journalist in me always wants to find out the facts and write them down, and the soldier's daughter in me always wants to remember how war is not glory, it's hell. 

I'll write more about this project soon, because working with the uniforms has proven to be quite a surprise.

More deaths to count

Although I don't think I'm at all obsessed with death, I seem to have a recurring desire to mark and count the deaths associated with various national tragedies.  My first such effort was called Kentucky Graveyard (Iraq) and showed flag-draped coffins for all the Kentucky military who died in Iraq in the first year after our invasion.  My second was called Memorial Day and had a flag for each of the U.S. military who died in Iraq through Memorial Day 2008.

Kentucky Graveyard (Iraq) 

Memorial Day (detail)

I've been thinking for a long time about a similar project to count the dead from the coronavirus pandemic.  I've seen stories about artists who have put little flags out on lawns to count the dead, those who sew together small fabric bits, and those who make hash marks on fabric or canvas.  I thought of two different projects, and today I got started on the first of them.

It's along the lines of my Memorial Day quilt, actually a grid of thousands of tiny quilts the size of postage stamps.  Memorial Day had 4,084 little bits, and that was a pretty big project that took three months of fulltime studio work.  But the Kentucky coronavirus death count was 2,662 through the end of 2020, and 2,600 little bits seems manageable and yet big enough to make an impact. 

Fortunately, when the idea came to mind I had exactly what I needed already in the studio: a big stash of polka-dotted fabrics, which can easily signal either little germs floating about in the air, or the pox marking the afflicted.  In fact, I had used a lot of dots in a quilt made several years ago, called Epidemic.  (That quilt had a lot of holes in the grid, signifying people lost to the disease.)  I took all of this as a sign to make another epidemic quilt.

I've learned so much about how to construct these "postage stamp" quilts after making more than 15,000 little bits over the years.  This time I think the construction is going to go faster and more efficiently than I've ever managed before.  (I'll tell you more about that as the project progresses.)

I got 164 stamps sewed this afternoon, ready to be stitched into the big grid.  Only 2,498 to go...  

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!