Quilt date for August

I'm in the mood for triangles today, having recently sorted through all my little quilts and rediscovered how many of them have triangles as their basic building blocks.  All the work I'm going to show you came from leftovers, either my own or somebody else's; there's nothing I love more than getting a scrap bag of strange new fabric.  But there's no reason you couldn't use new fabric.

When I find myself in possession of a bunch of scrap triangles, the first thing I do is sort them by angle and then by size.  I search for a pair that are generally the same shape and size and then sew them together to make a square or rectangle.  I make a lot of these little blocks and set them aside in a pile. 

When the pile gets big enough or I get tired of matching and sewing, I start sewing the blocks into rows or squares.  If you do rows, you have your choice of two patterns, which I call "sawtooth" and "mountain."  In a sawtooth pattern, all the triangles point the same way, like a line of Rockettes.  In a mountain pattern, they're arranged in pairs, back to back to make, well, mountains.  Of course, you can mix and match your patterns at will.

top row, sawtooth -- bottom row, mountain

If you do squares, you usually sew four or nine blocks together, and have your choice of various arrangements that are familiar from traditional quilts, such as pinwheel or broken dishes, in addition to sawtooth and mountain.  If you go to sixteen blocks you can use any of the myriad traditional patterns such as card trick or dutchman's puzzle.  Or you can just sew the squares together at random without worrying about a specific arrangement.

broken dishes

pinwheel

sawtooth

mountain










Now that you've sewed some of the blocks together to make rows or squares, put them back on the design wall to see what they want to do next.  You may want to sew the rows or squares into larger modules, or you may want to frame them with some larger pieces of fabric.   

You can do this kind of free-association piecing at any degree of precision.  If you find yourself with a bunch of triangles that were all cut to size for a previous project, your blocks will all end up the same size and you might like to square them up and use a more traditional arrangement.  If they are random sizes, they probably won't fit together without some creative manipulation.  If you want to sew two blocks together and they aren't the same size, add a strip of fabric to the small one to make it the same size.  Or sew two blocks to three.  Or whatever else seems to work. 

The quilts I show here are all pretty small, but that's OK.  Little quilts make nice little presents, or they can serve as studies for larger pieces.  I don't think this date will become the love of your life -- big quilts made of little triangles can seem very traditional, even if you assemble them from various size blocks in non-traditional arrangements -- but you might have fun using up a bunch of leftovers, or testing out a new color palette.

Let me know how your quilt date works out!  If you want to send me a picture of what you made, I’d love to post it.

Art-A-Day

August 8 -- pre-game huddle

August 9 -- type case

August 10 -- drooping

August 11 -- escalator to nowhere

August 12 -- across the canal

August 13 -- stoplight peppers

August 14 -- shower curtain

Nancy Crow's show

Almost too late, I managed to transport my jet-lagged body to Auburn NY to see the huge Nancy Crow show at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Gallery three days before it closed -- definitely worth the trip. You know that I consider Nancy to be my sensei, having taken 14 weeks of workshops with her over the last seven or eight years.  I had seen many of these quilts in person one place or another, and in fact three of them I saw intimately in progress because she asked me to machine-quilt them.  (Here's Constructions 91.) But it was stunning to see everything together, and beautifully displayed, representing some of her very old work and much of her very new.

I am sorry that the museum did not permit photography, because there were some glorious quilts -- 57 in all -- that you would love to see.  Check the link above and here and here for some pictures.  And I will provide links for other quilts that I talk about later.  Please do take the extra seconds to click on those links; the quilts are wonderful and well worth your time to have a look.

The show included five of Nancy's older quilts from the days when she was using templates and commercial fabrics.  You've probably seen pictures of these quilts, which were huge and spectacular and hit the art world with a smash because they referenced the traditions of quilting but looked like nothing ever seen before.  Nancy has written about her epiphany when she realized that improvisational cutting and composition beat the hell out of templates and advance planning, but I couldn't help but notice that some of her "template" quilts were actually straying toward improvisation.  For instance, on display was a double wedding ring quilt where the curves on the rings seemed definitely freehand and one of the four main motifs was considerably smaller than the other three.

Once Nancy made the big move to improvisational design, she started her vast "Constructions" series, inspired by the construction of the timber barn that now serves as the venue for her workshops.  I found it interesting, among other things, to see how long it took for her to abandon the traditional quilt practice of the border and binding.  Bindings were the first to be abandoned.  For a couple of years she put borders on everything; later she bordered two sides; finally she let the composition occupy the whole space of the quilt. Here's Constructions 17.

Perhaps my favorite quilt in the whole show is Constructions 65, a spare but complicated composition of three colors, which is obviously only one generation away from traditional quilt blocks.  Technically it's nine rail fence blocks, with blocks of horizontal stripes alternating with blocks of vertical stripes in a traditional nine-patch array.  Still has borders, but very modern borders that almost disappear because they're so well integrated into the composition.

Most recently Nancy's "Constructions" have featured mostly vertical bars, often overlaid by an X, a special shape that she drew extensively as a child.  Many of them are made in duplex format, where one horizontal composition is stacked on top of another one.  Several are in four-plex, where the composition has four separate sectors.  I am amused because those of us invited to participate in the Color Improvisations show Nancy curated were initially asked to make four-plex quilts; that request was later rescinded but not before many a quilt was made in that format.  It's a standard format that artists have used forever, and Nancy is clearly a master of it.

These pieces constitute the heart of the show, but there is also a significant presence of Nancy's whole-cloth or minimally pieced works using her own surface-designed fabrics.  A few years ago Nancy began experimenting with screen printing and monoprinting and made several quilts with these fabrics.  I think in these works she has come squarely to the same dilemma that many of the rest of us grapple with relation to surface design.  Namely, we make beautiful fabric, and then what?  Do we just turn it into a whole-cloth quilt, or does it demand something more, something to turn it from fabric into art?

I liked the quilts where Nancy cut into her screenprinted fabric and pieced it back together to give a bit more complexity.  I don't know whether she's still working in these series, although I know she continues to take the occasional workshop with surface-design artists.  Also have to give a big compliment to Sandy Ciolino, who magnificently machine-quilted one of the screenprinted quilts.

You still have till Sunday afternoon to see the show, if you're within driving distance of Auburn.  If not, eat your heart out.  Nancy Crow is the best of the best, and this show shows her work to its greatest advantage. 

The typographic observer 3

Sans serif

Berlin museums 3 – Berlin Wall Memorial

The last time we visited Berlin, almost 40 years ago, the cold war was in its full paranoid stage and the wall was an ugly presence slicing through the city. We had memories of clearing Checkpoint Charlie in a tour bus, complete with mirrors on wheels for the border guards to slide underneath cars to make sure nobody was clinging to the axles.

This time, two decades post-wall, we visited the Berlin Wall Memorial to see how Berliners have commemorated that sad chapter of history. A section of the wall and the surrounding neighborhood have been made into an outdoor memorial/museum area with excellent signage in German and English. A huge amount of information has been crammed into unobtrusive kiosks that stand in the former no-man’s land between the actual wall and the inner perimeter.

At this site the no-man’s land included a portion of a cemetery. In the day, most of the graves remained in place and mourners were still allowed to visit, but only with permits and under heavy armed guard. One of the kiosks played a clip from an East German training film that showed two vigilant soldiers patrolling the cemetery at night. Look! A man hiding behind a gravestone – sic the dogs on him! The dogs got him by the wrist, the guards ran over to arrest him! And so, the narrator intoned, a happy end to the story of another Western spy trying to infiltrate the communist paradise. (We laughed out loud.)

The area included some remaining sections of the wall and an old guard tower. But the highlight was a memorial with the names and photos of the 136 people who died at the wall. They ranged in age from two to over 90, although the majority, as you might expect, were young men with the physical strength and nerve to dare an escape.  Some were East German border guards who saw opportunities while on duty.

Throughout Berlin, at the site of the wall, you can find memorial kiosks with details, sometimes photos, of escape attempts, successful or unsuccessful. Because this particular area included a border crossing, there were many attempts noted on the kiosks and brochure.

Right across the street from the memorial area is an old subway station, one of the “ghost stations” where western trains continued to run through portions of East Berlin. These stations were closed, doors and exit shafts were filled with cement, and guards patrolled the empty platforms (no doubt to prevent spies from leaping off the trains to infiltrate the communist paradise).

Just to make this art-related, a couple of days later we saw this picture, made many decades earlier but strikingly evocative of the horrors that later were visited upon this beautiful city.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Mauerer II, 1922 (Wall builders)

The product police strike again

I had one of those triple-digit grocery runs the other day, during which I went up and down the aisles and contemplated what a busy and productive year the product police have been having. You know the product police – the guys who notice how much you like that brand of salsa and promptly remove it from the sales chain. It often takes me a while to accept the loss of my friends, so for several months I may check the shelves in a vain hope to find them back again.

So yesterday I checked, and sure enough, my salsa still wasn’t there. Neither was my cereal or my hair conditioner, or oil-packed tuna in a pouch. (Let’s don’t even think about what happened a couple of years ago to tuna in a can, which wasn’t discontinued but just made so crummy that I had to upgrade to the pouch in the first place.)

The same thing happened earlier this summer when I needed an emergency wardrobe update before embarking on a big trip. The product police had gotten to my favorite underwear and socks, on their way to pulling all remaining copies of the new shoes I had bought two weeks earlier and fallen in love with and wanted at least one more pair of.

The cops are at work in other areas, too, such as fiber art. Hear the pain of dyers who can no longer buy Prima muslin from Robert Kaufman. Many of us are still in mourning over the untimely death of Walmart black, a cotton that discharged to gray and white – and then, one day, they changed the formula and it went to red instead, just like all the other blacks on the market. Moving to higher-end merchandise, let’s cry for Bernina, which about five years ago decided their presser foot needed a new coupling device, meaning that the 20 specialty feet I had lovingly (and expensively) acquired over the years for my two older machines won’t fit on my newest one.

That’s not to mention the demise of our favorite retailers. Sewing types in my part of the Midwest still have a hard time accepting that Baer Fabrics is no longer in business in Louisville, nor is St. Teresa’s in Cincinnati. Online we’ve lost Web of Thread, and Carmenwarehouse changed hands and stopped being wonderful. I could go on and on – and I’m not even a shopaholic, way more a retailphobe if you must know.

What’s going on? Do manufacturers think we’re all airheads who won’t buy anything unless it’s new, new, new? When did brand loyalty get redefined to mean we should buy anything that says “My Favorite Brand,” even if it isn’t My Favorite Product any more?

We needed a bar of soap last month in Germany, so we dropped in at a small market and had a choice of three, count ’em, three different kinds! One of which turned out to be what we needed. Contrast that to your basic US store, where there would be three, count ‘em, three whole shelves of soap and it would take you five minutes to find the one you want, or more, because they changed half the products since the last time you bought soap.

Yes, US consumers have all the choice in the world, except if they want to buy the same salsa they bought last month. This has to be economically inefficient – all those R&D and advertising costs rolled in to your new kind of salsa, not to mention the administrative burden for the stores, the distributors, the guys who stock the shelves, all of whom have to phase out the old salsa, rearrange the warehouse and the shelves, make up new signs for the new salsa and explain to the unhappy customers that they’ve been screwed.

I hope my malaise isn’t just from getting old and crabby. I think it’s more basic than that, a symptom of what’s wrong with the US consumer economy – too focused on superficial glitz, too lacking in real substance and value. So I take perverse pleasure in mending the holes in my old favorite socks and hoarding my last three yards of Walmart black for the perfect bleach job at some future day.  And speaking of hoarding....

Silkience shampoo -- discontinued seven or eight years ago.  I found six bottles on a bottom shelf in Virginia shortly after it disappeared in my own stores, and bought them all.  This is the last one left.

Tame creme rinse -- discontinued around 1990?  This is my last bottle, hoarded through the years, recently stretched with a little bit of water, and about one rinse away from eternity.