Pat your head and rub your stomach...

Last week I taught a workshop for my local fiber and textile group, on a subject that I thought would be easy as pie.  I called it "Magic Cross Stitch" but really it was only the technique of filling your cloth with cross stitches by working from the back side of the fabric.

Why do this?  Actually I started out by stitching blind, a technique that Dorothy Caldwell famously teaches on the first day of her hand stitching classes.  I took it to extremes several years ago when my dear friend and art pal Terry Jarrard-Dimond took a class from Dorothy and loved the blind stitching.  We decided to each stitch blind for 12 hours -- one of us on black fabric, one of us on white.  Here's the finished pair:

Equinox: Night and Day

My half was the night; Terry's was the day.  She mostly used seed stitch; I mostly used cross stitch.  Read more about this project here.

I loved this stitching; it looked so weird, so random, so unplanned.  But it took way too long; that number of stitches would take me perhaps two hours if my eyes were open.  The other ten hours were spent untangling threads, making sure the thread lay flat against the fabric, avoiding loops, making sure the stitches weren't too tight, getting the thread unwrapped from the buttons of my shirt.  Almost all those tasks would have been unnecessary, of course, if I hadn't had a blindfold on.

So I thought of another way to achieve the surprise, the random and weird look of the blind stitching but without the hassles of blind thread management.  I worked from the back of the fabric, not the front.  Even though the cross stitch is so simple, it's amazingly difficult to visualize from the back of the fabric what's happening on the front.  I did a lot of "magic cross stitch" a couple of years ago, after finishing the blind stitching, and I loved the results (the project is still in process).

I thought this would be a great technique to share with my fiber art pals, and arranged to lead a workshop.  I'll tell you about it tomorrow!

Fantastic Fibers coming up

The entry deadline for Fantastic Fibers, the annual juried show at the Yeiser Art Center in Paducah KY, comes at the end of this week and if you're on the usual-suspect email lists you may be getting reminder messages.  I'm here to tell you why I'm not going to do an entry.

First off, what's good about FF.  Although Paducah is way off the beaten path of the art world, and the Yeiser is a small museum, the show runs during the huge AQS exhibit so lots of the 30,000 quilters making the Paducah pilgrimage will see your work.  And the awards are decent: $1,000, $500 and $250, and there's going to be a printed catalog.  There are no size limits, especially appealing if you love to work big as I do.

In recent years FF has succeeded in attracting excellent work from around the world; I particularly remember a fabulous piece by Eszter Bornemisza, the great fiber artist from Hungary, in the 2012 show. (Read more about it here.)

Eszter Bornemisza, Primitive Findings (detail below) -- in Fantastic Fibers 2012

So why am I not going to enter this year?  Money.

The entry fee is $25 per piece!  You can enter up to five pieces ($125), but even if you don't have that many wonderful creations lying around, we're talking way too much $$$$ for me.  On general principles, I am hostile toward shows that seem to regard the entry process as a revenue opportunity rather than a way to simply cover costs.

Since I never delete old emails I can report that the FF fee was $12 per entry in 2014, $15 per entry in 2015 and 2016 (25% increase), and now is up to $25 (66% increase).  That's pretty steep -- both the fee and the rate of increase -- for a small museum in an out-of-the-way town.  I think it's overreaching.

So I'm opting out, thank you.

My favorite things 5

I am privileged to count as a friend Elmer Lucille Allen, who is quite a local celebrity, and not just in the art world.  She was the first African-American chemist to work for Brown-Forman, a huge liquor company, back when those "first" distinctions were hard to come by.  She loved art since childhood and became an accomplished ceramicist, getting her MA after she retired.  Wanting a more attractive way to display her teapots, boxes and other vessels, she perked up her ears when somebody suggested she drape fabric over the shelves -- and proceeded to learn and master shibori dyeing. I met her at our local fiber and textile art group.

Several years ago she had a show of her textiles and ceramics together.  I missed the opening and by the time I got to the show, all the beautiful pots had red dots on them, so the next time I saw her I whined that I wasn't able to buy anything.  She said she had boxes and boxes of ceramics all packed up for some reason, and she would be happy to bring them over to show me.

So we unwrapped all the things in my living room and these two cubes called out to me -- heck, why wouldn't they, since they have my initials on them!  (I know, most of the Ls are backward, but they're still Ls to me.)

The cubes have patterns on all six sides but are glazed, in a beautiful pale celadon, only on the top five sides.  My only regret: Elmer Lucille didn't sign them.

All the news that's unfit to print 2

In my continuing war against stupid, worthless, ridiculous factoids in the newspaper, this latest piece of evidence:

Do we really believe that 20% of the American public thinks that meeting new people is "harder than selling snow to a snowman"?  Maybe, if the question was phrased something like this:

I think meeting new people is harder than:  

A.  herding cats

B.  pulling teeth

C.  selling snow to a snowman

D.   pissing up a rope

E.   putting toothpaste back in the tube

You'd probably get about 20% response for each of the options.

I might mention that the sponsor of this "survey" is an app that lets you "get to know new people without the awkwardness of one-on-one meetups."  Well, at least that ought to cut down on date rape.

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.  

Vickie makes a little book

When I wrote last fall about making a book of "newspaper poetry" and invited readers to copy the idea, Vickie Wheatley left a comment that she was going to make one herself.  Yesterday I was so happy to see her finished book, and it's wonderful!  She gave me permission to share it with you.

I had used early/late as the theme for my little book; Vickie used up/down, and found lots of raw material.  Since both "up" and "down" are parts of so many idioms, she had a lot more variety than I found with my theme.  Here are a few of her pages:

Just as I found when making my book, Vickie discovered that some of her pages strongly resembled poetry.  Best of all, her husband, who writes music, used some of the "poetry" as a basis for a new song!

Well, done, Vickie!  And thanks for sharing your work with us.