Be my valentine -- part 2

Hey guys!  It's not too late to do the right thing for your sweetie!

If you already bought this neat metal water bottle with a spray head, you can still run out and get a nice bunch of flowers instead.

The first quilting lesson

Yesterday I started what I hope will become a really rewarding experience: I had my first day with a student who wants to learn how to make quilts. Molly has a sewing machine and has used it for small gift projects and home dec, so we don’t have to learn how to thread the needle. But she has not made quilts.

How to start! ? !

My personal prejudice is that too many teachers of beginning quilting pile it on with too much detail and too many rules. I like to get people sewing, so they can get hooked on the joy of creation before they are turned off by the frustration of "not getting it right.” I thought it might be fun to chronicle Molly’s learning and see what she makes.

We talked about what she wanted to make – a baby quilt – and what pattern/approach she would like. I gave her a choice of three traditional quilting concepts: nine-patch, rail fence, and log cabin. She decided on log cabin.

I think all of those three concepts have much to recommend them to beginners. They’re all so firmly grounded in the traditions of quilting that anybody drawn to the quilt format will feel comfortable. But they all lend themselves to a low-rules approach to construction and design. With any of those three concepts you can make a very traditional feeling quilt, or a very contemporary, edgy one.

First we chose fabrics. I have a stash of fabrics, largely traditional calico small prints, that I have outgrown as my own quilts have become contemporary and abstract. They’re all folded neatly in a “library” so it’s easy to choose a palette.

Molly was happy to find a lot of earth tones, and I was happy to divest them – those of us who lived through the 70s (and bought lots of fabric) are usually not thrilled to remember those glory days of brown.  She chose about a dozen fabrics, making sure to have a wide range of values, with a couple of light-lights to perk up the mediums and darks.  If you have chosen a good palette, you don't have to make a lot of subsequent decisions, just grab whichever strip is on top of the pile or seems to be the right length to match the piece you're sewing it to.

We decided to make nine blocks, so we cut nine three-inch squares for the log cabin centers. Then we cut a bunch of strips in varying widths. Molly sewed a strip to each of the centers, chain-piecing the whole set before cutting them apart and pressing.  Then she added a second strip to each block.  She took everything home and for our next meeting will have nine blocks ready to trim and sew together. We decided there would be no rules: you don’t have to sew strips in a particular order or in a particular color plan or keep the center square exactly in the center of the block.

Two strips sewed to each center square.

There are only two things that I tell beginning piecers to worry about: sewing a straight seam and pressing VERY CAREFULLY.

We talk about how it’s important to start with straight edges on your pieces (thank you, rotary cutters), and to align the two pieces of fabric carefully before you take them to the sewing machine. Don’t watch the needle as you stitch, but rather watch the cut edge of the fabric and concentrate on guiding it past your chosen landmark, about a quarter-inch to the right of the needle. The landmark can be a line on your stitch plate, or a place on the presser foot itself, or the edge of the feed dog plate, or a mark you have drawn in ink on your machine bed – whatever seems good for you.

Molly is using the edge of her sewing machine foot as the landmark. It’s not exactly a quarter-inch, but so what? As long as she always uses the same landmark, her seams will be straight and uniform. If she decides later in her quilting career that she needs to construct quilt blocks with great precision, she’ll be able to do so because she will know exactly how wide her seams are.

And we talk about pressing – how you start on the back of the work by gently guiding the seam to the correct direction, then flip the piece over and do serious pressing from the front. How you set the iron down behind the seam and use its flat edge as a bulldozer to push the fullness ahead of you, to make sure the seam is completely open before you add pressure.

All the other details can wait. And maybe we’ll never get to them! I am constantly surprised and thrilled that you can make beautiful quilts without templates, without a lot of measuring, without a lot of advance planning, without a lot of worrying. If you don’t have to worry about bureaucratic details, you can keep your mind clear to think about the colors, the design, the beauty, the art.

Art-A-Day

January 31 -- Big Red at lunch

February 1 -- construction site

February 2 -- parade

February 3 -- church yard

February 4 -- red, white and blue

February 5 -- still life with scissors


February 6 -- snowing again

Final exam -- LA Art

Final exam:  for each of the following installations, say whether it's art or not art.

1. 

2. 

3.

Answers later -- give me a minute to mark the papers. 

You may be interested in the program we attended; I would recommend it!  It was put on by Elderhostel, the venerable and respected organization that puts on educational sessions for geezers.  (Elderhostel is now changing its famous name to Exploritas, one of those names that nobody will ever understand or remember, because they think the baby boomers will be embarrassed to be thought of as "elder."  Well, until it comes time to step up and claim the senior discount.) 

This program is called "Art Collectors and Their Collections" and it's offered several times a year.  Headquarters is a very nice hotel in Monrovia, with Trader Joe's (wine lovers will know it as the home of Two Buck Chuck) and a good Japanese restaurant within walking distance.

Final exam answers: 

1. not art (rainy day at the Huntington Library) 

2. art (Cady Noland, Misc. Spill, at the Geffen Center, Museum of Contemporary Art) 

3. not art (rainy day at the Norton Simon Museum)

Be my valentine

It occurs to me that this blog is called "Art With a Needle" but there hasn't been very much discussion of art with needles.  I will remedy that.

I was in the fabric store, bumped into a rack of tulle and remembered that Valentine’s Day is coming up – but still far enough away that I could sew up some hearts and get them to my assorted faraway loved ones before the appointed time. Usually I have these brilliant ideas the week after, so I was energized.

Making tulle doodads is the easiest sewing project you can possibly do. The only supplies you need are some tulle and some Solvy.

Cut a sheet of Solvy (I cut about nine inches worth off the six-inch roll) and three sheets of tulle a little bit larger than the Solvy. Put one tulle down on the table, then the Solvy, then another tulle. I used two colors of tulle, a red and an orange.

Now get a bunch of tiny bits and pieces of fabric, thread, lace, yarn, whatever you find on your work table or floor or miscellaneous drawer. I found some sheer fabric, some bits of gold cord, a piece of fancy netting with gold inlays, a metallic orange “raffia” cord, and a bunch of fabric snips in reds and purples.

Arrange the bits and pieces evenly over the sheets of tulle, then put the third sheet of tulle on top of everything. You may want a couple of pins to hold it all together and to keep the bits from falling out as you slide the package to the sewing machine.

The fun part: sew and sew and sew the layers together, trapping the bits and pieces inside the tulle sandwich. The Solvy holds everything firm while you sew. I used red cotton thread in the needle and metallic gold in the bobbin (my machine doesn’t like metallic threads on top so I humor it). Eventually you will get tired of sewing and will take the sandwich out.

I used a Sharpie to draw hearts on the sandwich, then switched to a darning foot and went around the outlines once or twice.  I cut the hearts out just outside the outline stitching.  Finally, you soak the hearts in hot water to dissolve the Solvy.

If you are making a lot of hearts, the second batch is even easier because you will save up the snips from the first batch and recycle them into filling for the second sandwich. I saved the snips from my second batch in a little plastic bag and stashed them in my miscellaneous drawer for next year.

One final construction tip: here’s how to put on the hanging cords most efficiently. Thread your needle with your cord of choice but do not cut the thread off the spool. Thread all the hearts onto the cord and push them a good ways up toward the spool so they don’t fall off. Now take the first heart, slide it back toward the end, cut off enough cord for its hanging loop, and knot it. Repeat with the second heart and all the rest.

The Joy of Mending

Checking out Alison Schwabe’s blog this morning, I was intrigued by her comments about an exhibit she saw years ago called “Objets Blesses.” It showed things from Africa that had been painstakingly mended (she posted a photo of a drinking gourd mended with leather) and the point was that people mend things that are important to them – and that “mending therefore confers a higher level of value to the object.”

That resonates with me, as I am an aficionada of mending. With a husband and two sons I have rarely been without mending opportunities in the last four decades and I am really good at it. Once I told a young teenage son that he was forbidden to wear that pair of jeans out of the house unless he let me mend them. He reluctantly said OK, “but only if you maintain the integrity of the rip.” So I did, by putting the patch on the inside and largely hiding the mending stitches underneath the floating threads of the original hole.

Only last weekend I noticed frayed edges on the bottom of my husband’s pants cuffs as they emerged from the dryer, and spent a comfortable hour fixing them. Trimmed off the frayed bits, opened the hem, put a piece of muslin behind the fold line and reinforced it with stitching, then turned the cuffs a quarter-inch higher and rehemmed.

I often mend holes or spots in sweaters or knit shirts with ultrasuede. These below do double duty of holding up cuffs that would droop if left to their own devices.

Usually I restrict the stars to women’s clothes (I call it a designer detail, and have received oohs and aahs) and stick to rectangles for men, but I did put a high-contrast heart on my husband’s sweatshirt when the neck ribbing started to disintegrate. The grocery clerk loved it – “Look at this heart! His wife sewed this heart on his shirt!”

Here’s a purely utilitarian mend, occasioned when I was sewing the facing on a quilt and managed to snip open my own shirt instead of snipping the thread. This was a purchased shirt, so I didn’t have scraps stashed away. I took off the pocket, cut a piece of fabric for the patch and replaced it with something else, then incorporated the patch underneath the button. I like to think it looks deliberate, like one of those safari jackets with doodads that you don’t understand but must have some purpose.

We lived in Germany in the early 1970s, at a military base with a pathetically haphazard library. I found a book published in Great Britain during the war to tell all about mending. And this was heavy-duty – not just how to mend sox, but how to transform a worn-out man’s coat into children’s clothes and the like. I was fascinated, and imagined myself creatively and frugally mending everything in sight. It’s just like I consider myself as a potential pioneer woman. Thank heaven I don’t have to mend socks and transform coats into kids’ pants and chop wood and kill bears – but I bet I would have been great at it.

But back to Alison's point about the mend conferring value on the object.  That's one lovely concept that is 99.9% absent in today's consumption-mad world.  Sure, the grocery clerk loved the heart on the sweatshirt, but in general a guy in mended clothing elicits pity as a victim of poverty, probably homeless if not outright wacko.  Maybe I can fob off my ultrasuede patches as designer details, and cover up the stains on my shirt by overdyeing, but I feel latent guilt when I do so -- will people see my creativity or just my inner bag lady?  Most of the time I wear the shirt anyway, but it nags.

For some time I have been wrestling with the concept of mending as art.  I even have the title for the show:  "Mended In Gold."  Haven’t figured out how to execute it, but I have started to save my world’s greatest mends after the garments nevertheless wore out. Some day….