Zoe starts a new quilt

At the risk of sounding like an elementary school art teacher (not that there’s anything wrong with that) I’m going to write about kids again today. Seems like my blog has been full of little people lately as I’ve welcomed a new baby to the family and recalled lots of babies in my past, not to mention my project for kids at a Pittsburgh museum. But yesterday our granddaughter Zoe spent the day with us and the first thing she said was, “can we make a quilt today?”

In her last quilt, Zoe did the sewing but I cut the strips and pressed after every seam. This time I decided she could learn to do these tasks for herself. After an extended lecture on rotary cutter safety (ask me how I know) we worked out a routine. First attempts to have her both hold the ruler and cut didn’t work very well, so she positioned the ruler where she wanted it; then I held the ruler in place while she cut.

In hindsight, think my work table is a little too high for Zoe and she didn’t have enough leverage to lean on either the ruler or the blade with good force. For subsequent cutting projects we’ll either give her a stool or move to a lower table. Yesterday it was simpler to let her concentrate on wielding the blade without having to worry about the ruler slipsliding away.

Then, after a lecture on iron safety (fortunately I have no burn horror stories to relate, but didn’t let that get in the way of a good lecture) she got to iron her fabric and press her seams.

We had another milestone yesterday – we had to raise Zoe’s sewing table two inches because her knees weren’t fitting properly underneath! Not really a surprise, as she’s been using it for almost two years at its low level.

Oh, the quilt itself …. We scoured every fabric drawer in the house for hot pink, which I would always tell you is one of my favorite colors but for some reason has all but vanished from my stash. I thought I owned enough print fabric of every conceivable color and color combination to satisfy anybody’s needs, but I was mortified to find so little pink. We did eventually find enough to get us through the day, but  the next step in Zoe’s quilt education may have to be a trip to the fabric store.

She’s making blocks of random-width strips that are going to finish at 12 inches square. We’ll eventually arrange them in rail-fence fashion, with alternating blocks striping horizontally and vertically. She’s more than halfway through her initial piecing.

(We thought we had started with nine strip sets, so the finished quilt can have nine blocks, but two of them joined together in the course of chain-piecing.  We'll deal with that at the next session.)

Art for kids

I am going to get a double honor this month. I have a quilt in Fiberart International 2010, the prestigious triennial show that opens in Pittsburgh on April 16. And I have also been invited to be the guest artist for a “drop-in studio” that will be set up at the Society for Contemporary Craft, where my piece will be on exhibit.

The drop-in studio is a place where visitors can make a little bit of art to take home. It’s usually children 4-10, who spend between 15 and 45 minutes working. The museum likes to present projects that relate to art on display at the time.

Postage 1: Regatta -- detail
on display in Fiberart International 2010

My work on display is one of my “postage” quilts, a grid of little stitched rectangles that are suspended from threads. My project for the drop-in studio is to let the kids make patches by glueing little designs to 2-inch squares of denim. The museum is going to cut the squares from old jeans and come up with a pile of fabric scraps that can be cut into designs. Low-budget projects being a good thing in the art world these days, this one should be a real winner because the only thing they’ll have to buy will be a bottle of Elmer’s Glue.

I have made a bunch of samples that will be on display, and last week I invited my granddaughter Zoe over to make some patches and then model possibilities for what to do with them.

Note patch affixed to backpack

Unfortunately, the drop-in studio is unsupervised, and while scissors are OK, the staff is hesitant to put out needles. So if any sewing has to be done, it will have to be done at home. It will be OK, of course, to glue the patches to shoes, caps, notebooks, backpacks, etc. but not to anything that has to go through the wash. But I hope that some grown-up will step up to the plate and help the kids sew the patches on their sweatshirts or pants.

Art-A-Day

March 28 -- on the golf course


March 29 -- Lydia

March 30 -- rock face

March 31 -- having a ball

April 1 -- magnolias

April 2 -- still life with banana peel

April 3 -- Easter parade

"I swear never to make a baby quilt"

Elena wrote a comment to my last post and said, “You're not in the group of artists who'd swear never to make a baby quilt. Care to share your thoughts on that?”

I understand how some people might swear never to make a commission quilt that has to match the sofa, but what is so awful about a baby quilt??  It's small, it's fast, you can make it out of your stash, it's going to be USED and it's probably going to be kept.  It will probably be the first work of art in the child's life.  And I think every baby deserves to have something that's his own, that's special, that doesn't have to be shared with everybody else in the family.  Maybe that's why I love to put the baby's name on the quilt.

Some artists may think it's beneath their dignity to make a functional quilt, especially one that might well get peed or chewed or spit up on or put on the floor. But I think that those of us who choose to make our art in the form of quilts must have some visceral connection with traditional quilts (i.e. functional quilts), else why choose this under-respected niche of the art world in which to operate? If you don’t love something about the traditional quilt format, then why not make your art as paintings, or sculpture, or lithographs, or collage, or photos?

Maybe all artists who make non-functional, non-traditional quilts ought to be required to make one functional quilt every year or so, as a ritual obeisance to our roots. When you make a functional quilt, for instance, you are reminded why you quilt densely, why you put a strong binding on, all those conventions that you no longer have to do, but once upon a time all quiltmakers had to do. We can choose, in the name of art, to make a quilt with no binding at all, or make a quilt from tea bags or bread wrappers or Coke cans, or leave thread ends wafting in the breeze, but our foremothers had no such choices, and perhaps we should regularly be reminded of why and how they made their work, why and how they developed the traditions that we so blithely flout.

I don’t make bed quilts for big beds, because I don’t have enough time. On the rare occasions when I am confronted with a wedding, I make a wall quilt if anything.  I’ve actually made only two quilts in my life for grown-up beds (and one of them, my first quilt, is currently taken apart, awaiting reconstruction, because I did such a lousy job of making it in the first place).

But I have made many smaller quilts that, yes, people actually pull over their bodies to get warm.  And I make baby quilts whenever I have the opportunity. When I do, I’m moving temporarily into a different world, a thankfully bygone world, where women got to show their artistry only within very limited areas, where making quilts was esteemed only insofar as the quilts were useful. It reminds me of where we started, and how far we have come, and it’s good to be reminded every now and then.

Babies on my mind -- finally here!!

We finally have a new baby, Owen, a big boy at 8 pounds 11 ounces! Tomorrow morning I’ll put a present in the mail for him – finished a couple of days ago, so it doesn’t have his name on it. But it will be there the day after he comes home from the hospital. The present is a newborn quilt.

We now know that babies don’t develop the ability to differentiate colors until they’re about three months old, but they can see the high contrast of black and white. So the earliest quilts and toys should not be in primary colors or baby pastels, but B&W.

I learned this by accident 11 years ago when my nephew Robbie, not yet three months old, was visiting. A black and white quilt that I had made many years ago was draped over the sofa where we plunked the baby, and we were surprised to see that he was attentively “reading” it and would do so for a remarkably long time. I immediately made him his own little B&W quilt but it was too bad I didn’t do so earlier.

The next baby in the family didn’t come along till 2008, and I made him a B&W quilt right away. Here’s Justin (who’s now a big brother) at six days old, paying very close attention to his reading.

For Robbie’s quilt I gathered up a bunch of different B&W fabrics and just cut squares from each one. For both Justin’s and Owen’s I was feeling ambitious so I went into my boxes of pieces from Nancy Crow workshops and found a bunch of B&W studies that I sliced and diced a bit, then sewed together into the baby quilt. In both cases I added a bit of commercial polka dot fabric for a border.

Here’s what Owen’s new little quilt looks like.

Babies on my mind -- part 4

Still no baby today, but here’s another baby quilt to show you. This one was for Elijah’s big brother. As occurs in the best baby quilts, it has his name on it.

I love babies whose names include few or no curved letters, because I like to piece their names. Great names from my baby gift past include Matthew, Ella, Lily and Will. But if you name your child Cassandra, expect her name to be embroidered down in the corner, not pieced in.

J doesn’t count as curved, because it’s so simple to just pull in the bottom of the tail stroke as you stitch. U is easy if you make two mirror-image Js and sew them together. C, O, G and Q are difficult, unless your letters are pretty large. The hardest, of course, is S, because you have to change directions halfway through the curve.

B, P and R are relatively simple, because you can make tiny semicircular bowls without worrying too much about the shape, and let the strong straight strokes carry the day. If you want, you can make it easier by cheating and omitting the hole in the bowl – just have a solid semicircle attached to the vertical stroke, as I did with the R in Irene in yesterday’s quilt du jour. I generally hand-applique the bowls onto the background, then stitch the vertical stroke over the top, but if you were feeling really feisty you could probably figure out how to piece them in.

Once I made a quilt for my brother Bruce that had his name pieced in, by finding print fabric with semicircular motifs on a plain background. I found fabric of the same color for the background of my other pieced letters. Then I fussy-cut the print fabric so the semicircles became the bowls of the B and R; I pieced in the vertical strokes and there were my curved letters, with no circular seams at all!

And once I made a quilt that had all the letters of the alphabet -- except those with curves.