Stuff I liked at FNF 2

I was happy to see another quilt by Mary Ruth Smith at this year's Form, Not Function show.  She has been in the show in the past and her work never fails to amaze! 

Mary Ruth Smith, Crossover


















She constructs a two-layer ground of sheer fabrics, french-seamed together to conceal the raw edges, and embroiders obsessively until almost the entire surface is covered with stitches.

From across the room you're not sure what method was used to execute the subtle cross pattern interrupted by white lines.  Up close you see the handwork.

I'm intrigued by the interplay of small patterns (each little segment has its own motifs and color scheme) and large (the dark cross shape overlaid with light rectangles).  And since I am doing a lot more hand-stitching myself this year, I can't help be impressed by the sheer time and effort that goes into all this handwork.

Walk into a quilt show this decade and you're overwhelmed with surface design -- all the ways you can put pattern or image onto fabric with painting, printing, dyeing, discharge, etc.  It's nice to see somebody doing it the old-fashioned way, and with such masterful technique and results.

Another reason to hate THEM

I haven't had a good rant on this blog in months but today's the day.  I woke up this morning, sat down at the computer, and discovered that while I slept the people at Google (I think -- although you can never discount the possibility that it's the people at Microsoft) had totally screwed up my settings for the internet.

In the olden days (and I don't mean the days of manual typewriters, just the good old days before the war in Iraq) you would set your computer the way you liked it, and it stayed that way.  If something got updated, it was up to you to find the update and if you wanted, install it.  Perhaps you missed something nifty for a while, or forever, but if you liked what your software did and how it was configured, you got to keep it as long as you liked.

Now your computer is never safe from THEM.  While you sleep, they sneak in and make things better.   Whether or not you think they're better or not, you're stuck with them, at least until you manage to turn them off.  Which is not always possible. 

Today's "improvement" has changed the way my internet screen looks.  The tabs aren't where I look for them.  The blogger interface works different.  I can't find the "history" listing at all, so if I want to reconstruct where I read that interesting blog post day before yesterday, I'm s.o.l.  I suspect there are other features of this update that I will dislike when I discover them. 

I hate it when THEY decide that I need help.  First THEY came up with automatic capitalization while I typed away on Word.  Since I often like to make lists that begin with lowercase letters, this was a pain in the neck.  Through several updates I was able to turn that feature off, but then THEY took away that option.  Lately my email program won't let me write, for instance, comment(s).  When it sees the character string (s) it replaces those characters with a smily face, and I throw up.

You may be old enough, or addicted enough to old movies, to remember the old James Coburn flick "The President's Analyst."  The vast conspiracy at the heart of the caper traced back to The Telephone Company (and you may be old enough to remember life before AT&T was busted).  Now we have no Telephone Company, just 12,000 telephone companies.  But THEY are smart enough to regroup as the world changes. 

I hate THEM.  Makes me wish I had a gun so when THEY sneak into my office in the dead of night, I could blow THEM away.  No jury would convict me.

Stuff I liked at FNF 1

I'm sorry that my hometown quilt show, "Form, Not Function: Quilt Art at the Carnegie" closed last week so my posts don't have a chance of luring you to see it.  Because of travel and illness I wasn't able to see the show until late in its run but still wanted to share some more of the quilts that I liked.

Martha Hall, Double Talk

Anybody who likes pieced quilts has already had the fleeting thought, upon seeing the Quick Response codes, "that looks kind of like a quilt!"  You can't look at these intricate compositions of squares and rectangles without thinking of how easy it would be to translate them into quilts. 

And many people have already translated those fleeting thoughts into quilts.  Some have done a much better job of it than others, and I award my personal prize to Martha Hall as the best QR quilt I've ever seen.  It will be hard for anybody else to top this one.

First, because she's translated the black and white code into a lovely color palette.  Second, because she has cleverly incorporated a bunch of smaller QR arrays into her larger composition which you can't see till you get up close.  (I love details that are revealed at close viewing.)

Third, because her quilting complements the design well, evoking circuits and connections.

Fourth, because there's a secret -- if you use your fancyfone to read each of the little QRs, they give you a bunch of "QR" phrases.

And finally, though I know it's gauche to admit it, I give extra points to quilts that are technically correct.  (Guess that makes me #14, a Qualified Rube.)  This one lies perfectly flat on the wall, and the complex piecing never loses its straight lines and square corners, which is a lot harder than it looks.

Martha, thanks for making a quilt that gave me a great deal of pleasure to look at!

Collaboration project 10 -- an update

I wrote last year about a collaboration with photographer Keith Auerbach, who made beautiful designs starting with a scanned image of one of my little sew-off squares.  I said at the time that as collaborations go, this wasn't at all a balanced meal.  I did 1 percent of the work, he did 99 percent.  But I resolved to have a second act in which I would have a better showing.

So here it is.

After scanning and playing with the sew-off images, Keith played with some other images as well.  One of his results struck me as being particularly amenable to a pieced quilt, because of the graphic stripes in the center panels.

So here's what I came up with:

I don't think this is a great work of art; in fact I will probably never finish it, let alone show it in public.  But I am excited about some things I learned in making it.

Most notable was the striking effect of the striped panels, exactly what drew me to the image in the first place.  They were indeed amenable to being executed in fabric.  Yes, everything is pieced (since you can't buy striped fabrics these days).

But the parts I liked best about the little quilt were not the plain striped panels but the complex areas where diagonal cuts of stripes were juxtaposed with others -- for instance, at the left margin just below center, or to the left of the red pyramids. 

The stripes vibrate all over, as in the old Op Art paintings, but especially at the places where the regular pattern is interrupted.  I'm going to make more work with stripes, and explore what happens with different patterns and color combinations.

What else did I learn?  That a judicious bit of commercial print fabric can enliven an austere array of pieced solids.  I've gotten so far away from commercial prints in the last several years that it took a fair bit of courage for me to incorporate the red into this piece, but I think it worked nicely.  I'll try to keep an open mind in the future for similar opportunities.

And finally, that my beloved Kona cotton solids, which I have used exclusively for almost ten years, have some bad habits that I may not be able to live with in making more quilts like this.  Kona is a beefy fabric but not tightly woven.  Those qualities endear themselves to me, because it's a forgiving cloth;  you can rip out mistakes, in either the piecing or the quilting, without leaving holes, as you get in Pimatex or other broadcloths. 

But the downside of not-tightly-woven is that cut edges fray easily, leaving nasty little threads out in the middle of the pieced areas.  Which creates no problems if your colors are darker, but every little thread shows through to the front in a pale yellow or white fabric.  In this photo it's not Kona that's fraying, but you can see what a mess you can end up with.  In my striped study, the dark Konas didn't fray anywhere near this badly, but enough stray threads did escape that it would have taken a full day to get the piece ready for show quality.  Call that a full week to get a full-size quilt ready, time I would be very crabby about spending.

So if I make more high-contrast stripes with white or other pale colors, I will either have to seek out another fabric, or figure out a way to keep the Kona in check.  I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, thanks again to Keith for letting me use his photo as inspiration.  I got plenty out of this collaboration and suspect I will get lots more before it's over.

Photo suite 10 -- palm trees

Back in the jury box again

I'm going to be a juror again -- this time for a show where we earnestly solicit your entries! It's the second year for Textiles in a Tube, sponsored by Greenville Technical College in Greenville SC.  It will be on display in the college's classy Riverworks Gallery in the city's art district, June 1 - July 15.

There's a gimmick -- all art must arrive at the gallery in a 3 x 36" mailing tube.  But that should only jumpstart your creativity!  For instance, here's the best in show from last year's exhibit:

Shelley Brenner Baird, A Long Story, 2" x 468", detail below

It's a little accordion-fold book/quilt that when unfolded stretches across the whole wall.  She did fit it all into a tube, along with the velcro strip that had to be affixed to the wall to hold it up.  See the whole work at Shelley's website here.


If you're intrigued by the challenge, check it out here.  Entry deadline is May 4.