Wednesday, November 29, 2017

My new piece for Cloth in Common

This is the piece I was talking about in my last post and now I can post it. It is my response to the second challenge for the new online group, Cloth in Common, that I joined. You can see and read about all the responses to the "touch" challenge on the group blog here. It is shaping up to be a good group!









I found this piece to be a real joy to work on and am working on another using traditional piecing and embroidery techniques. I will be posting some photos soon. Meanwhile, here is a shot of some of the embroidery I am doing for the new piece. I might have been overly ambitious about this part of it. It's going to take me awhile...




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Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Inner piece...

What with all this eye business, including two surgeries and a million appointments and tests and drops and fiddle-dee-dee, this has not been a very productive year artwise. I basically took the summer off. When I tried to to do a little sewing I found it harder than expected. I just was not seeing very well. I couldn't clearly focus on my sewing machine's needle. I was seeing two needles, unless I took my glasses off and got as close as possible to where the action was, just short of risking that I would accidentally sew through the end of my nose. Doing something like this made me cross-eyed, cranky and exhausted.



You can probably imagine how (not) conducive this was to the creative process. Most saddening of all, was when I felt like it was really time to get back to work I was empty. No ideas, no excitement. I puttered away at a new take on an old idea, but the result left me feeling even more uninspired. Perhaps I was finished with art quilting. I could retire to knit, read, write, travel! I cleaned up the studio, opened my doors for my sixth (maybe last?) Open Studio Tour and wondered what was next.

Then one day I went out to the studio and began pulling fabrics out of my collection of solids until there was a stack that made me a little giddy with the color and I started cutting triangles—I've always had a thing about triangles—then making stacks of triangles that I began sewing randomly together. And it made me happy. Matching up two triangles and sewing a quarter inch seam didn't even require my eyes to work that well—I can do this in the dark—well, almost, although it's been years since I actually "pieced" a quilt in this traditional way.



The more triangles I sewed, the better I felt and I began to see actual possibilities for this to be something more than therapy! That night as I was drifting off to sleep I saw that it needed handwork, embroidery, another something I haven't done for years, something soft as counterpoint to the geometry of the triangles. And so I've come full circle, back to the basic skills I learned long ago. You will be seeing it soon. I think this small piece is leading me both backward and forward at the same time.




Maybe it's my new thing. Maybe not. But now I'm working up a stack of log cabin blocks and they are looking pretty great. My happy is back, for now anyway.

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Thursday, November 02, 2017

Thank You!




This morning I made this donation of all the money paid directly to me. In addition to this amount I received messages from an another seven people that they had donated directly to One America in response to my previous post. I figure we have, together, contributed right around $1000. Thank you all, so much for your support!

I am reading that power is slowly being restored to all three islands, roads are being cleared and medical supplies have arrived, but there are still many people missing or unaccounted for, all water still needs to be boiled and they have not been able to remove garbage and storm debris which is choking the system and posing health risks. I like to think we are able to do some small amount of good there.

I still have prints and you can continue to contribute—just go back to this post for the details.



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