The Coco Chanel/Old McDonald Quilt

 I was three-quarters finished with this peace/love/fashion quilt for a friend when she posted on facebook that her nearly 18-month-old daughter knows a kazillion animal sounds.  My compadre thought it really important that the animals representing the sounds show up on the quilt.

 Laramie, my Chihuahua, totally loved making this quilt. She's been indifferent to others but persisted in spreading out loooonng-ways across this one whenever I worked on it.

 Is that a happy cow or what?  I have the same design in pink but the blue just worked better . . .

 especially once I added the blue slithering snakes ("ssssssss").  The kitty, by the way, is orange for a reason:

because it's the same color as my friend's kitty.

We too the quilt/blankie over this evening, and it was so much fun thinking about how excited the toddler will be when she sees it (she was asleep when we got there), and how much fun she and her mom will have cuddling under it, with one of them thinking admiring the dresses and shoes while the other offers a background chorus of sssss, ribbit, meow, woof, moo, baa, roar, and more.  Ah, friendship; just another word for joy.

Stylin' and Profilin' with Old McDonald

 

Here are some of the fabrics for  the new picnic blanket (a. k. a. pieced quilt) I started this week for a friend.

I was zooming along with the construction when my compadre asked if I'd seen the friend's latest post on facebook. Turns out she'd told her daughter's adoring public about all of the animal sounds the toddler can make now.

My compadre contained himself until the next morning, and then he couldn't stand it any longer. He said, "You ought to put the animals on the quilt."

The what?  Yes, I'd heard correctly. He thought I should put all of the animals the little girl knows onto her mom's quilt.

"They'll look really good," he said.  He didn't need to add that my friend would be doubly delighted.

As an act of friendship, he was bang-on right.  From a design perspective, though, I had to rearrange my idea of what I was making.  See those pretty fabrics above?  The one with the black background shows up in a number of places on the quilt, as does another fabric with a black background.  The motifs for that one are fabulously outlandish boots and purses. It's a styling and profiling quilt balanced by a range of pinks and a few very small rectangles that reflect the presence of a little girl.

Adding animals?  How would that work?  More smoothly than you might think, considering the fabrics I added:

Believe it or not, I had all of these fabrics except the lion (green background, top center) and the snake (Slither slither on the right side, with the white background).

The majority of the piecing was complete, but I was able to substitute good-sized chunks of animal fabric here and there.  The rest of them I fused down slap in the middle of my carefully chosen and organized pinks and peace signs, alleviating the potential boredom that never existed because it was wonderful to begin with.

And now?  What is it now?  I'll post a photo when I get the thing completely finished so you can judge for yourself, but I've got to say that sometimes dumping your original concept when a new one comes along can be a brilliant move.  Already I love thinking about how much fun my friend will have with her daughter, the two of them discovering animals here and there and giggling as they baaa and moooo and ssssss and oo oo ah ah (that's a monkey sound) and ribbit and roar with their blankie wrapped around them.

Textile Arts (Notes to Myself)

Source of photo:  Paddling Experts blog

Silverfish love spray starch so if you want to prolong the life of any textiles, forego the spray starch.

Photo from Gadgetrivia

****
I took a class with internationally recognized quilt designer Kathleen Loomis a few years back. She taught us how to do free-hand cutting, saying she used a template twice and didn't like it.  Here are her two rules regarding textile art:
1.  Work on a design wall.
2.  Press well.  (If you can't get a seam to lie perfectly flat, rip it out and re-sew it, because otherwise you'll have permanent bubbles and bumps.)  An item can only stand one serious pressing, for which you must have a hard surface underneath.  The floor will do and has the advantage of being always available.
Incidentally, Kathleen Loomis has a website as well as a brilliant blog, which is always a pleasure to wander through.
Also incidentally, I have two irons, a Black & Decker Digital Evolution, which is weighty and works really well on seams, and a Panasonic NI-C78SR, which is my favorite iron ever.  It offers the technology irons have needed ever since steam was invented:  a removable water tank.  Rather than bringing the spouted cup to the iron and spilling water all over the ironing board, one pushes a button, lifts off the water tank, and takes it to the faucet to be filled.  Brilliant.  I don't know why every iron doesn't include this feature.
*****

Pink, Endlessly Being Stitched

I started this project in the summer, sewing together bits of pink fabric left over from other quilts.

No matter what I added to it the thing still seemed wimpy, the pinks too bland.

Koko decided to get in on the action.  Usually he's camera shy but not when it comes to quilts.

I broke up the pinks with blues and some touches of green, but the piece wasn't resolved until I added some newly purchased strong pinks

My favorite, ever.

Quilt-speak

 As promised, another view of Mary Flowers' quilt.

Somebody asked if I'd mind sharing what I wrote around the edge of the quilt. Here is what it says:
 

Where ever we may be, the sun is shining on me and thee. The same sun, yours and mine, no matter how near or distant our houses may be. That sun warms, comforts, nurtures – much the same way that you (my dearest friend Mary Flowers) and I (your dearest friend Mary Jo Cartledgehayes have warmed, comforted, and nurtured each other for what is now more than forty years.

Forty. How can that be? And why do I feel as though if we'd blinked we'd have missed it. “Ars longa, vita brevia” - the Latin, constant believe that life is short and arts long. Today, January 8, 2012, the day I am completing this quilt, I understand the statement anew. Life – our lives – are long in the day-to-day; in experiences and creativity and curiosity and people loved steadfastly. Long in cute shoes, pretty dresses, leather jackets, blue jeans (remember the time we went somewhere and they wouldn't let us in because we were wearing jean? Jeans that cost $50 in 1979-ish? I think that was the night you put your purse on top of the car and we got in and started off and papers flew out like giant snowflakes in the dark). Long in places: Paris, even though we weren't there at the same time and London and Middle Bass and the Carolinas; bars and 24-hour breakfast places; baptisms, burials, weddings, Cookie Days, and the thousands of ordinary days (14,600 to be precise) that we have laughed our heads off, cried our eyes out, raged, ranted, run (remember running on East Main?) and sung.

Our lives are long in the counting of days and goodness, but they are also the blink of an eye. But art: here's the thing: art, even the oldest – Phoenician, Babylonian, cave paintings – or the famous: Mona Lisa, the crown jewels, the Daniel Morgan statue: art is long but art is frozen, forever frozen in the moment of its completion.

We have been a lot of things over the course of our amazing lives, but what we have not-not-not-not-not-not been is frozen. Those flames you saw dancing on my head when I was in the pulpit? Girl, those flames were dancing over your head, too, this whole time, since back when your dad christened you May-Ree and me May-Ree Jo. We are the brains in our heads. We are the wrinkles and scars on our bodies. We are the flame. And we are the dance. xxxooo Mary Jo

On Finishing

Project 52.1

This year I'm completing projects. First up: a quilt for an old friend. I'd already made her one, but she pointed out that it needs washed once in a while. a quilt -- primary colors with a red binding --a few years ago, but she wanted a second one.

 

She was hoping for colors like rust, brown, aubergine, orange, gold:  the vibrancy of falling leaves. Those colors remind me of every boring antique quilt I've ever seen, and I can't stand the thought of working with them. I found a substitute:  turquoise and tangerine.  That combination developed from the first fabric I chose for her, the birdhouses you see above.

This is the only fabric that appears twice in the quilt. That's because Mary has a number of vintage birdhouses ornamenting her lawn / garden in South Carolina.  Here's a photo from the summer of 2011:

Every decision about the quilt emerged from the birdhouse fabric.  It allowed for turquoise, which allowed the peace sign fabric, which freed me to use any other color I wanted. The Jetson-looking tangerine blobs convinced me to make the entire quilt from 18" squares. I like those blobs very well and didn't want them lost.

I hand-quilted the piece with orange thread, and this afternoon I finished hand-sewing vintage binding onto it.  I was then going to write my name, the date, the location (information all quilters are encouraged to include), but once I started writing I couldn't stop until I'd gone around 2.5 times.

Then I traced around my left hand, because I love the shape of hands and also because Mary Flowers once told me she would recognize my hand if we were separated by fifty years and all she saw was one finger.  (Do you know what I call that?  I call that enduring friendship. And thus we have The Enduring Friendship Big Block Quilt.)

What did I notice in forcing Project 1 through to completion (and, trust me, it was a forced completion; yesterday I came up with a new idea; I had to remind myself I was determined to complete one project a week in 2012 and I was rapidly running out of week)?

I noticed 

--that I like the look of handwriting around the inside borders of a quilt backed with white muslin.

--that I might enjoy making a quilt in which my words, in various colors, become the pattern.  That idea is a bit nerve-wracking; what would happen if after investing ten or twenty hours in writing I added something I didn't want to keep in the finished quilt?

--that sometimes I worry needlessly about silly things that are resolved once I get on with the project.

Hellloooo, 2012

2011 was capped off by my annual meeting with Dick Clark to welcome the new year.  He was on the television in my bedroom, where I was snug as a bug, keeping my right arm still and allowing the muscles and ligaments to recover.

While I was in South Carolina, I met my friend Brian for coffee, and we talked about the New Year's Eve we spent in Times Square with our friend Susan Malavet.  Cold?  Oh, Lordie, it was brutally cold.  We'd have frozen, no doubt, if not for Susan, who lived north of the city and was the veteran of numerous New Year's Eves in New York City.


The most amazing aspect of being there is the other-worldly / one-world feeling you get when you visit the Mona Lisa or when you see Charles Dickens' name inscribed in a visitors' log at Shakespeare's birthplace, both of which I've done.  It's equal parts awe -- I'm part of something so much larger than myself -- and also of connection -- not to the artist but to the millions who've joined in admiring the work. 

The next most amazing aspect was that within twenty minutes Susan, Brian, and I were the only people left on the street. I don't know where all of those people went, or how they got away so quickly.  If they'd all flowed to Grand Central Station, they'd all flowed out of it again by the time we arrived there to catch a train.  The night is a masterpiece of civic planning and foot-traffic flow.


And here we are with a whole new year,all bright and shiny, just waiting for us to pitch in and make something of it. 

I'm beginning a new series of large art pieces this year involving bridal gowns (and perhaps additional garments) and narrative. 


I'm also planning a number of smaller pieces.  Rather than making 365 pieces of art, though, as I did last year, I'm going to complete 52 pieces of art (painting, collage, quilt, fiber art, assemblage) in 2012.  Yep, that's one a week.  Twenty or so pieces are already off to a good start; at least a dozen more are right at being finished and just need me to push through that final "what the hell do I do now?" stage.

My other major art project for 2012 is to learn how to operate all of the bells and whistles on my Nikon camera.


And then there's that book project.  It's a very fine project, indeed, but I won't be working on it until the repetitive stress injury to my elbow heals.


Finally, I'm still researching preservation techniques and still working on Step One, which is to halt the damage to paper records, photographs, and ephemera from my parents' house.

For the record, the Year of the Rabbit continues until February 4, when the Year of the Dragon begins.  Other dragon years are 1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, and 2000.  If any of those are your birth year, you can expect an especially propitious time of it.  The rest of us can expect the usual sun and rain falling on the just and unjust alike.

The Purple Quilt Rides Again

The purple quilt that began with a few lovely purple patches draped on my mantel is now completed -- except for the batting and backing and hand-quilting and binding, which always go faster than making the quilt top because they require handwork rather than decision-making.

 As I've mentioned, I was making this quilt for Dr. Nancy A. Hardesty, my dear friend who is near the end of her two-year struggle with pancreatic cancer.  Nancy asked that I give the quilt (in her honor) to someone with breast cancer (in honor of my own breast cancer). Then I suggested we raffle or auction it off to benefit the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus, of which Nancy was a founding member.  Nancy loved that idea and thought it would be a nice touch if whomever won the quilt then donated it to someone with breast cancer.

It's the circle of love, and I as designer wonder if anybody but Nancy and I could ever love this quilt. The fabric pieces are all relevant in one way or another or six to our families and friendships.  The newspaper piece because she's a historian.  The cross because of her faithfulness.  The tiara because (not everybody knows this) Nancy could never resist a fine tiara.  The lime green Halloween piece because she hasn't missed sending me a Halloween card in more than twenty years.  The pinks with polka dots because I love pinks with polka dots, which meant she would delight in having them there.  The purples, because it's her favorite color; she even owned a purple car for a number of years.  The New York scene because she's sophisticated, the ancient ruins because she took a fabulous trip through Turkey some years ago.  And the little piece of dragon, green on purple, because he's on many of the quilts I've made for family members and certainly belongs on hers.  Finally, there are the psychotic cats (bits of black on green on the bottom left) and the vintage piece I bought on ebay from a woman in Iowa who was selling batches of quilt pieces her mother had collected for sixty years, give or take a decade.

The quilt was in my car when I attended the Kentucky Cancer Foundation / Junior League breast cancer survivor weekend last month, and on Sunday morning, when the Reiki masters were there, on impulse I went to the car and brought the quilt in.  We discussed it and decided I would lie under it while they (there were two of them working together) offered healing energy to me and through me to Nancy.  When I got home from the weekend, I found the news waiting for me from Letha Dawson Scanzoni about Nancy's rapidly eroding health.

The quilt is on the chair where I set it down that day.  It's a good place for it for now.  One day I'll pick it up again and attach the batting and the back and begin the stitching of love and memory.  When a decision is made about auctioning, you'll be the first to know.

Fibonacci 53. George Washington's Birthday Letter

                     Our Annual Letter
1    I/
1    haven't/
2    sent my/
3    Christmas cards yet,/
5    nor mailed New Year's; Dr./
8    Martin Luther King, Jr., Day; Valentine's Day; nor/
13  Lunar Year of the Rabbit cards. And yet I hate to let the/
21  seasons pass without saying to friends that 2010 was a stony road, with my father's death and my illness; but that/
34   I am now well, and so are Michael and our Labrador mix, Koko. Laramie is ebullient. She's the Chihuahua/Jack Russell we adopted -- she was found wandering down the roughest thoroughfare in town --/
55   to walk me and comfort me during radiation.  Now I'm healthy enough to walk both dogs at once; and I have a purple bicycle that so far I've fallen off of only once. We have primary and secondary health insurance.  I won the Louisville chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists award for best essay.  In/
89   spite of her vascular dementia, my mother is doing well in the care center where she's lived since Daddy died.  My brothers visit often, taking flowers or candy or her cat named Cat.
             My late sister's younger son and his wife are expecting a baby this summer, and everyone is thrilled, including Mother (this she remembers).  My daughters remain smart and beautiful.  Bradley is in the Navy, stationed in Hawaii. Devin graduates this June. My friend Lizzie graduates next year; her brother sat out football due to injuries but is/
144   hearty again.  Michael took family leave to care for me and, in December, was promoted and given a spiffy company vehicle.
          I write a poem daily based on the Fibonacci Sequence, a kind of fractal (any group of numbers that add back into themselves).  The number of words per line is as follows: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. I've been told the sequence ends at 21, but ask me if I care.
           I won a ribbon for photography in the state fair, and I make art every day. Small art to put in the mail to strangers around the globe. Semi-abstract quilts. Large collages to hang on walls. Altars to the planet, made from junk and wood dragged home from dumps./

          On this George Washington's birthday, we wish you health, happiness, and sufficient wealth to purchase fine wooden false teeth if needed.
                                                       Love to all, Michael and Mary Jo

Flying Fingers

I've been on a quilting binge ever since I learned that my friend Terry had a malevolent sarcoma on her left arm. The news left me with an overwhelming desire to sew tiny green pieces of fabric together. I did so for two days, crying all the while, and then I decided that I might as well be in South Carolina where I could see and talk with Terry. She's come a long way since then; the arm was amputated about two inches above the elbow three weeks ago Friday. She's determined that she'll be driving again by the end of this summer.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, when I got home I kept sewing little pieces of green fabric. Eventually it turned into a quilt/blankie, mostly greens, with six or eight patches showing pretty teapots -- fabric I picked up at Mary Jo's Cloth Shop in Gastonia, NC, while I was down that way. The backing is a white fabric with scattered daffodils. The title is "The race is not always to the swift," because I used racing fabrics for one edge of the backing-- people in a foot race, hermit crabs, and some nice pirate fabric.

We're all recovering nicely, and Terry loves her quilt. I was headed back south to see her and also celebrate a baby shower for my sweet niece Jessie, whose baby is due at the end of August. That didn't work out, and I was so disappointed I decided I might as well finish getting my 2008 tax information together. I also made a few more blankies while I was at it: one for my compadre's new grandson, one for his granddaughter, another quilt with greens and yellows, and a chicken quilt for Mary Flowers' husband. Oh, yes, and a blankie for Jessie's baby. Now I'm finishing one for my sister's grandson, the amazingly precious Carson, whose second birthday is next week. His is cowboys and things with wheels -- just right for picnics and playing peekaboo.

PS I just realized that I wrote malevolent sarcoma rather than malignant. I don't want to personify a cancer and yet both adjectives seem appropriate.

Pansy fiber art

I love contemporary fabrics in all their diversity -- especially the conversational prints (although I'm most drawn to the "novelty" subsection) -- and keep experimenting with ways to use them well in fiber art -- something that pays attention to the print but goes beyond the ordinary. This piece was fun -- can't quite explain why the word "pansy" demanded to be embroidered in that way, but what are ya gonna do?

This piece is in a private collection.

Rugged Cross -- God owns heaven

From the Rugged Cross series.

I started with the green fabric for the cross and the weeds for the background. As I stitched, the line "God owns heaven ... something-something ... earth" kept flitting through my mind.

A friend provided the source: the Anne Sexton poem "The Awful Rowing toward God," from Sexton's book of the same name. I did a paper on Sexton while in undergraduate school and probably hadn't thought about her in 20 years. Who knew this line was still in a mental filing cabinet?

The line in full, which is embroidered in barely visible text on the piece, is "God owns heaven...but ... craves the earth."

Rugged Cross -- Last Leaf

Another piece in my Rugged Cross series.

This piece, like the others I'm working on now, are pieced, quilted, embroidered, and finished by hand.

Rugged Cross - Blessed Assurance

I'm working on a series of fiber art pieces called Rugged Cross.


I learned in 1994 in an American Church History class that in North Carolina KKK meetings opened with the singing of the old, melodious, and well-loved hymn "The Old Rugged Cross." Russel Richey, who taught the class, had researched the KKK in the sixties; he and an associate attended some meetings and smuggled a tape recorder in with them, and he played the opening hymn for our class. It shows that religion can be used for whatever ends a person has in mind.

This piece came about when I told a friend that I was working on a Rugged Cross series, and she replied, "I don't need another rugged cross. I'm looking for some blessed assurance." ("Blessed Assurance" is an 1873 hymn written by Fanny Jane Crosby and, according to Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal, is one of the ten most popular hymns sung by United Methodists. )

This piece is in a private collection.

Party time fiber art

I'd been working with soft colors for quite some time when I decided to do this piece. I did everything by hand -- piecing, quilting, and embroidery -- to my own surprise. I'm having a spell in which I'm at the computer long hours, and the last thing I want to do is sit in front of another machine (even a sewing machine) at the end of the day.

I began with the black background and trimmed, pieced, and stitched all the bits on it. I put all of the knots on the front. I'd been reading about communication theories and journalistic ethics , but I don't know that the concept of full disclosure is the reason behind the visible knots. But I like them.

A horse is a horse

I made a horse quilt for his birthday, using a photo I took as the basis for embroidering and appliquing.  Next tyime, I may work with solid colored fabric and use nothing but embroidery for the mane and highlights. This time, though, I'm satisfied; time was running out for finishing a quilt to be hauled around inside and out.

Fabric Valentines -- Instructions!

I'm donating these 4x6 fiber art pieces to the Heart-2-Heart project, an effort to collect postcard-sized fiber art to give to wounded military personnel at Walter Reed Hospital on Valentine's Day, 2007.
If the project receives more donations than needed, the extras will go to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and to Bethesda Naval Hospital.
The free-form heart method is simple and fun. Here's how I did it.
1. Cut fabric into a 4 x 6 rectangle.
2. Fold the rectangle in half and cut out a free-form heart. Set the heart outside for another project. You'll be working with the 4x6 rectangle with the heart-shaped hole.
3. Place the rectangle on top of a piece of novelty fabric and move it around until you're happy with what you see inside the heart.
4. Use a glue stick, sparingly, to bond the two fabrics temporarily.
5. Cut away the excess novelty fabric.
6. Attach the piece you've created to batting with a wee bit of glue.
6. Stitch around the outside edge of the heart. I do this by hand, but you could also use a machine.
7. Add embellishments as desired.
8. Finish off the edges. I did bound edges, but as an alternative you can zig-zag or satin stitch around the edges.
9. Glue to a piece of card stock or other stiff material.

Heart-2-Heart art

Heart-2-Heart: a collection of 4x6 fabric art pieces that will be distributed on Valentine's Day to wounded military personnel at Walter Reed Hospital.

I love novelty fabrics and thought these were especially cheery. I did all of the stitching by hand.

Happy Hands quilt

My partner is one of six children. I used tracings of his hand and those of his siblings to cut out the pieces. The two handprints on the bottom, supporting the whole, are their parents'.

purple log cabin

This log cabin block is 10.5 x 10.5 inches. I worked it earlier this summer but wasn't satisfied with it until today, when I added the flower, the stem, and the Alice Walker quotation about noticing the color purple in a field.