penny-studionotes-2

I was the lucky winner of a copy of Kathleen Loomis' new book, Pattern-Free Quilts: Riffs on the Rail Fence Block .   I have long followed Loomis' blog, Art with a Needle , on which she usually writes about the sophisticated, challenging, stunning art quilts that she makes, and which have been shown in the top quilt/fiberart exhibitions such as Quilt National, Color Improvisations, and Quilts=Arts=Quilts. Her art quilts are distinguished by an intensity of design that requires a vast reservoir of persistence and commitment to carry off.  See, for example, her postage quilts, or her fine lines series.  But she also enjoys making simpler quilts.  As she explains:  "For almost 15 years, I have been working fulltime as a quilt artist.  I've made hundreds of quilts that have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe.  But I still will make a baby quilt at the drop of a hat, and have a deep love for quilts of every style and use, whether ...

The Quilt Alliance is an organization devoted to the documentation of American quilts.  One of their projects is "Go Tell It At the Quilt Show," where they invite everyone showing quilts at a particular show to be interviewed.  They did this for the Sacred Threads exhibition, in which I showed three quilts.  Here's a link to the interview with me, where I talk about these three quilts:  Self-Portrait, Year 2: Beneath the Surface; Regret; and Accident.  The video lasts 5-1/2 minutes.

Today I did the overdyeing for Accident-2.  Since I was doing this on the cloth alone (no screen stretched over the top), I realized I could do this step on my large padded work table, rather than on the floor.  The photo below shows the top edge of the quilt pinned to the table.  (Ignore the messy splotches on the drop cloth under the piece--it's been through the wash.)  The rest of the piece is hanging over the table and resting on the floor.  After I finished each section (applying the four colors across, from right to left), I pulled the piece up and over the back of the table.  I put a sheet on the basement floor to protect it. I ran a line of thread loosely down in the turquoise section, to mark where I wanted to extend the royal blue.   (I removed the thread as I worked--otherwise it would have served as a resist and left a line in the fabric.) The next photo shows me at about 2/3 down the piece.  Here I'm finishing up scraping on the new l...

I left this work to batch for about 10 days.  Today I washed it out--detail above, full piece below.  The final step will be to overdye the piece in turquoise, blue, ochre, and black, with the goal of diminishing the visibility of the text.  The overdye will also give me a chance to reconsider the royal blue section.  I made it narrow in this version, just edging the ochre--not sure why I did that, and I don't think there's enough of the blue.  So when I overdye, I'll expand that section more into the turquoise, and make it more of a wedge rather than a stripe, more like it was in this earlier trial .  I am satisfied with the shape of the ochre in this version. Pulling the dye on this large piece was  grueling.  I thought it would take about an hour, but it took three, on my hands and knees.  It was helpful to have done the smaller trials (about 1/3 the size), but I didn't anticipate how much easier they were to complete than the full-size ve...

Working on pieces like "Accident" is just that--work.  These deeply personal pieces are challenging and difficult, both in the conceptual/emotional process that leads to a design and in the construction of the quilt.  For most of these works, the thinking process takes years--how best to convey my idea in the design?  The construction is quicker, but still, it takes months to figure out how to construct the design that I've come up with and then to complete it.  This kind of work is satisfying, especially in those moments when I hit on a design that I can say yes to, and when a construction technique I've come up with or tried out works just as I'd hoped--or leads me to a new solution.  But it is not fun.  I have to push myself to keep at it.  Break it into small chunks that I can handle.  It helps to have something on hand that I can play with when I take a break from the big work.  I just have to be careful not to get sidetracked into makin...

I'm making progress again on Accident 2.  When I last wrote about the piece (in this post ), I had gotten to this point in the trials: Since then, I've considered the helpful comments I've received, consulted with friends, and done one more trial.  The biggest decision I've made is to diminish the starkness of the text by overdyeing the piece, turquoise over turquoise, blue over blue, etc.  The photo below shows the overdyeing trial.  I tried two different values of each color, and three different values of black.  I prefer the darker overdye (towards the top of the piece, most easily seen in the black section).  This also opens up another design possibility:  I will leave a small part of the narrative in white, for the sake of emphasis.  This will draw the viewer to one key part of the text, rather than reading the text as a whole.  I have chosen a sentence to emphasize--not the one I happened to leave white in the trial piece. I also decide...