penny-studionotes-2

About a year ago, Abby Glassenberg wrote an article for Generation Q  magazine about my quilt "Self-Portrait, Year 2: Beneath the Surface."  She recently re-published the article on her blog, which makes it accessible to people who didn't see it in the magazine.  Thanks Abby!  Here's the link .  There are already some thoughtful comments after the body of her post. One bit of further explanation about the last paragraph of the article, which has me posing the question "Am I a mother with [my son] gone?" It was actually online commenters who raised the question, and Abby wanted to know my response.  The text on the Self-Portrait quilt states, "I AM A WOMAN WHOSE CHILD IS DEAD."  Among the many online comments I received about the quilt was one thread that said something like:  "Why did you say 'woman' instead of 'mother'?  You're still a mother!" I think people felt I was being too hard on myself--that I shouldn't d...

Back in early March, I started working on a final quilt in my series about loss, one that would focus on stones, and would include some kind of imagery of stones; see this post  on the design, and then two more posts on dyeing, discharge, and stitching trials for the stones, here and here .   Then I had a chance to get some productive critique of the work when meeting with quilting friends in Chicago, and the work has gone through significant change since then.  I realized that I wasn't really interested in the kind of rectangular patchwork background that I had been working on, but rather on the stones themselves--they needed to be the central focus.  When something isn't working, it's a relief to figure out what's wrong!  Here's where my thoughts have been going since. . . About ten years ago, I made a small piece, with the light gray area the size and shape of the headstone on my son's grave.  The idea behind the piece had to do with the Jewish practice...