penny-studionotes-2

If you are nearby, I hope you'll be able to come to my exhibit, which opens on Saturday, August 20.  I am also making a webpage for the show, which I'll complete once the opening is past.  The site will include photos and descriptions/explanations of the quilts, as well as my talk and a video of my husband David's recital.  I'll post the URL when the site is ready.

Back in mid-May, after having finished "Holiness," I wrote a   post   about the development of a final piece about stones, one that would focus on the shape of stones.  I spent the month after that doing many trials with fabric and thread, some small, some large.  Nothing developed that gave me the feeling, "Yes, this is it!"  One day, I realized that I felt OK with not doing another large piece about stones.   The series of quilts I've been making for the last twelve years is complete—this work that has been about the death of my son Jeremy and what it is like to live with loss. I have put out into the world, as best I can, what there has been in me to say.    There are no more angles to cover.    This doesn't mean that my deep sense of loss is over, just that I have said what I can about it. I will be having a show of this work in August.  My time between now and then will be taken up with details for preparing for the show. ...

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...

I did more trials this past week, collected below: Some are pretty awful (like the large piece done with deconstructed screen printing in top left); others are better. stamps with Cleanline resist on gray cloth Thiox discharge on gray cloth Using stones themselves as a resist, suggested to me by Beth Berman.  I love the results, but not sure they're right for this particular piece. Flour paste resist on white cloth with black thickened dye  Stitching trials (done a while back in a workshop with Dorothy Caldwell After all these trials, maybe I'll go back to stitching.  Still thinking. . .

I'm back to working on the large quilt having to do with stones.  In my previous post on this quilt, I mentioned being unsatisfied with the composition of rectangles.  I have played some with that, but it's still unresolved.  I decided to work on another aspect, and come back to the composition later.  As indicated on the sketch of the quilt, I plan that some of the rectangles will contain some kind of images of stones.  This past week, I've done a number of trials, using all the surface design techniques I thought might yield the kind of gestural, abstracted image I'm thinking of.  Here are the results, with techniques listed below the image.  (The details about all this are as much for my own record as for other readers--feel free to skip over them!) ·        flour paste resist, drawn into and then discharged with Thiox ·        flour paste resist, drawn into and scraped with thick...

I'm at the early stages of planning a quilt that will be a wedding gift for one of my son's best friends.  He and his fiancée really like scarlet and gray, so I'll work with those colors.  I'll have a good deal of hand-dyed gray fabric left over when I'm done with my current quilt in progress, so it will be nice to use that in another quilt.  I'm thinking of a log cabin quilt.  Here are some early trials for blocks.  The first group of three below is made of "logs" that finish at 1.5", with the block 3 logs deep on each side out from the center.  The grays are my hand-dyed fabrics; the reds are commercial prints.  Here I'm comparing three different fabrics for the center square. light gray center white center black center Then I did another block using all hand-dyes, a light gray center, logs increased in size to 2", and only two logs deep out from the center.  (These are reds I had on hand; if I go with solids, I will dye reds wi...