Back into the routine

Home again, back from a wonderful week at the beach with multiple members of the Kleeman family. We spent the week catching up, eating, sunning on the beach, swimming, eating, and just hanging around. The Outer Banks were in the throes of the East Coast heat wave, with heat indexes of 110 degrees. Not usually a problem with an ocean right there, except the water temperatures were in the mid 50s. It was numbingly cold and only the bravest (or most foolhardy) of our group spent any time in the water. But the houses come with swimming pools, where the water was just the right temperature. When it got too hot on the beach, we would run up, jump into the pool, then return to the beach. The most difficult decision we would have to make was what to cook for dinner.

This is my family - husband, son, daughter, significant others, and grandchildren. I hope you can see the t-shirts - click on the picture to get an enlargement. Each one is painted slightly differently and they were a big hit.

We returned home on Saturday to 100+ degrees only to find that our air conditioning wasn't working. A call to the service got us in the queue for repair and the man showed up yesterday afternoon. The compressor is under a 10 year warranty, but of course the problem was the capacitor, not under warranty. The compressor will wait until next summer, when it is out of warranty, and then go up. We are cool again, and happy. And ready to think about Quilt National. Time to get stitching!

Artful Home Studio Sale

The Artful Home Studio Sale has started and will continue through July 29th. This is an opportunity to purchase artwork at a discount anywhere from 20% to 50%. I have a lot of work up there, some fairly recent but some really pretty old. The prices on the older work are not anywhere near where I'm currently pricing my work, and then they are further discounted. I would love to move these pieces out of my house and into someone else's!

OH NO 50!

©2010

This is a piece I did when I turned 50, so you know it's pretty old. Or maybe you don't, so take my word for it. This and other work is available here.

Next week is my family's triennial reunion, held for a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Actually, it's my husband's family. He's the oldest of nine children and nearly all of them are married and have their own children. Some aren't coming this time, so there are only 30 of us. We rent two houses right on the oceanfront and have a wonderful time. We always do a t-shirt to commemorate the event and this year I commissioned one of my granddaughters to draw the logo. I modified it into a line drawing, had t-shirts printed up, and then we hand painted each one individually.

Here is the drawing; I think it's pretty clever. And the painted ones are fabulous. When we do our group photo I will post it and you will get the full effect. Our houses are supposed to have wi-fi and I hope it works so I can post stuff.

The Sketchbook Project

I joined the Sketchbook Project and received my book last week. The way it works is that each artist gets a Moleskin sketchbook and has to fill it with something. The dimensions have to remain the same and the books will become part of a touring exhibit and will be cataloged into the Brooklyn Art Library System. Each artist must select a theme. I chose "Inside/Outside". So far I have no entries into my sketchbook and as usual, when called upon to make something that fits a theme, my mind goes totally blank. Looking at some of the samples of previous entries, it seems that many people only loosely follow their theme. So I probably will just go ahead and do something and let the viewers figure out how it relates.

We are in the midst of a horrible heat wave. We had a 10 day stretch at the end of June where the temperature was in the 90s everyday, and hit 100 at least once. A few days of some cool weather that was wonderful, but now we are back into the 90s and above. Yesterday the official high was 105 degrees. It hasn't rained since June 16 and the grass is brown and crunchy. I've been hauling water and using the soaker hoses in a desperate attempt to keep plants and shrubs alive. And now even the trees are showing stress. No significant rain is in the forecast. We could use about 3 days of gentle rain but what will probably happen is a thunderstorm with a downpour. The ground is so hard that any deluge like that will just run off and not soak in. Wonder which will be more outrageous - our electric bill or our water bill.

SAQA Auction quilt

It's time again for the SAQA Benefit Auction. You can read more about it here but essentially the way it works is that members donate 12"x12" pieces and they are auctioned off in a reverse auction starting in September. My piece is on page 3b, since I just sent it off this week. Take a look at all the pieces already listed. You would be hard put to not find something you like amongst all those works of art.

Ventanas 21

©2010

It's another piece in my Ventanas (or Windows) series. The background blue fabric is the result of hand dyeing and painting multitudes of fabrics, cutting them into strips, sewing them together to make a piece of fabric, then cutting that into strips and sewing them together. I've been doing this because I'm working on a commission piece that is going to have this style of background and wanted to figure out just how I wanted this to look. And also how to work with the strips. Everything is raw edge, so each strip is zigzag stitched to its neighbor. It sort of looks pieced from a distance. Overlapping produces less bulk than seaming, I think, which makes it easier to stitch over the joins. And I don't have to worry about getting curved seams to fit. An added benefit, which I haven't yet figured out what to do with, is that when I trim away extra bulk from the back, I get a pile of skinny strips of fabric.

ACEOs

Here are the first ACEO - Artist Cards, Editions and Originals. These are all originals. Hand dyed and painted fabrics with leaf monoprints; machine stitching. Dimensions: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2". The price for each one is $20, which includes shipping. If Paypal isn't working, email me at cathy@cathyquilts.com

ACEO #1

ACEO #2

ACEO #3

SOLD

ACEO #4

ACEO #5

ACEO #6

SOLD

ACEO #7

ACEO #8

Comparison

Been doing some soy wax batik and I realized that I haven't done it for quite a while. Since we no longer get a newspaper delivery, I had to scrounge newspapers for the ironing out process. I tried using a boiling water bath and it did work, but it took a long time, and was very messy. Good thing I did it outside because there were lots of wax drips.

So the good thing about soy wax is that it is soluble in water. This can also be a drawback, particularly if you want to get the "crackle" that is so much a mark of batik. Getting a good crackle involves immersing the waxed cloth in a dyebath. Soy wax will dissolve in a dyebath. Except now that I think about it, it wasn't all that easy to get the wax off in cool water, so maybe this is something to experiment with.

Anyhow, I was trying to get a crackle effect on this piece, so after doing one layer with a tjap and getting the sort of leafy effect, I covered the piece with wax, cracked it, and painted on diluted paint, working it into the cracks. I ironed this piece to get the wax out and since I knew that a lot of the paint was sitting on top of the wax, I figured that as the wax melted through the fabric, the paint would get deposited. Here is the piece after ironing. It's stiff as a board.

After washing in hot water and detergent, the fabric softened up and some of the heavier crackle disappeared, although not nearly as much as I was afraid it would. It's a little bit more subtle, if you can call red on orange and yellow "subtle".

I really like this second piece. I applied the wax with a paint brush and you can see the brush marks, sort of. I applied the first layer of wax onto white fabric, then painted on dilute light green paint. After that dried, I brushed on another layer of wax, crumpled the fabric to crack the wax, then applied a darker green shade of paint. I think that this was one of the pieces that I boiled the wax to remove it, then washed it. Here is the before picture.

And the after. It looks like the color has lightened up a bit, but that may be the result of less than expert scanning. I really like the painterly effects and the randomness and how the colors blend into each other. And the edges where the color falls off - love that.

Right now in the studio I'm making some small pieces to put in a sales gallery along with a show. My group New Image is having a show at the Lorton Workhouse Gallery in Lorton, Virginia. It's titled Yard Art at the Yard and is an interpretation of the various uses of the word Yard. My pieces in the show are done with leaf prints, so I'm making some small (5"x7") pieces mounted on painted stretched canvas using more leaves. As I'm making these, I'm getting some small pieces from cuttings that I thought I would make into those Art Cards, ACEO - Art Cards, Editions and Originals. They're really small - 2.5" x 3.5", the size of a baseball trading card. When I get them finished, I'll post some pictures.

Show report

The show opening went really well. Since there were several shows opening, we all benefited from spillover as people wandered through all the galleries. I really appreciated the people who came specifically to see my show and I hope they felt it was worth the drive. It was very gratifying to hear the comments on my work, especially from those who were unfamiliar with quilts as art. Of course, I did hear the word "grandmother" once, but I think it was in jest. The space is well lit, bright, and airy and shows quilts well. I have pictures here but have to apologize for the quality. I have an excuse - I just got a new computer and Windows 7 does not like Photoshop Elements 3 and so I've had to use a different program to edit the images. Learning curve and all that.

Sundown on the left and The Green Flash on the right.

Left to right: Sun Dance, Yellow Brick Road, Symphony in Red, Spring Green

On the left are two Ventanas, on the right is Looking Out

Left to right: Looking Out, Fading Glory, Three Leaves, and two more Ventanas

Hidden Agendas on the left, Sundown on the right

Graffiti and two Ventanas on the left

Left to Right: Downtown, Sun Dance, Yellow Brick Road

Backyardhenge on the left, Life Lines on the right

"Ventanas" is Spanish for "windows" and it occurred to me later that it's an interesting juxtaposition to have those pieces around the actual windows. Not that I thought about it when doing the hanging plan, it just happened to be a good place.

The show will be up until May 30. The Museum director is hoping for some good local publicity and I'm hoping for some sales. I think she has a better chance of success than I do, but one should always be optimistic.

Hanging the Show

This is the official postcard for my show that starts this Saturday. I really like how my piece is front and center. The Delaplaine has seven different galleries and each one is dedicated to an artist, at least for this month. Sometimes they have group shows; last year they had a National Juried Quilt Show, juried by Karey Bresenhan, of Quilts, Inc.

Yesterday with the assistance of three very wonderful friends, I hung the show. This is a lot of work. Thank heavens I planned the layout in advance, so there wasn't any shifting pieces around to make them fit. I had thought about how high the pieces should be hung and wondered - do they all hang with their tops at the same height, or does the height vary with the length of the quilt. While I was a Art Quilts Elements I observed that they hung the work so that eye level was at the center of the quilt and the heights of the tops varied. "Eye level" is defined by various web sites that give instructions on hanging at 58" from the floor. This is definitely not my eye level but I know I am shorter than most people. Using 58" as the midpoint for the quilt, I could figure out how high the top should be, and marked this on the quilt bag.

Once we got familiar with the process and assigned duties, the whole thing went pretty quickly. And we all agreed that it looks spectacular. I will take pictures when I go back on Saturday for the opening reception, 3-5pm. If you are in the area of Frederick, Maryland during the month of May, I hope you can take the time to see the show. And right around the Delaplaine are several antique shops and yummy eateries. You could easily spend the whole day!

Art Quilt Elements and more

This past weekend I went to the opening of Art Quilt Elements in Wayne, PA. I also attended a one day SAQA conference held in conjunction with the opening. Both were excellent.

First, the show. This is becoming one of the premier art quilt events in this country, imho. The quality of entries is reflected in what is selected for the show itself. Fifty quilts were selected from the 600 entries by the jurors Jason Pollen, Deborah Warner, and Robin Schwalb. All have eminent qualifications for their roles as jurors and spoke at the conference. They reiterated things we artists have heard numerous times: have excellent photography, make sure the detail shot relates to the whole piece (in some examples shown, the detail could have come from an entirely different piece), composition and the elements of design are critical, and so on. I could have listened to them for way more than their alloted time. The keynote speaker was Sue Benner and it is always a joy to listen to her speak. Her topic was "Building an Artist Community" and she talked about the importance of having communities, not only for your art, but for your life.

Lisa Chipetine and Sandra Sider spoke about critique and technology and the importance of networking. The last session was small group meetings with AQE artists who were present at the conference. We could learn about their careers, their creative processes, and the particular piece that was in the show. Since there were quite a few of the artists present, it was an opportunity to absorb significant amounts of information. I also was able to put faces to names I had only seen online, always an interesting exercise, since nobody ever looks like what you think they might look like. I met several people who are regular readers of this blog and who gently chastised me for neglecting it, hence this post.

There is a catalog of the show available from the AQE web site for $30 (includes tax, shipping, and handling). It is a well designed catalog and worth getting (I bought 5*) even though catalogs never do justice to the work. You just have to use your imagination to visualize the vibrant colors and beautiful textural qualities in the work.

(* Four of the catalogs are for friends, but you probably guessed that.)

The "more" part of this post involves a new publication 1000 Artisan Textiles by Sandra Salamony and Gina Brown in which I have at least one piece. I haven't received my copy yet and I've changed computers since the original email so I don't remember which piece or pieces were selected for publication. I'll just have to wait and see. It's not just quilts, it's all kinds of fiber related works and it's available from Amazon.

The second "more" part of this post is about my solo show which starts on May 1 at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center in Frederick, Maryland. My work will hang in the Kline Gallery and I plan to have between 15 and 20 works. The opening is Saturday, May 1, 3-5pm and the show extends through Sunday, May 30. Everybody is invited! Hope you can come.

Hidden Agendas ©2008

35" x 42"

Not art

I have been at my sewing machine every day for the past month, but not making art. We have two chairs that are probably 35 years old, and the upholstery was wearing out. Especially where I had scrubbed it because of animal accidents. Yet the chairs were still in good condition and very comfortable. They sort of swivel and rock. So I thought I would make slipcovers for them. How hard could it be? Talk about famous last words....

Now I know why it costs so much to have these made. Being a novice at this, I went to the library and checked out several books on making slipcovers. Read them thoroughly. Only one of the three actually gave explicit instructions. The other two pretty much left out the steps getting from "Buy your fabric" to "Put it on the chair."

I started out by making a muslin cover so I could figure out where the difficult parts would be and learn how to handle them. Well, I figured out where the difficult parts would be but didn't solve how to handle them, at least not very well. When I got the slipcover fabric I bravely set off. The book said to make the seat cushions first, just for a psychological benefit. So I did. But the first cushion turned out way too big, and then I decided I should buy new cushions since why go to all this effort and use old cushions? I'll save the cushion cover til later.

Anyhow, after a lot of bad language, ripping out, frustration, and hair pulling, I finished one slipcover. I took it to chair #2 to put it on. I had used chair #1 as my model. That's when I discovered that the chairs were fraternal twins, and not identical twins. More bad language, but no more ripping out. On to the second slipcover. Which wasn't any easier, and even developed its own new problems.

But finally they're done. They're not perfect but they are pretty good. Slipcovers can't fit as well as upholstery, so I can live with the wrinkles. They look much better than they used to.



After I was about 75% finished with the second slipcover I discovered a website of a guy who sells step-by-step instructions of how to make slipcovers, geared towards the beginner. I was particularly interested in the "tips for first-timers". He suggested to not try to tackle a chair with an attached back cushion, wings, or curved arms. Check, check, and check, my chairs have all three. Probably better I didn't know that up front.



And here is Rosie, now 8 months old. She supervised from her comfortable perch, or helped by chewing the tape measure, pulling out pins, and knocking stuff off the table.

And now gotta get back to doing some art. The snow has melted and Spring is starting. Hooray!

More Snow Dyeing

This snow dyeing technique produces some unique markings, that's for sure. It's too bad it's limited, season-wise. Plus it takes a fair amount of space. I have to cover the pans to make sure the cat doesn't manage to get into them. After all, they are kitty litter pans, and she feels a certain ownership. So here I have these beautiful fabrics, which present the problem of how to use them. It would be difficult to overprint them and they don't seem to want to fade into the background. Front and center would make them happy, I think. So I thought that a good way to showcase these fabrics would be to dye some t-shirts also.

This blue one, which is nice, but not spectacular, will be my working-out-at-the-gym t-shirt. I can admire myself as I slog through my workout.

This second one I like a whole lot better. I used two different pans with different colors (obviously). The blue pan was the Brilliant Blue, with a little bit of Black Cherry and a little bit of Golden Yellow. I didn't mix the dyes so strongly this time, only 1 T per 1 cup of water. The second pan was mostly the Golden Yellow with some red and a small amount of blue. These pieces are to die for. Or is it dye for? Ha Ha. Sorry.

These next 4 images are all from the same piece of fabric and were in the same pan with the above t-shirt. It's amazing the variety of markings and colors that appear. And again these are fabrics that will have a difficult time playing with others, they are just too eye-catching.

Before the snow all melts I should try to do some with more dilute dye solutions to see if I can get subtler markings. I think I have some time, I'm betting there will still be some piles of plowed snow for another month.

Snow Dyeing and a Sweater

There has been a lot of discussion on the various dyeing and surface design lists about snow dyeing. I have always thought that this was rather a strange method of dyeing fabric since one of the basic premises is that the dyes need a temperature of at least 70 degrees to fix to the fabric. Snow is obviously nowhere near that temperature, so why use it? But at the moment we are overwhelmed with snow and I needed to dye some backs for quilts, so I thought I would give it a try. Right outside my back door is enough snow for just about the entire world to try out snow dyeing. In case you hadn't heard, we here on the East Coast, particularly in Baltimore, have had two humongous snow storms in the past week. This much snow is unheard of around here. And this season, we have had three storms of more than 20 inches of snow, an event never before recorded. For a region that normally gets 18 inches of snow for the entire season, this wallop has pretty much shut down everything. So, back to the snow dyeing.

A little research showed me the methods that people had used: pre-soak the fabric in the soda ash/water solution, wad up and place into the bottom of a large pan. Gather up the snow and pile it into the pan. Pour the dye solution over the snow. The snow forms a resist of sorts so that the dye hits sections of the fabric unevenly. Once the snow melts, then let the fabric batch overnight. I placed my snow-filled pan in a sunny window to speed up the snow melting process, but it still took many hours. The pans were on a slant so that as the snow/dye melted and puddled, the fabric was not soaking in the liquid.

I used some blue dyes that are at least 10 years old, mixed at 2 Tablespoons dye powder to 1 cup water. This is pretty concentrated solution. I wanted to see if I could get saturated colors because most of the examples I saw on the web were too pastel for my taste. This first piece is a Brilliant Blue and Black Cherry, both from ProChem. The Black Cherry was mixed at 1 Tablespoon in 1 cup. When all the snow melted on this one, I drained out all the liquid.

This second piece of fabric is Cerulean Blue, again 2 T in 1 cup water. For this one I must have had more snow or it wasn't in direct sun because it took much longer for the snow to melt and I didn't bother to drain the liquid. Maybe those more solid areas were soaking in the dye all night.

The results are really pretty nice, but I'm still not convinced it's worth the effort and the time involved. And the close contact with snow, that stuff is cold.

In December I blogged about dyeing some cotton yard and knitting a sweater. You can read about it here and here. I discovered that it's difficult to get even coloration on the yarn and I was worried about how it would knit up. Actually I like the slightly variegated look. Here is the finished sweater. It crosses over in front and ties at the side. I haven't had a chance to wear it anywhere yet. I like the patterning and once I got the hang of it, didn't have to rip out very much at all.

Now I've got another knitting project going. I like to knit while watching TV in the evening. Hand sewing makes my fingers and hands hurt, so I do this instead. It seems a shame to just sit and watch and let my hands be idle. I can glance up enough to keep up with what's happening. Except for Lost, and particularly when they air the previous week's episode with little explanations written out at the bottom of the screen. I call this "Lost for Dummies" because it helps make sense of the plot. Sort of.

500 Art Quilts

This new book will be available at the end of this month, 2 months ahead of schedule. I'm very pleased to say that I will have work in this book, although I don't remember exactly which piece or pieces they selected. Have to wait until I get my copy. There are 363 artists featured in the book and you can preorder it right now on Amazon:

The list price is $24.95 so the Amazon price is a pretty good deal. And if you buy more stuff, you can get free shipping, can't beat that. I get a small percentage if you purchase after clicking on this link and I appreciate that very much. It's too bad I can't that percentage on the stuff I order myself from Amazon, I'd be rolling in dough.

Right now I'm thinking about the month of May and the solo show I will be having at the Delaplaine Art Center in Frederick, MD. As it gets closer to the date, I will be posting more information. If you're going to be in the area I hope you can visit. Frederick is about 30 miles west of Baltimore on Interstate 70.

Filing

Putting stuff back where it belongs is always a challenge. It's much easier to plop it onto a flat surface somewhere and leave it for "sometime". Periodically those flat surfaces, also known as my work table, get so covered with stuff it's impossible to work. And I'm forced to do a clean up, which is a good thing. As long as I don't just move it around, like stirring the pot, which means it all comes back to its original spot. Anyhow, this isn't really about the stuff on my work table, it's about the little basket where I tossed the slides that came back from my show entries, in either a fat or skinny envelope. That basket was full of slides, and since I haven't entered a show with slides in probably about 3 years, one can only surmise how long it's been since I refiled them.

So I emptied the basket and pulled all the slides out of their little sleeves and sorted them. I have notebooks marked by year for slide storage. There is an archive notebook for anything before 1998, then 11 books going from 1998 through 2008. Each quilt has 2 pages of slides since I always shot a full roll of 36 on one quilt. It was easier to have lots of originals than to do one original and then have dupes made. As digital images became more and more prevalent, I began to take them also, but continued to shoot slides. Here is a blog post I wrote when I put in my last order for slide film, in April of 2007. (By the way, I cut up the quilt mentioned in that post.)

Obviously I stopped shooting slides because there are only 2 quilts in my notebook for 2008. It wasn't because I ran out of film because I still have 3 rolls left, stored in the freezer. I would get my slides processed by Fuji, using prepaid mailers. Then Fuji stopped processing their own film and had everybody send them to Dwayne in Parsons, Kansas. If you have Kodachrome slide film, Dwayne's is the only laboratory in the world that still processes it. Kodak stopped producing Kodachrome film last June and if you have some, you had better use it because Dwayne will stop processing it at the end of this year. He will continue to process other types of slide film.

It was always a little apprehensive waiting for slides to come back and wondering if I got the exposure right or didn't see some errant threads that were centered right in the middle of the detail shot. Or if the lab messed up. Several times the film cutter got confused because I shot the quilts on a black background and it couldn't tell where to start cutting. It was was by a machine and it would look for the change in color that signified an image, except in mine that signified the edge of the quilt. That meant the quilt was not centered in the slide and the left edge was cut off. I had to enclose a note that said the image was shot on a black background, please center. Then I figured out a foolproof method - I shot the detail first.

So anyhow, now I'm totally digital and I have a very nice Canon EOS Elan II film camera body that nobody wants. B&H Photovideo sells them for about $80, used of course. This is a camera I think I originally bought for $600. I will take it to the local camera shop and see if they will buy it. Photography students at the local universities often use them.

And slide projectors are becoming scarce also. It's really a dying technology. Someday we will have boxes and boxes of slides and no way to view them. It's really pretty amazing how quickly this change from film to digital has occurred. According to Wikipedia, the first true digital camera that recorded images as a computer file was manufactured in 1988. It took about 10 years for the technology to become readily available and affordable for ordinary consumers, and in 1999 Nikon released its D1, a 2.74 megapixel camera. From then on it was a race to see who could cram the most megapixels into their camera.

Winter Song

©2008

This is the last quilt for which I have slides, from March of 2008. OK enough history, time to do some art.

Winter Song detail

©2008

It's time

Christmas is over. It's time to get back to art. It's time to stop using all the Christmas prep as an excuse to avoid the studio. Of course, those were legitimate excuses: design Christmas cards, order cards, mail them out; purchase or make and ship presents for out of town family; purchase presents for intown family and friends and wrap them; make treats, lots of cookies and candies (short interruption for trip to ER to sew up thumb due to misuse of kitchen equipment); decorate tree, prepare meals, yada yada yada. I did spend some time in the studio but it was to sew labels and sleeves on finished quilts and make the storage bags. I'm on the last one and when I finish that there will be no more tasks that I can use to procrastinate. I will have to make some art.

At the moment I'm sort of devoid of inspiration and need a kickstart. Doing some surface design on fabrics always helps in that direction. Maybe some monoprinting with gelatin plates, or some soy wax batik (haven't done that in a very long time). Wish I had a foolproof method for getting up to speed....

What do you do?

Further adventures in knitting

Good thing I decided to knit one sleeve at a time. So far I've had to rip out three different times, for a total of about 30 rows. And it's not the kind of ripping where you can take the needle out, pull the yarn, and then pick up the stitches. With the pattern - knitting 2 together and yarn overs - I know I would never get it right. So I have to laboriously unknit one stitch at a time. Sigh.

While I was doing the research, I kept reading about AddiTurbo needles. Everybody raves about them so I did some more research to see if I wanted to purchase some. They are definitely not cheap. But it sure looked like I wouldn't have the problem of the needle unscrewing itself from the cable or the permanent loop in the other cable. It quickly became obvious that nobody was selling these beauties at a discount. All the web sites I checked had the same prices and even had the same charts. Must have some master site with the information that everybody is supposed to use. But I found this one site Bob and Nancy's Services that did free shipping, so that's a discount of sorts. I ordered them on Monday, they were shipped Tuesday, and arrived today. Pretty good deal.

I haven't been doing much art lately, for sure. I have a bunch of quilts that need sleeves, labels, and bags to hold them. Boring work, but at least I'm in the studio and I can listen to audio tapes. The label fabric that I ordered from Spoonflower arrived and I embroidered titles and dimensions for about 6 quilts, and those have to be sewn on. Maybe while I'm in the studio I will absorb some inspiration.

Adventures in Knitting

So I dyed yarn for a sweater, and found a pattern I really like at elann.com. It's a top down knitting pattern and I really like those because it nearly eliminates any finishing sewing, no side seams, and no sleeve seams if they can be knit in the round. This pattern is not real precise in its instructions and assumes that the knitter is fairly experienced. I thought I qualified for that until I got to this section:

Sleeves: Move sleeve-backs (underarm to back of shoulder) to one circular needle, and sleeve-fronts (underarm to front of shoulder) to a second circular need. Knit.....

Huh? I've used circular needles to knit in the round, but this use of two circular needles was new to me. I could not even visualize what this was talking about. Google to the rescue. I found lots of descriptions and videos of knitting with "2 circs". It actually seems easier than using double pointed needles, at least once you get the hang of it. But I couldn't find anything anywhere describing how to use this technique and knit two sleeves simultaneously. A little more searching revealed directions for knitting two socks on 2 circs at the same time. I thought I would try to adapt that to the sleeves.

This involves a lot of three dimensional thinking and my brain was clearly not up to the task. I threaded those stitches on the circs and they always came up in the wrong configuration - inside out or the beginning of the row was not at the needle ends or the whole thing was twisted. I struggled with this for a long time and it was not made any easier by the permanent loop in the one circular needle nor by the fact that Rosie the kitten thought all this yarn would be great to play with. Finally, I thought I had a workable configuration, and started knitting the sleeves. Disaster. Everything got tangled, I didn't put the right number of stitches on the separate needles so the pattern wasn't working out, and I finally surrendered. I'm knitting one sleeve on the 2 circs (notice how I've picked up the jargon), and it's going well. As long as I keep track of whether I'm doing a patterning row or a plain row. When knitting back and forth it was easy because the patterning row was the knit row and the plain row was the purl row. Now it's all knitting and I have to pay attention.

When I dyed this yarn I wasn't able to get even color throughout. I swooshed the yarn in the dye bath frequently and added the soda ash in batches and swooshed some more, but after I washed it I could see a definite variation in the color. I was concerned that it would look funny, like I had used different dye lots of yarn. But no, it doesn't because the variation is within the skein and it alternates lighter and darker. And it's really working out well - adds lots of depth to the patterning. I'm going to tell everybody it was intentional.

The last sweater I knitted I had to do a lot of reworking because I got the sizing wrong. Well, that and a lot of pattern errors and one sleeve knitted inside out. I certainly hope the sizing works out correctly on this one. I don't know if I have the heart to rip it all out and start over.

Keeping Busy

This is not a creative time of year for me. The days are dark and often gloomy, the trees are bare, and everything feels gray. I can't seem to get in the art mode, but I want to be in the studio. So what better time to clean the place up? I wish the horizontal surfaces weren't such magnets for stuff: magazines, fabric scraps, paperwork, stalled projects, yadda yadda. If I'm not diligent in putting that stuff away my work surface contracts into about 2 square feet. So I spent a day or so putting things away and dealing with paperwork. And I have several pieces that need the finishing touches - sleeves, labels, bags, slats. Boring work, but I can listen to audio books and the time passes quickly.

In the past I've made labels using t-shirt transfer paper. I've never been very successful with that stuff, and I think the papers have gotten old, because I was even less successful this time. I couldn't get a good transfer no matter how many times I tried. I had the idea to get them printed at Spoonflower, and created a jpg of the label with my name and address information on it, and uploaded it. I'm getting a yard of labels, which I think works out to more than 50. That should last for a long while. The title of the piece and its measurements will have to be added to each piece, and I could either write it out by hand or stitch it by machine using the built-in alphabet. Or I could even freehand write it out.

On one of my email lists there has been a thread about rejections. I've hit the trifecta this season with 3 (or maybe 4, is that a quadfecta?) rejections, all in a row. I'm not sure of that last one because I'm not 100% sure I even entered. It wasn't a show, so I didn't have to put it in the schedule, and I don't have a copy of the entry form. I intended to enter, but maybe I didn't carry through. I was never notified either way, and since I'm not on the list of people who did get in, obviously I didn't. Sheesh, I hate this CRS (can't remember s*^%).

Winter time is knitting season for me, and I searched for a sweater pattern that had more interest than a plain stockinette stitch. I found one with an intricate cabling pattern and I really liked it. Knitted up a test swatch and tried to follow the pattern. Yikes - too complicated. I would never be able to get it right and would constantly be tearing out rows. So I've found another pattern that's not quite so complicated (I hope). Ordered more cotton yarn from DharmaTrading and dyed it the other night. For this sweater, I thought the yarn should be all one color and so I used three skeins and immersion dyed them. I know why variegated colors are so popular - they're so easy to do. Even coloration is very difficult, and I have the results to prove it. You have to stir the yarn in the dye bath to distribute the color, but the more you stir the more likely the yarn is to tangle. So I have different shades of the golden brown I tried to get. The skeins have been hanging on the line for 36 hours now and they're still not dry. Then I will have the task of winding them into balls, which will have the added difficulty of keeping the yarn away from Rosie, the kitten, who thinks everything is a toy. Once I knit the sweater, if the variation in color is too obvious or doesn't look good, I can always over dye.

But the news is not all gloomy - yesterday I shipped High Noon off to its new owners in California. They are celebrating an anniversary and decided to treat themselves to the purchase of my quilt. I think that is an excellent way to celebrate an anniversary.

High Noon ©2005

We will be celebrating our Thanksgiving on Saturday again this year, since my daughter goes to her in-laws on the official T-day. It always feels weird to be cooking the turkey dinner when everybody else is still recovering from their celebration, or out shopping. So, whenever you celebrate Thanksgiving, have a great day!

One last thing. John Hopper, author of The Textile Blog, wrote a very complimentary article about my work last month. He writes about the entire gamut of textiles - quilts, tapestries, knitting, carpets, embroidery, and more. There are some very interesting articles on his blog (in addition to the one about me, of course).

Girlfriends' Weekend

Last weekend I spent a delightful 4 days with 6 friends in Chicago. These are people I've met at the Quilt Surface Design Symposium in Columbus, Ohio and have enjoyed their company whenever I've been with them. As part of this trip, I attended the opening reception of "What's the BIG Idea" at the Northbrook Public Library, where I have a piece in this show. I have family in Northbrook and it was a real treat to have them come to the reception and see my work hanging on the wall. It's an all media show, with mostly painted works, and mine is the only quilted fiber piece. I didn't win any of the big prizes, but there is always hope for one of the Viewers' Choice prizes.

In Chicago we stayed at the Silversmith Hotel, an historic building in the Loop, two blocks from Millenium Park. The staff treated us like queens and we tried to not make too much noise as we partied in our rooms.

We wanted to visit the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute but had to kill some time before it opened and so explored Millenium Park. This is an amazing place. Here is the description from their web site:

"Millennium Park is an award-winning center for art, music, architecture and landscape design. The result of a unique partnership between the City of Chicago and the philanthropic community, the 24.5-acre Park features the work of world-renowned architects, planners, artists and designers. Among Millennium Park's prominent features are the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion, the most sophisticated outdoor concert venue of its kind in the United States; the interactive Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa; the contemporary Luri Garden designed by the team of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd, Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel; and Anish Kapoor’s hugely popular Cloud Gate sculpture."

I remember from my childhood that this area was railroad yards and parking lots, but in 1998 the City began construction of this park. What a change! We spent many minutes at the Cloud Gate, looking at our reflections in the highly polished stainless steel surface, and watching other people do the same thing. From one vantage point its curved surfaces reflect the skyline of the city along with the clouds in the sky. If you get close up you see your self contorted into very weird shapes.

We walked over the BP Bridge, designed by Frank Gehry, 925 feet long and serpentine in shape. There are panels that form the sides of the bridge and slope down to the ground and are an almost irresistible temptation to slide down. Slide marks from previous visitors attest to the fact that not everybody can resist the temptation.

We walked through the gardens which were showing the effects of late fall, and made me want to come back in summer to see them in full bloom. From the Park we ascended the walkway to the entrance of the Modern Wing of the Art Institute. This wing just opened last Spring and is another architectural marvel. We only visited a few of the exhibits, there is just way too much to see for a one day visit. We saw mostly contemporary art, both European and American and ate lunch in the gourmet restaurant.

On Saturday our goal was to attend SOFA - Sculptural Objects and Fine Art. I've heard of this show for years and never had the opportunity to see it. But first we had to get there, and that required a hike down Michigan Avenue, right past the old Chicago Public Library building. No longer a library, it now houses the Chicago Cultural Center and presents free art programs all year long.

From their web page:

"Completed in 1897 as Chicago’s first central public library, the building was designed to impress and to prove that Chicago had grown into a sophisticated metropolis. The country’s top architects and craftsmen used the most sumptuous materials, such as rare imported marbles, polished brass, fine hardwoods, and mosaics of Favrile glass, mother-of-pearl and colored stone, to create an architectural showplace. Located on the south side of the building, the world’s largest stained glass Tiffany dome ― 38 feet in diameter with some 30,000 pieces of glass ― was restored to its original splendor in 2008. On the north side of the building is a 40-foot-diameter dome with some 50,000 pieces of glass in an intricate Renaissance pattern, designed by Healy & Millet."

The mosaics were incredible, some with pieces as tiny as 1/4" across. We could have stayed for many more hours, but SOFA was calling. It was a long walk to Navy Pier and by the time we got there we were all in need of food and drink. After a delicious lunch, we finally got into the show. I've been to the American Craft Council show in Baltimore many times, and sort of expected something similar. At the ACC show, individual artists show their wares in 10'x10' booths. At SOFA, the artwork is displayed by the galleries that represent the artists in "booths" that resemble a gallery setting. Much more sophisticated in presentation. And much higher prices, it seemed. The people in attendance seemed to be divided into two categories: gawkers like us and fashionably dressed people who obviously had lots of disposable income. And they were disposing of it as there were many red dots.

Saturday night was deep dish Chicago pizza (yum, my favorite!) from Lou Malnati's I have frequently ordered pizza from them - they will ship it overnight FedEx, packed in dry ice. But it's never quite as good as the real thing, hot from the oven.

Sunday morning half of our group headed home early, and the rest of us spent the time walking in Grant Park, hoping to see Buckingham Fountain in all its glory. Unfortunately, even the the temperature was a balmy 70 degrees, the fountain had already been turned off for the season. We strolled through the park, then came back up along the waterfront.

And then it was time to leave and come home. What a fantastic weekend! We're already talking about our next jaunt. Maybe back to Chicago, or maybe someplace else. And next time I will remember to bring my camera.

Doings

Hmm, it has been a while since I last posted here, hasn't it. So I have several things to talk about today. Yesterday I went down to Washington, D.C. to spend the day with my friend Anita Kaplan. We went to the National Museum of the American Indian, the newest museum in the Smithsonian. The building itself is beautiful and the permanent exhibits have more information about American Indians than I had ever imagined existed. In this case "American" refers to the continental Americas, and not to the country.

But what was most interesting is the exhibit featuring the work of Brian Jungen, an Indian from British Columbia, Canada. To quote Paul Smith, the curator of the museum, "he begins with objects that are ordinary, useful, and comforting. When he's through, they are unique, expensive, and useless." Jungen takes objects such as plastic chairs, plastic garbage cans, golf bags, baseball mitts, suitcases, and Nike Air Jordans, cuts them apart and reassembles them into whale skeletons, turtle carapaces, totem poles, statues, and ceremonial masks. You can read more about the exhibit here and also see some of the sculptures.

Being a fiber artist, the piece entitled People's Flag really captured my attention. There isn't a picture of it on the NMAI web page, but if you follow the link to flickr you can see images that others have taken of the exhibit. The People's Flag is red, very, very red and is constructed of red items of mostly clothing. We could see sweaters, dresses, jackets, towels, blankets, bags, whatever. If it was red, made of fabric, and could be flattened into 2 dimensions, it was sewn onto this piece. Sizewise, it it immense. I think maybe 30 feet by 20 feet, although I may be way off. On the flickr site, there is one image that has people in it so that you can see the scale.

This exhibit will be up until next August, so if a trip to D.C. is in your future, I think you will enjoy seeing this.

After we had lunch, we went to the National Museum of Art East Wing. There we saw some of Matisse's cutouts, another exhibit of huge proportions. Also, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Mark Rothko, and a host of others. Many of these works covered an entire wall, and are inspirations to making very big art. I need a bigger studio. There was much more to see but we were tired and I was going to be going home in rush hour traffic, never a pleasant experience. So much to see, so little time.

When I got home a nice surprise awaited me. A copy of Quilts Japan arrived in the mail with a picture of Family Reunion, my Quilt National piece in it. Also pictured from Quilt National were Kathy Loomis' piece, which won the Quilts Japan Prize, and Anne Smith's piece, Best of Show winner. They only showed these three quilts from the show, so I'm very pleased that I'm one of them. The magazine leans more towards traditional quilting and other sewing crafts, with patterns and such, but since it's in Japanese, I don't get much from the text. There are some nice patterns for totes and purses, and I always like those. I might even make one, if it meets my stringent requirements for a purse. That is, it has to have pockets in the right places for my stuff.

And last but not least, here is a picture of my new kitten Rosie. In August my old cat Chuck finally succumbed to kidney failure and had to be put down. He was 16 years old and a wonderful pet. I knew I was going to be getting another cat but wanted to wait until after I had gotten all our planned vacations out of the way. Three weeks ago I went to the local SPCA and found this kitten. She was 10 weeks old at the time. And they were having a special - animals were free for seniors during September. "Seniors" was defined as anyone over the age of 60, and I was not ashamed to admit it. Otherwise she would have cost $100. Of course, when I took her in to my vet for more shots, it was $140, so in the long haul, that first hundred dollars is going to be a pittance.

Chuck was pretty old and slow, in addition to being ill, so I had completely forgotten how much energy a new kitten has. She dashes from room to room like a kamikaze pilot, crashing into walls and furniture as she slides across the wood floor. Any little item she finds on the floor becomes a new toy to be batted around until it disappears under the sofa or the refrigerator. I'm working on getting her to use the scratching post instead of my furniture and she sort of gets the idea. It's going to take a while I'm afraid.