harmony and discord

It was the first week of college and our first dorm floor meeting. I can't remember her name, but I can picture her perfectly in my mind's eye. Tall with an athletic build and straight wheat blonde hair that fell in a perfect chin-length bob, even features, slightly severe looking, generally serious and unsmiling. Maybe not unsmiling - does that imply frowning? More a placid neutrality. She was intending to go into the apparel program (and did). She was wearing a print (or plaid, maybe?) skirt and a patterned knit sweater, something with reindeer. Her clothing neither matched nor clashed. She seemed so exotic to me, her ensemble daring and original.

I tried to study her during our meeting without seeming creepy. How did she pull it off? It was 1984 and I had never traveled outside of the country, had only twice made the 4-hour car trip to Chicago from the small city I grew up in. Moline, Illinois in the mid-eighties was a deeply conservative and isolated place. The kids I hung out with required a pretty firm allegiance to all things preppy, and my penchant for wearing mismatched earrings was considered fairly outré. There was not much tolerance for deviation in any form. It was a stifling sort of place.

Anyway. Mixing patterns. I still retain a deep love for smartly mixed patterns that occupy that narrow spot between harmony and discord. I'm not a fashionable person - but I find a lot of inspiration for my quilts in fashion.

Stella Jean

Project Alabama

comme des garcons

Gary Graham

Stella Jean

magazines

I used to have a problem with magazines. I used to have this crazy love for them. I can remember going to visit my friend Marti, we were probably in third grade, and spotting piles of People magazines on her couch and practically salivating at the sight of them. My mom never bought People. I remember wanting nothing more than to just plop myself down on that couch and start browsing, but even at that tender age I’d learned that it was unacceptable to go over to a friend’s house to play Barbies and sprawl out on the floor to flip through a pile of old Cosmopolitans instead.

As a teenager I started saving (hoarding) mags with my first subscription (Seventeen, of course) and just never stopped. By the time I finished grad school in 1994 and prepared to move back to the Midwest from Arizona, I realized that it was just too ridiculous to cart that collection back across the country. But I wasn't ready to just ditch them wholesale, mind you. Impossible! Instead, I carefully x-acto-ed out all the most important pages, 3-hole punched those pages and loaded them into binders. Perfect! Well, sort of. Packing to move from Chicago to Brooklyn in 2009, I started loading the binders into boxes and realized that I had somehow amassed 23 very fat binders. And that each box, containing perhaps 4 binders each, weighed several billion tons. There was no choice. I needed to cull. Funny thing though, even the stuff I had first saved from 1994 still looked good to me. I hadn't tired of or outgrown it. At least my interests/tastes have remained fairly consistent over the years, I guess? Regardless, I managed (somehow, painfully) to winnow my collection down to the 9 binders that now fit neatly on my bookshelves.

Bouwerie Iconic

Anyway, over the past couple years I've stopped buying magazines entirely. I'm not sure what happened, really. They just stopped seeming so alluring. It might be that I finally hit some saturation point, because not even the Bouwerie Iconic could lure me inside, but more likely it's because of the internet. I have pages and pages of flickr images "favorited" (3,727 in fact), long bookmarked lists of blogs that serve as sources of visual inspiration, and just this past year I've been sucked into pinterest in a big way. Makes me wonder if digital hoarding is a thing. I'm totally going to google that.

How red is too red?

So I've got a new quilt up on my wall. Perhaps I was a bit more influenced by that Diana Vreeland bio pic I watched a few weeks back than I initially thought because the starting point for me with this quilt was simply: red. Or, more specifically, could I locate the tipping point for when a lot of red becomes too damn much red. I think I am just skirting the edges of too much right now.
in progress

urban quilting

SFChinatown (2007) 29.5" x 29.5" Dupioni silk and cotton

I ran across a new-to-me quilter a few days ago - Amy Ahlstrom. I really like the intensity of her colors, the collage-like applique technique, the layered, mash-up effect of billboards and fragments of adverts you see in the most densely populated cities. I've only seen them online, but they look so bold and funky. I suppose they are correctly categorized as "art quilts" - a genre I've never found particularly interesting - I seem to retain a sort of modernist prejudice against quilts that are "representational" - I always wonder why the quilt-maker isn't just making a painting or a photograph instead. I tend to be attracted to quilters who are interested in exploiting what I think of as the inherently 2-dimensional properties of printed and sewn fabric. In a way, Ahlstrom's work does both - since her references are objective but still flat (photos, ads, signs). I look forward to seeing how her work evolves.

http://amyahlstrom.com/

Diana Vreeland is my new grrlfriend

Almost as soon as the movie started, I wasn't sure I'd be able to watch it. That voice. Gah. The affectation. The stream of pronouncements masquerading as conversation. The emphatic EVERYTHING. But then the photos and magazine layouts from her time at Harper's Bazaar began rolling across the screen and I was hooked. And, ultimately, won over. That extravagant absurdity! So delightful.

Look at that crazy horn (tooth?) thing! Fabulous!

lucky

Love this guy. Look at that head gear.

I spent the better part of last Saturday wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Walking up the massive steps to the entrance, I think (every time) how lucky I am to have access to this amazing place. I love the Met. I love most of the public museums I've been to in the city, particularly some of the smaller ones like the Neue Galerie, but my big love is reserved for the Met. I always overstay, overestimating the amount of walking energy I have until I am completely out, and nowhere near an exit. Still, not the worst problem to have.

Loved this small piece. Such economy of color and type but so much impact.

I liked the pattern and color on this piece, the simple graphic circle for the flower.

Who painted this? I managed not to note.

Look at this! So utterly nutty.

This was in an area of the museum that was entirely new to me. It's easy to miss whole wings it's so damn big.

One of the other very cool things about the Met is their website. I've been looking at a lot of textile design lately, trying to puzzle out the elements of beautiful fabric design. The Met has an online archive available to anyone interested: http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/

A Gustav Klimt fabric swatch from the collection.

peaceable kingdom

Conny saves animals. Cats mostly, but dogs, too. She started out helping the strays she encountered on the island, but became known for her willingness to provide shelter for the hardest cases - the lost causes - and people began bringing them to her. She currently has 5 dogs, 18 indoor cats, 18 outside cats, and a small cat community she looks after that lives in the park across the street from her house. One of the last days we were in Ibiza, I tried to photograph all her animals. I had a thought that I would assemble the pictures into a small blurb book for her. I should have started a little sooner in our visit because I just couldn't get all of them. Several of the ones that live in the backyard cattery tend to be shy, so I know I missed a few there, but I also managed to miss getting decent shots of some of the dogs, for which there is no good excuse. In particular Pixie, the tiny dog with non-working front legs. Conny speculates that it was caused by a car accident most likely, but by the time Pixie arrived at Chez Martin-Harrison, her front legs had healed into unusably bent L-shapes. They consulted a vet who didn't think re-breaking the legs and resetting them would work and so now Pixie wiggles her way across the floor with her back legs, or waits for C, always nearby, to pick her up and carry her. Caring for these animals is a full-time job for C, so many of which have special needs. I really love and admire her for her devotion - I can't wait to return in the spring to spend more time with her and them.