process

I am in the process of making a quilt for my dear grandsquid, Lily. I've been thinking about this quilt for many months.

Miss Lily on her rug.

The rug under her pouf in the photo above is now in her bedroom - it was a birthday gift from us a year or so ago. I've thought that the quilt I make should work with the rug somehow, meet it on it's own pretty bold terms. I am using a screenshot from the Urban Outfitters website as a reference, but the colors aren't quite right on it - it's more vivid in person.

I'd considered and discarded a bunch of block patterns before landing on a simpler, improvisational design, with the quilt (below) serving as inspiration:

found on tumblr/pinterest

My first go slapping fabric on the flannel wall looked like this:

Which I kinda liked, but when I returned to it after being away for awhile, I was less sure about it. So I decided to play around a bit more with the fabrics I'd pulled and came up with this:

I decided to do a twin size rather than a square, and to make it a series of fractured stripes. I felt like this was close enough to start sewing, knowing that it would change during the process of stitching.

Here it is with the left half sewn - I'm still a little unsold on the right half - specifically the top part. I'm considering getting rid of the solid red block and replacing it with a small red print that would make that column a more consistent block. I'm itching to get it done, but know it would be better to just sit on it a day or two to get some perspective. More to come...

Quilt Archive

I have a bunch of photos of my quilts on flickr.
At some point I'll figure out how to create a link on the sidebar for this. Sigh.

Do the Right Thing

Tonight I rewatched Do the Right Thing on my laptop. I'd been meaning to do so for a while and as Netflix is removing it from their streaming video list tomorrow I figured I should hop to. I saw it in a theatre when it was first released in 1989. I remember being really affected by it - wanting to discuss it with other people and not really having the words or opportunity to do so. I can't recall where I was living at the time - was I still in Providence or had I returned to Illinois? - but I do recall that the theatre was packed, and that it was the first time I had ever watched a movie in a predominantly Black audience.

24 years later, I live in the neighborhood where it was filmed. In the first screenshot below you can see the sign for my street. Our building is a couple blocks away. It still looks pretty much the same. Not sure where I thought I'd be at age 47 when I saw this film in 1989, but living in this neighborhood would not have even occurred to me.

The film holds up pretty well, even on my computer screen. It's a little long, the pacing is a little weird at times, and some of the editing feels a little herky-jerky, but still, damn! Spike Lee was only like 32 when he made it. I remember feeling devastated at the end the first time I watched it. I think I am now too old to feel devastated by a movie, but I still felt moved by it, and sad, and frustrated by how timely it still feels - by what still hasn't changed in this country.

quilt couture

I've long held a not so mild prejudice against quilted garments. Not the puffy coat/parka sort of thing, but the patchwork appliqued sort of affair, usually made out of muddy calicos and wooden toggle buttons, and invariably stiff, boxy and unflattering.

Something a lot like this.

But I've started to collect examples of fashions that reference quilting, or utilize it in ways that I think are really kind of great. One of the first times I remember noticing what I thought was an interesting use of patchwork in clothing construction was a skirt by Jay McCarroll. 

This isn't the exact skirt I liked, but close enough.

I've found examples that run the gamut from affordable to high end - Louise Hedley is a designer who sells her clothes on etsy whose work is really interesting - and around $100 a dress.

www.etsy.com/shop/sohomode

This Cynthia Rowley dress refers to a string quilt pattern in the dye/print pattern:

Cynthia Rowley

This Jean Paul Gaultier skirt borrows from a boro tradition:

Jean Paul Gaultier

A designer that I've just run across recently is Reet Aus, whose work has eco-political roots.

Reet Aus

Another new (to me) designer is Carleen:

 

 

Carleen

It makes me wish that I could sew clothing! But I'm hopeless when it comes to shaping fabric three dimensionally. Alas.

Support Local and Independent Artists

snow today

A man was shot to death in front of our apartment building late last night. His name was Daquan Wilson. He was 27 years old and on his way home - he was about a block from his building when another man shot him 4 times in the chest.

I heard the bullets. Pop. Pop, pop...pop. Our bedroom is in the back of our apartment. I had in the ear plugs I learned to sleep in years ago when my husband began snoring like a maniac. So I wasn't absolutely immediately sure it was gunfire. But my brain rapidly concluded it could be nothing else so I got out of bed and went to our front windows. There were 2 people with cell phones standing over a person on the sidewalk. It was still very quiet. There had been no shouting (that I heard) preceding the gun shots, and no noise after but for the the man pacing the street, cell phone to his ear, saying, "Oh my god, oh my god."

I woke up S. We briefly debated calling 911 as well, but it was obvious that the people on the street were already doing so. Where are the sirens? I asked S. What's taking so long? After a very long 5 or 6 minutes a stream of about 6 cop cars pulled up, followed by an ambulance. One cop pulled his car onto the sidewalk to illuminate the scene with his headlights. Only the man's legs were visible from our viewpoint as one officer bent down to check for a pulse. There was a lot of activity, cops waving flashlights around on the ground (looking for casings I presumed), talking into phones, the EMT people hauling the stretcher over to the victim. When they hoisted him onto the stretcher without using the back board, I knew he was dead.

About 15 minutes later, someone knocked loudly on our apartment door. It was an officer who wanted to know if we had heard or seen anything prior to the shooting. It was a short interview, the cop apologetic for disturbing us. Our downstairs neighbor peeked his head up the stairs, wondering what was going on - he had slept through the whole thing - it was the cop knocking on the apartment doors that had woken him. It was all so quiet, relatively speaking - just the Pops and then the cop knocking on the door. No sirens, no shouting. There was nothing on the street this morning to indicate that a man had been murdered there in the night.