mind the gap

Sometimes there is a gap between what I want/intend to make and what I actually end up making. Sometimes it is only a small gap, but sometimes it is a chasm. Sometimes I am fine with this, and sometimes it makes me mental. I think this surely must happen to other quilters, too?

One of the few quilts I've made that I feel unambivalently pleased with is this one:

I didn't have a specific "vision" for it at the outset, just a lot of red scraps I wanted to use up and a desire to sew mindlessly. By the time it reached a certain size I knew I would "resolve" all the crazy interior energy of the red and white checkerboard with a more consistent border. I considered adding another row or two to the outside edge, but a combination of laziness and a (rare) sense of wanting to leave well enough alone kept me from doing so.

I debated the back fabric for a while, however. Pretty early on in the process of sewing the top I had thought that this bright green fabric from my stash might just work a treat. It's actually a tablecloth I bought when I was in India several years ago. When I realized it wouldn't be quite large enough for the back, I felt quite sad. Figuring out a quilt back is actually a pretty involved process for me, I give it a (ridiculous) amount of thought. I auditioned a few alternative back treatments but kept circling back around to the tablecloth. I decided I could extend it by inserting two solid green panels, and that that would give it enough width for the ladies who long-arm my stuff. So I did that, but then I started feeling uncertain about having cut up the tablecloth to insert the panels and had to fold up the whole mess and stick it in my closet for 6 months. When I finally pulled it back out again, the extended back looked just fine to me, and I shipped it all off to Michigan to be finished. I'm actually really happy with the finished quilt - it has sentimental value for me as well as serving as a reminder to me to trust my initial instincts.

Which leads me to the quilt I've got in progress on my wall right now (top of this post). I'm not sure I'm totally loving it. Which is a bummer because it's pretty much, almost-ish, finished, I think. But somehow it's just not quite what I had hoped it would be. How did this happen? Maybe more importantly, how CAN it happen, if I am working truly improvisationally?

Answer: I guess I'm working only sort-of improvisationally.

Hmm.

I always start with SOMETHING when I start a new quilt. It's usually pretty loose - a shape I want to work with, or a combination of colors, or even an emotion, but there is always something. But not a predetermined end result (or only rarely). I guess I am only now realizing that at some crucial point I stop improvising in a "pure" sense and start making more deliberate decisions. At some point I must  develop at least an unconscious vision in my head? Maybe it's not possible to do otherwise?

 I don't know. Maybe I just need to balance out some of those blacks and then I'll be happier with it. We'll see.

Sigh.

happy valentimes!

Valentine's Day.

In grade school it was awesome. A couple of days before the holiday, during class art time, we would make and decorate a big manila folder sort of thing - a "mailbox" of sorts - which we'd then attach to the front of our desks with a couple of fat strips of masking tape. On the day itself, there would be pink cupcakes with red hot hearts on them that someone's mom would have brought and red kool-aid in pink plastic cups. At the appointed hour, we would commence shuffling about the classroom dropping Valentines in one another's manila folder mailboxes. The expectation was that you might give some special friends special cards/extra sugar hearts, but that nobody would be left out. If there were 25 kids in the class, you arrived with 25 Valentines to share. Once everyone had made all their "deliveries" there was the sublime pleasure of spilling all the little envelopes out onto your desk and opening each one to see what it said and who it was from. Always hoping there would be some special message on the cards from the boy(s) you thought were cute and looking for meaning in the words written on the little sugar hearts enclosed.

Valentine's Day soured for me during high school. One of the fund-raising activities at my school involved selling and sending carnations during class on Valentine's Day. To walk around without a handful of red carnations on these days meant that nobody cared enough about you to send you any flowers. Or that you had not had foresight enough to arrange with a friend to send them to each other. I didn't really date in high school. I maintained a pretty aloof posture and self-defensively considered myself too cool for all the typical school bullshit like dances and pep rallies and such. So I was one of those pitiful souls who spent the day carnation-less, and feeling pretty unloveable.

As an adult, I've reclaimed Valentine's Day. I now view it as an opportunity to celebrate love in the widest sense - not just romantic. I try to make room at the end of January to hand-make a handful or so to send to family, friends, and people I think might appreciate receiving one. It's become my favorite holiday, actually. It combines crafts and sweets, two of my most favorite things. And I like the kitschy, over-the-top aspect of it - all that pink and red, and cherubs, and lace, and nonsense. It's fun to mess with it a bit, see how exuberant and silly and extreme you can make it. This year is a bit of a repeat from last year's version - a simple heart shape cut out and sewn together on my machine. Last year I included a bit of an E.E. Cummings poem, this year it's Langston Hughes:

"I play it cool, I dig all jive,
That's the reason I stay alive.
My motto,
as I live and learn,
is
Dig and be dug
In return."

grey

yep. feeling pretty much like this pile.

Winter.

Winter, I am so done with you. You and your cold and wet and grey skies and no sun. And cold. Did I mention cold? You are such a drag.

All I want to do is stay in bed. Sleep. Or stay in bed and read. Or stay in bed and watch movies online for hours, both hands tucked under my laptop to stay warm, a cat curled between my legs.

Sigh. The no sunlight is the worst though. The no sunlight is the supreme motherf*cker.

worst

mammo shoot. good times.

At the job I used to have, the one I was laid off from 2 months ago, one of my many, many responsibilities included art-directing photo shoots.

These were not glamorous shoots. The images we made were going to be used in healthcare publications. Ever get a newsletter from your local hospital or your healthcare plan? The sort with health "tips" and heart-healthy recipes, etc.? That's the sort of thing I'm talking about here. Often our clients wanted a (very) specific population represented doing a fairly specific thing. For example, a Hmong American woman in her early 50s receiving a flu shot. Or an African-American man in his early 30s applying lip balm outside in a snowy environment. Stuff you couldn't find on a stock site.

One of the last shoots I did was for a line of brochures we were updating. These brochures contained post surgical patient information. Like, after a hip replacement, how to safely get on and off a toilet without injuring yourself. Important information, of course, but not exactly the sort of thing I pictured myself doing in art school. Anyway, so after a full day's work shooting multiple models demonstrating how to get on and off a toilet, in and out of a chair, in and out of a hospital bed, how to walk with a walker, walk up and down stairs, up and down a curb, etc., I asked the photographer (a woman who worked primarily in fashion, but had recently picked up other sorts of jobs due to the economy) if this was her worst job ever. She demurred, of course, but what else was she going to say? I was her client. I pressed her a bit - "Really, photographing some dude in a hospital gown and socks squatting over a toilet isn't the worst job you've ever had? Then tell me what's worse!"

She paused for a second, and then said, quietly - "Quilts. Photographing quilts all day is worse."

Seriously. That's what she said.
Blahahahahahahaa!

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.