The Violet Protest

The Violet Protest
ten squares, 8" x 8"

As soon as I saw this project, I knew that I wanted to be a part of it.  It inspires me greatly! It is a call to make 8" blocks using equal parts of red and blue in ANY textile medium and then donate them to the project. The squares are going to be stacked in an installation in the shape of the letters "US" and then when the installation is over, the squares will be sent to each of the members of Congress.  So, if you don't want to make squares, you can still help out by donating some money to help pay for shipping.

They need a total of 26,750 squares!! And, the organizer is hoping to have contributions from each of the 50 states. As of today, I think there are volunteers for 49 of them!!

A mockup of what the proposed exhibit will look like

I decided to make little quilted squares.  I stitched the tiny tops and then used Mistyfuse on the backs.  Then I fused them to squares of felt.  This made for an easy finish after adding some machine quilting.  In case you are curious, it is super easy to quilt the little felt sandwich!

Here are my completed blocks.  Some are clear favorites of mine, others, less so.  But it was all good, and all were made while contemplating the healing the giant rift in our nation. I really like the values represented by this project: Civility and Respect, Citizenship, Compromise, Country over party and Corporate Influence, Courage, Candor, Compassion, and Creativity.

Thanks for stopping by.  Hope you will consider participating too! Every little bit helps!

Conversations

Conversations
52" x 33"

Pretty overlapping lines with the transparencies of the colors showing through. The boldness of the lines and simplicity of shape and form are so appealing to me! Fresh, modern, skillfully executed. Joy!

OR

Two overlapping sound waves, suggesting the concept of "overtalking". Conversations when two people are talking, perhaps over each other, and not really listening to what the other person is saying. When having a conversation, do you listen? or just talk? And then I realized how incredibly hard it is for me to listen when someone is saying something that I disagree with, or something I just don't like at all.  This happened to me when watching the impeachment hearings.  I found myself repeatedly hitting the mute button on my remote control, perhaps a universal experience regardless of which side you are on? And, it led me to think that this is where the trouble STARTS, not being able to listen to opposing viewpoints. Hence, the somewhat disparate color palette. And, this is where the discomfort starts for me, having an insight, and then trying to decide what to do about it....

Meanwhile, in the studio, some process shots for you. Some days I worked for hours and the time just slipped away, other days, not so much.  One thing that I did enjoy was working in cooler weather, even on the really cold days. Beginning the stripes of wax....

The first round of dyes:

Note the difference between the colors of the wet dyes above and the rinsed and dried dyes below. Getting ready to boil out the first layer of wax:

Drying on the line: (the image is actually reversed in this photo, this is the back of the fabric)

Adding the second round of waxed lines:

After adding the second set of dyes and boiling out the wax.  This is a photo of the basting stage, getting ready to machine quilt. It is so rewarding to see all the colors!!

The quilting. I decided to leave the color stripes unquilted.  I love how puffy and dimensional they look with the white background quilted. 

Thanks for visiting my blog! 

Plenty to Go Around: batiking the back panels Part 4

Plenty to Go Around, the back side, Part 4, project
80" x 80"

The top two panels have a few flowers, hills, and sky. Here are some of the spiral flowers.  The waxed over flowers at the bottom is the part that overlaps with the panel below, they will not be needed, and the pencil markings will come out during the boiling stage.  It is also very likely that part of this section will be trimmed off as the panels are sewn together.

This photo shows the flowers with the fence.

Here it is hanging on the clothes line, complete and nearly dry.  I like the way in undulates in the wind, kind of like the hills undulate on the panel.

The other top panel was so quick in comparison!  Just a few lines for the hills:

It was such a great feeling of relief for being so close to the finish line!  

Here is the final image of the back.  The panels have all been hand appliqued together.  This part could have been done with a sewing machine, however, my panels did not line up as well as I had hoped.  By stretching each piece of fabric individually on the frame, they stretched slightly, and not completely evenly, so that in the end, they did not line up well enough to just chop and sew.  But by carefully placing and turning under the edges of the panels as I went, with hand sewing, I was able to get the final image well enough, and keep the entire piece flat and square.  

I love the final design.  It is both simple and complex.  The colors are rich and hopefully the message is clear, or at least asks you to think about a very complex subject.  Next up the quilting.  I will be hand quilting this one, so it will take a while.  Hope to update you on the progress in about 4 to 5 months.  

Plenty to Go Around Part 7

Plenty to Go Around Part 7

This is one very cheerful post.  As a few of the batik designs I made did not look so hot in the making. In my mind, I could see the final product, but I wasn't sure if it was real or not.  Today, I am happy to share with you that both ideas actually look okay, and not, in fact, a disaster!

The first is the chickadee, which I have blogged about before here:
This is the photo of where I left off:

Add here is the first one I have finally appliqued to the quilt top:

I am still debating whether or not to add eyes to the birds. As for the logistics, there are 48 birds to sew on.  For each one, I change thread colors as I go around the little bird, about 6 times.  I have completed about 15, so I have a bit more work to do.  Ha! I will have to say that the hard part is the little beak.  It is so hard stuffing under the fabric edges into such a small space.  Yikes!
After the first ring of birds was completed, I started on the little orange flowers. I have also posted about the making of those orange flowers here.
When we last left off, the fabric looked like this:

Then they were all individually cut into stacks waiting to be appliqued to the surface:

And now, I have a few sewn on with their edges turned under.  I love how sweet and delicate they look!

And once again, on both of these, a batiked white section was used to define the shape of the design and make the hand sewing just a bit easier because the white blends into the background.  You can see it on the tail of the chickadee, and just ever so slightly on the stem of these orange flowers.  I am feeling rather pleased that this idea was useful and worked the way that I planned. 

Meanwhile, progress on this project is still a bit slow, but is moving forward.  I have a funny story to leave you with.  I was working on this project in a public location and a large group of older women (ok, my age women!) came by.  One of them asked what it was that I was doing and I replied making a quilt.  Then another looked a bit shocked and said, "a proper quilt? All by hand?"  It was all I could do not to get offended or even laugh at the suggestion that if it wasn't all by hand then it wasn't proper? I just smiled and said yes.  Because in this case, it will all be made by hand.  I don't know if it will ever be considered proper though, at least not once I finish the imagery for the back side.  Stay tuned!

Power of the Press

Power of the Press
31" x 28.5"
2014
I am humbled by my failures.  I am disappointed. I am sometimes sad, and sometimes angry.  All of these are okay.  It is simply part of the path.  Sometimes work needs to be made just because it's next.  There are no guarantees that the work will be good, or relevant, or accepted.  And just as I have utter joy in my successes, I know that they only represent part of the story.  I try to accept all parts of my story, but honestly, the successes are much easier to talk about--publicly.

Today's piece is a quilt I made several years ago.  It has been rejected too many times to count from every venue I entered it into.  And now, it has aged out.  It is too old to enter into most venues.  And, though it is a failure to me for a number of reasons, perhaps it is ahead of it's time? Perhaps it is even more relevant today?

I wanted to make a piece about what news is and what it aspires to be.  As I get older I feel more cynical.  This piece begs the question, how much of a story is actual news, and how much is written just to sell newspapers?  How much is written and published just to sensationalize an event, regardless if it represents a whole story, or a true story?  What is truth?

Yes, I am that old.  I am the age where my 'go to' for news is still newspapers.  But how much more heinous is the act when it is published and consumed so instantaneously?  It hurts to think about it.

This piece is made out of newspapers, newsprint, cotton, and silk.  There is a tremendous amount of black thread sketching. The newspaper titles were printed, paper laminated, and then Mistyfused into place. I made the binding red to allude to the old riddle, "What is black and white and red all over?" There are many answer to that riddle, one of which is a newspaper. The emotional expressions and the red work well together. 

Today this piece feels more relevant because of amplified hate speech, lies, rhetoric that are being published as "truths".  Some people are calling it fake news.  Some very powerful people are calling anything they disagree with fake news.  The era of reason and truth seems to be disappearing into the background.  Sensational or not, it would not be normal to NOT feel shocked, appalled, and angry today. I think fake news is the ultimate oxymoron.  If it is fake, then it isn't news.

Women's March 2017: by the Numbers

Women's March 2017: by the Numbers
48" x 48"

This quilt was made to honor the 3 million people who marched globally the day after President Trump's inauguration. Each 1/2" square represents 325 people.  That is equivalent to a large jet plane full of people. Imagine a full airplane for each tiny little square! That's a lot of people, all marching to protect the right's of women.

For my quilt geek friends:
You may be wondering, how many squares are there? The answer is 9216.  
And, how long did it take to make it?  The answer is less precise....too long.  I thought this was a great idea when I started, but I got tired of stitching all those little squares long before I finished it.  And yet, I continued on.  Sometimes it helps me to have a daily quota, a minimum I have to do to finish by a certain day.  On most days, I managed to do the minimum.  On some days, I did nothing.  And, on a few days, I did more, and some days I even did a lot more.  The right combination of good sleep, motivation, great music (or Netflix), and I can get a lot done in a single day.

This was also made during the season that is the absolute best for gardening, and I have some ambitious plans for my garden, so I tried to do some of both every day.  It helped to have something that involved moving my body to contrast with all the hours of sitting and stitching.

It starts with the cutting. I always prewash my fabrics and then press them.  When I started, I had no idea how many squares of each I would need, so I just cut a few, and then replenished the pile as I went.   This also helped avoid repetitive motion injuries from using the rotary cutter for too long. I eventually used 60 different colors.  Here are some stacks of the 1" squares.  I would gather a few from each pile for the daily quota, and then toss them up in the air, several times (this was the FUN part), and then picked squares that were close to each other to begin stitching.

It begins with sewing two squares at a time.  To save thread and time I decided to chain stitch.  It also helps keep those tiny pieces from being sucked into the machine each time you start stitching.  This is stage one of stitching.  I call it, making the butterflies, because when they are open, they don't lie perfectly flat and they loosely look like butterflies to me.

The next step is to sew two "butterflies" together.  This makes a four patch.  To me they look like lounge chairs.  I put them in a grid to keep track of the direction the seams are pressed.  This helps manage the bulk of all the seams on those tiny pieces.

The lounge chairs are then sewn together in long strips, and then the rows of strips are sewn to each other to make a daily block.  Each day the block is sewn to the previous day's work and the quilt slowly grows bigger!
When I got to the pink part, I had to keep track of where the pieces were.  So, I consulted the master plan, a scaled drawing on grid paper.

To keep track of my progress, I colored it as I went and referred to the diagram for placement of the squares.

You can see the emergence of one of the pink ears of the pussy hat in the lower right corner.  This also shows the amount of work for a daily quota, 160 pieces. And, as time went on, I gratefully became more efficient at stitching.

Here's a photo of the back side.  I grew to like this side better, but unfortunately, I had plans for the front side, so this beautiful and fascinating view is now hidden inside the quilt.

I also kind of went crazy in love with how this looks in a window with the light shining through it.  It looks like candy to me and I just want to eat it!

Eventually I finished piecing the whole quilt top together, and I didn't know exactly what to do with the quilting.  This quilt is already complex.  I wanted to keep the quilting lines simple because I didn't want them to compete with the design. I selected a plan and decided to do a sample piece.  There are two great reasons to do this!  One is to test the process.  Does it work?  Will it shrink too much?  Will it bunch up, or be too hard to sew through the layers?  The second reason is to check to see how it looks.  I planned to use pink thread exclusively and I wanted to know if it would look bad on all the other colors.  It is really hard to pick a thread color when there are so many colors in the quilt!  So, I did the small sample....
It worked!  Here's a close up of the actual quilt:

LOVE IT!

This is my entry for Threads of Resistance.  There are almost 2 weeks left before the deadline of midnight, May 1.  If you haven't entered already, I hope you will consider doing it!  The opening venue is:

Premiere dates: July 11 - September 9, 2017

New England Quilt Museum
18 Shattuck Street, Lowell, MA 01852
    Opening reception: July 15, 2017 at 11 a.m. 

And there are 11 more venues already scheduled for the next year and a half!