Squares and Rectangles

So, I let the meeting house quilt go for now, and I find that I’m working on squares and rectangles in pretty basic arrangements following patterns (I never follow patterns!) or making my own pattern (sweater quilt tutorial will be added this week).

The first quilt is a story quilt from Fun Quilts studio. It’s a gift for my niece’s third birthday and it has almost 300 3.5 inch squares. It’s busy work, but it is a lovely quilt that will hopefully encourage her creativity. Here’s the quilt so far.

You can find the pattern in Modern Quilts by Bill Kerr and Weeks Ringle.

The other quilt was inspired by a blue and white quilt that I saw in a quilting magazine. Several years ago I taught a student whose father was posted in Senegal with the Foreign Service. She would bring me back beautiful indigo shibori fabrics from holiday and from summers (Thanks, Tessa). Here are some of the fabrics.

Originally, I thought I would make clothes, but they seem so impermanent, so I’ve started a basic blue and white quilt for the twin bed in my studio that the dogs sleep on when I work.

The rectangle sweater quilt is also in squares and rectangles.

Working with these basic shapes feels sort of like working with form in poetry. It’s something to keep my left brain busy while my right brain works through some of the more complex designs and color decisions that I can’t seem to get straight.

No matter why, it’s great to be sitting at the sewing machine for a couple of hours a day. And creating with my hand soothes me. I feel it bringing me back to the place of serenity and contentment that will allow me to pick up the meeting house quilt again.

As I’m sewing, I can feel problems with the meeting house quilt percolating in the back of my head. I feel pretty sure that when I turn to it again, all the things that kept me from working on it will be solved. I’m looking forward to that day.

SHOW AT SUNRISE CAFÉ

I’m hard at work today getting ready to hang my solo show at the Sunrise Café in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I’m looking forward to seeing my quilts in a new space ,and I’m nervous about whether the people in my new hometown will like my work.

Working with student writers, my goal is always to separate evaluation from feedback. I know first hand how damaging praise and criticism can be. Getting ready to hang this show, I know that people will be sitting eating the wonderful food at Sunrise and evaluating my work.

I create the work for me. I try to get onto cloth the images and emotions that are in my head, but when I put it out there, even if it matches perfectly what I intended to create, it may not be pleasing to other people.

And I want other people to like my work. I also want to be able to feel that it isn’t important whether other people like my work or not. So I feel both things at once, which seems impossible, but isn’t really, when you think about it. We all know that when someone says, “I don’t give a damn what you think,” they are generally expressing a wish and an intention. At the same time, by making the statement, they reveal that they do indeed care what the person they are talking to thinks about them or their work or their ideas. An interesting paradox.

I’m happy that Brian is letting me put my work on the walls of his lovely café. If you’ve been there and seen it and have a question about my work, please drop me a post at laughinglg@gmail.com.

If you don’t get to the café to see it, I should have figured out my web album problems soon and I’ll post photos here when I get the technical issues worked out.

BLOCKED, STILL—A MEDITATION ON THE REASONS

Okay, so I still can’t work on the quilt that I’m supposed to be working on, and I finally figured out why. The quilt is of one of my favorite places—the Ashton Friends Meeting House on the Sandy Spring Friends School campus. The place symbolizes peace, stillness, and happiness to me.

Right now, I am not peaceful, though I go to meeting and take yoga three times a week. My life is in chaos, so I’m seeking serenity, but I’m not there yet. Neither am I still. I can’t even sit still in meeting anymore, and that’s unusual. I even fudge a little when I’m in relaxation pose in yoga, focusing on my breathing or tensing and releasing my muscles, trying to settle into much needed stillness. As for happiness, I can’t remember ever feeling more sadness and grief than I do right now.

So, how can I make an authentic quilt of this place when I don’t feel any of the emotions it evokes?

I can’t.

So today I started on a felted wool quilt using scraps from my maternal grandmother’s clothing, sweaters my husband shrank in the wash, and sweaters I gathered from dorm students’ leavings at SSFS. This quilt will have a rough felted wool front, with velvet sashing. The back will be soft cotton velvet, and I’ll try to find some fancy, satiny fabric to bind it with.

This quilt feels more like my grief. It has loss—my grandmother, my sweaters, my students--but it also has the soft, quiet side of grief that is the awareness that, as Elizabeth Bishop says, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Okay, so her poem is deeply ironic and sad, but it’s still true that we can learn to lose what we love and still find joy and pleasure on the other side (the v velvet on the back of the felted wool quilt). I hope that working on this quilt will help me remember this.

You can find all of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem—“One Art” here.