The back speaks

Happy Blogoversary to meeee. I wouldn’t have noticed if Teena hadn’t mentioned it in the comments! It was yesterday, June 16. I’ve been writing this blog for four years!

And now back to your regularly scheduled post…

There are a lot of people, I have discovered, that don’t like to talk much about the back of their embroidery/cross-stitch. I was alerted to this by an avid cross-stitcher a couple of months or so ago, who says that some people get quite shirty about the perceived “perfection” of the backsides of their projects. Indeed they do! I’ve since confirmed how weird people are about this, and I have to say that I am mostly perplexed by this competitive perfectionism.

So here’s the back of the Iris Quilt.

I have two things to say about the back of my quilt. First is the useful thing – I was unsure whether quilting was going to benefit this piece. I just kind of went for it because I like quilting, but honestly, I was prepared to rip it all out. I didn’t rip anything because I liked how it turned out. The Iris Quilt has turned out to be the most densely quilted small piece I’ve done. It just felt right. The ironic thing is that unless you can see the texture of the piece it doesn’t really look quilted from the front. It’s mostly invisible or unobtrusive. The texture is really the important thing.

The second thing is …. I don’t believe in perfection. I think it’s overrated and unattainable. I like taking apart watches to see how they work, because I like to see the inside guts of things. Therefore, it’s important to me that when you flip one of my pieces over, you see this part. The not-so-pretty stitching. The part that makes the front side work. The “inner guts,” as it were. And if people would like to fault me for that or critique my sewing, I don’t really much care. I think I’ve gotten to that point in my life where I respond to criticism with a mildly amused snort and then do what I feel is right for me.

I also wanted to show off the beautiful texture on the front, so there are two pictures of that. The quilting on this has made it more lovely than I thought it could be, even with the exquisite fabrics I used. My mom remarked when she saw it for the first time that the flowers seemed puffy – they are not at all flat to the surface. I designed the quilting to play that up, and I think in the final analysis that really works. The quilting is done now, I’m now proceeding to work on the very last step – the binding! I’m super excited to get this completed and sent to my mom.

Sketchy

I’ve been working on a sketch for a week or so.
It’s the basic line drawing that will guide my next textile piece.
Well, the one after the one I’m currently working on, anyway.

This is really the background.
I can’t sketch out the actual interesting part of this one.
Because it’s three-dimensional. And elaborate.
Eventually you’ll see what I mean.
For now, though, this is what it exists as.
At least it’s to scale (30″ x 15″).

Not that you’ll see the final product soon, exactly.
The background work alone will take some serious time!
I was trying to figure out if any of it can be machine-sewn.
So far, I’m not coming up with much.

This scene is one from the 12 Dancing Princesses fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm.
I’ve been thinking about doing something based on this fairy tale for quite some time.
I just recently decided what aspect of it I’m interested in pursuing most.

Here goes!

The Truth About Memory

My last two completed January projects were started when I lived in south Austin, and since I moved out of there in October 2009, these finishes are a long time coming. This is my third finished small quilt, one of a set of four quilts in progress about thoughts I had while I lived in Austin about the fragility of life. Due to various circumstances, I spent a lot of time living with that thought, and eventually decided that I wanted to try to make things that expressed aspects of that theme, to give some sort of voice to how I thought about it all.

This quilt is called The Truth About Memory. For me the fragility of memory is wrapped up in the idea of the fragility of life. When you lose someone, there are pictures and belongings, but what you really have is your memories. It’s the same with our own pasts – as we move through the linear progression of life we lose pieces of who we used to be and create new pieces, and our memories are the layers that create the present.

technically, this is looking back through time …

The trouble is that memory is fragile, just notoriously faulty neural pathways. As a long-term journal keeper, I know how unreliable memory can be. I can’t tell you how often I’ve realized my version of a memory is wrong, or the details are glossed over, the years were switched, I forgot names and places. Some events disappear. Illness, age and stress all contribute to this ongoing distortion and loss. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not so much.

these little lines represent confusion …

This quilt is meant to represent pseudo-linear memory. The silk is primary experience/event memory, and shows how recall is sometimes good and sometimes twisted or incomplete. The embroidery is little memory threads, a glimpse, a noise or smell, small anecdotes, fuzzy scraps of information, or simply pathways linking one stream of memory to another. Lines twist, appear and disappear at random.

This visualization is a combination of what I think when I hear about “neural pathways” plus my personal experience of unreliable memory. Also shown is that I realize my clearest memories are those with emotional ties. For example, my first memory is from age 14 months when my brother came home from the hospital. I remember being out in front of our house looking down at his little face. It’s just one simple picture in my mind, but 34 years later it’s still with me.

hand-stitching on the back of the binding

So what’s here is real memories that are essentially indecipherable to anyone but me, because I doubt anyone else thinks of it quite like this.

Details: The backing is oatmeal linen with appliqued strips of pieced kimono silks. The embroidery is DMC variegated pearl cotton in one of the peach/brown colors (4124 maybe? I lost the tags) and ivory. It’s machine appliqued, hand embroidered. The binding is machine sewn on the front but the back and corners are hand-tacked.

The cat is now sleeping on top of it, so I guess she approves.