Can you see it?

This past weekend Jeff and I took a couple of days off and had a mini-vacation. It’s our 11th anniversary (when did decade two happen!?), and it was going to be hot in SF, so we figured – why not? So we went.

There must be hundreds of beautiful places for a weekend vacation within two hours of where we live, but after due consideration of the weather and the possibility of the San Francisco Hordes descending upon our chosen location, we chose a small Sonoma Coast town a couple of hours north of here. We picked the town and the inn sight-unseen, but as it turns out, we chose quite well. The town was fairly quiet, it was cool and breezy, we got to go beach hiking, we met the owners of every single lovely place we went, there was a surfeit of Sonoma County wine and we even got a surprise fireworks show before the fourth to boot. WIN.

In retrospect, it was a bad idea to drive ALL the way back down the Pacific Coast Highway to SF, due to the aforementioned SF Hordes. It wasn’t too horrid in the end because we were driving toward the city on the third instead of away from it. Just as a Public Service Announcement, if you’re in the area don’t ever think it’s a good idea to go to Stinson Beach on a holiday, unless you think it’s a grand idea to sit in a seven-mile, four-hour traffic jam on a small, windy two-lane road. That’s not my idea of a good time.

When I got home and was downloading the pictures from the trip I came to a sudden realization – I take most of my pictures with the idea of turning them into quilts! No kidding. Not ALL the time, but most of the time. A very few pictures I take are actually to remember a place that I went or a person or because something’s amusing, but I have quilting on my mind enough that I seem to keep it in the back of my mind whenever I have a camera in my hand. So to illustrate, all the pictures in this post are ones I took with a quilt pattern in mind. Can you see the quilts?

The pictures I take with the idea of a quilt in mind generally …

• have fairly simple structure,
• focus on a single element or the play between two elements,
• are somewhat abstract,
• have a strong message of some kind of sensory or emotional “feeling,” and
• usually feature a high-contrast color scheme.

I think that learning to frame a photograph well is analogous to learning to choose subjects for any kind of representational art – quilts, paintings, whatever. You have to decide what you want to show out of the millions of elements competing for your attention in real life. In the photo below it was really windy and chilly, there were plants with thorns that kept sticking my elbow, I was super worried about getting a sunburn (I did), the gorgeous Pacific Ocean was crashing at my back, there were butterflies flitting around, and I was up to my armpits in these flowers and could barely see the trail, which had an unnerving tendency to suddenly disappear over sharp dropoffs. But what I chose to show edits out most of that in favor of a simple field of yellow and blue.

Out-of-focus pictures are often better for the purpose of quilting (larger pixels), so sometimes if I really do want to make a quilt out of one of these photographs I will edit the photo in a few different out-of-focus or otherwise edited ways to think about composition and pattern. Other parts I’ll crop out and put in high, sharp focus to concentrate on the possibilities for embroidery.

I may or may not make a quilt out of any of these (I think the fireworks and the yellow/blue ones are the most likely) but I do keep a scrapbook of possibilities that I add to on a regular basis. If I started now working full-time I probably wouldn’t finish all of my ideas in my lifetime! I guess it’s good that sometimes it’s enough for me to just think about them.

Hope you’ve had a lovely holiday weekend if you’re in the US, or just a lovely weekend period anywhere!

Re-organizing (again) with cork

I have a problem with organization. It’s not that I’m against it, I do too much of it. A while back I moved my desk-sewing-craft-office-space around a couple of times, leading to much disarray and confusion. I’ve been slowly clearing back the weeds and did this in the process:

These are a pair of framed corkboards meant for organizing the fabric scraps, sketches and other ideas for the projects I’m currently working on. It’s a pretty simple concept.  I took two cheap 8×10 frames and added a double-layer of sheet cork and voila! Mini project inspiration boards.

The key to making one that works is finding a frame that’s deep enough for a double layer of cork, and one with a back that doesn’t come off easily when you poke pins in. Most frames will work (except the very cheapest of frames, they usually don’t have room enough for padding).

I also try to find one also that has plastic in the frame instead of glass so I don’t have a random piece of glass lying around.  Some people would know what to do with a piece of glass, but I’m afraid I don’t.

I have started these two and plan to do a couple more (because I always have more than two projects). I pinned up threads, fabric swatches, sketches, a couple clippings from magazines that gave me ideas, a photo, and a pattern.  It’s nice to see them on the wall like that, all findable and stuff, instead of scattered about my desk in an impossible-to-decipher mess.

Speaking of which, I took a picture of Jeff’s and my desks. They face each other, but are totally different. His is clear, just wires and electronic equipment on the left, and mine’s the other one, totally cluttered with piles of stuff, pens, papers, envelopes, the odd sewing machine foot, and there’s my computer sitting on top of my cutting board.  Some people complain about the men in their lives making the house cluttered and never picking up after themselves. As you can see, our house has the other problem, namely, ME.  There is a wealth of organization under that clutter, though.  I swear.

Quilting inspiration

I have this dream, where I sit down at the computer and get to write a post without having 40 things to do … yeah, well, lately I’ve been working on this post about quilting inspiration.  I picked five quilting-related places to talk about. As you know, I’ve been into doing arty-quilted things lately, and part of that is seeing projects that broaden my ideas about what fabric and stitchery can be.  I’ve been to big quilt festivals, sure, but the thing about the art quilters I see online is that I see the process, and the quilters sitting with their needles and machines, and their motivations, and their particular way of looking at the world. I may not have their skill, but I think I have enough love for it

IKEA: I guess I thought about doing this quilting inspiration after I saw the Project Patchwork textile challenge put on by IKEA Twin Cities and the Minnesota Textile Center (they handed out packets of fabric to see what people could do with ‘em).  So there was this raven quilt (right) that I saw on Whip-Up where they featured the raven quilt’s maker, Becka Rahn (etsy shop) and had an interview with her. This is not traditional, and the motivation was to make something out of unknown supplies, just what you’re given, and challenge your creativity that way.  This quilt was made with one piece of fabric. It made me think how amazed I am with what people can come up with and do with fabric and thread.  I like to see modern or free-form or non-traditional quilting like, whether simple or complicated, because I think fabric and thread is an incredibly versatile medium and I like how people express themselves with it.

Maps & Details: One artist that just amazes me, and who I am frankly jealous of is Leah Evans. Her textile work is maps.  Hand stitched maps. Out of fabric and thread. To my mind, they are nothing short of amazing. If I could choose any idea in the world for a quilt project, I would have chosen to have this idea. I would dearly love to own one, but I am too poor. ::sigh::

I admit that I  adore and cherish maps of all sorts more than most people, and love them as much as I love quilting.  I was known for littering school papers with historical maps I found in obscure places and delighting in really great place names like Tauberbischofsheim (a professor joked I was trying to show off with that one, but it’s a real place I wrote about).  I confess to getting an iPhone because it has built-in GPS maps.

My favorite of Leah’s quilts is one with irrigation circles, but you’ve gotta admit the one with rivers there to the left is pretty darn amazing.  You should look at more of her quilts.  The work is extraordinary and the detail she adds to all of them is completely mind-boggling.  [via DesignBoom]

Color-Texture: For the past several months I’ve been watching the work of Victoria Gertenbach who blogs at the Silly BooDilly. There are several things about her quilts: texture and color being the two that bring me back to see what she’s been working on lately.  There are times when she achieves a certain mixture of texture and color that is really complex, but when you stand back it creates something that’s remarkably simple-seeming.  It’s neat, and it’s gotta be amazing to run your fingers over.  Somewhere along the way I also started cheering for her dog Molasses, who’s been having a lot of health problems lately.

So probably that ‘texture and color and simplicity and complexity’ thing didn’t make much sense, so here’s a detail of one of her functional art quilts from Flickr.  She says this one was “inspired by embroidered patchwork from India” which I definitely see. She also posted the full version of the quilt, but I think the up close detail is really extraordinary. The many multi-colored quilting lines actually simplifies and unifies her patterned fabrics into a more cohesive design concept. On their own, the fabrics and even the combination is not as interesting, and doesn’t convey the same idea.

She’s been featured lately on Etsy for her modern mid-century designs. She really knows how to explore fabric as a medium: I’ve seen embroidery, modern machine quilting and machine embroidery on her site and Flickr pages.

I have also been keeping track lately of two more textile artists who are inspiring in their dedication: hours and hours and hours and hours of hand stitches on large and complex pieces.  I aspire to that kind of dedication, but my stitchery is nowhere near as large and complex as their works. They give me IDEAS about sitting and stitching all day on really big textile pieces.

Complexity. I don’t have pictures from their sites but: one artist is Judy Martin of Judy’s Journal who is stitching a white blanket with white stem stitches, something that probably has a lot of incredible texture in person. My stitchery is certainly not as large or complex as hers, but I always aspire to that sort of thing. I find it interesting to see what she’s working on, as she has long been an artist, and her fingers have stitched and drawn what seems like a thousand things.  Of note is her other blog, One Hundred Quilts dating back to 1982. I am not done going through the list, but holy pete! It takes me a while to take in her pieces.  Imagine! The body of work she has is amazing.  That quantity of quality is also something to aspire to.

Otherworldly. The other artist is Jude Hill of Spirit Cloth, who is crafting something, a pieced and stitched cloth, that seems to change and shift every day in ways that make me think that her cloth is somehow less substantive and more ethereal than mine. I’m not sure it is the same thing every day that’s worked on, but I’m not sure it’s not the same.  It’s a bit fey.  The blog is composed of many close-ups of stitched cloth tied in with recollections and thoughts and musings … a story cloth.  It’s really fascinating on this one to watch the process unfold, which is not something that everyone does with their work.  I like to think I learn something from this about putting one’s thoughts and inspirations into a piece of work, and being less planned and more spontaneous with something.

Honestly? I never really thought I would like quilting and stitching and embroidery so much as I do. But I could sit for hours and hours and do nothing but stitch. And apparently spend hours and hours watching others stitch. I like it as much as I like reading, which if you know me, you know that’s a major statement.  At the moment, my stitchery involves finishing part of my Birches embroidery, which I have ready but can’t reveal until there is sufficient daylight for me to take a picture of it (one of the tribulations of the blog title, you see).

TTFN, Miriam