Rethinking and Reworking

Over the years I’ve built up a pile of pieces that just didn’t work even though I had finished them. When I cleaned out my drawers recently I applied the FAT (file, act, toss) guide to decide their fate. Some I pitched (i.e., put in the to be cut up drawer, ) some I just put back, and some I reworked.

Here’s the before and after for some of the revisions.

Autumn Before:

Autumn After:

I toned down the red/orange/golds in the upper left with two layers of green tulle and did more quilting. I added more lines to the right side, and carried through a line in the upper middle.  I think it’s improved, but not perfect.

Z Is For Zoom Before:

Z Is For Zoom After:

The colors on Z never photograph the way they are, though the first photo is truer. I decided to break up the long horizontal lines with rolled on fabric ink.  I’m thinking of adding more hand stitching to emphasize the new lines, but can’t work out colors.

7 Years of Bad Luck Before:

7 Years of Bad Luck After:

I really went to town on changing this one as I found it unwieldy. First a dye bath, then stamping with fabric ink. Now I’m thinking of cutting off the top bit, or maybe cutting out an irregular circle and facing it.

 

Stupendous Stitching Before (and after):

I created this practice piece in the Craftsy course Stupendous Stitching back in 2012. It sat in the drawer since then, even though I bound it. I decided the shape bothered me so I shortened it by cutting off the top bit, and adding new binding on the cut edge. I like it better now.

I find it educational to figure out what’s wrong with a piece and try to improve it. Some pieces can’t be improved without redoing them; but many can be dyed, painted, printed on, and cut up. If the amendments don’t work, all I’m out is some time.

I’ve linked up to Off The Wall Friday.

Update 11/29/18: I just read a post by Paula Kovarik about revisting old work.

Artistic Endeavors – Conceptual Art

To me, conceptual art has always evoked a wha?? response. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawing instructions will give you a flavor of this slippery beast. Mind you, the art is the instructions.

The first drafter has a black marker and makes an irregular horizontal line near the top of the wall. Then the second drafter tries to copy it (without touching it) using a red marker. The third drafter does the same, using a yellow marker. The fourth drafter does the same using a blue marker. Then the second drafter followed by the third and fourth copies the last line drawn until the bottom of the wall is reached.

Yep, Mr LeWitt wrote instructions for others to follow, like his Wall Drawing #51, “All architectural points connected by straight lines.” This means that each time his instructions are followed at a different location, the results will be different. Clever, but is it art?

According to LeWitt,

“What the work of art looks like isn’t too important. It has to look like something if it has a physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned.”

 

PBS’s ‘The Case for Conceptual Art” tries to explain it all.

I can see some of the points made, but what puzzles me is how one gets from concept to fancy museum exhibits and deep pocket sponsors. Maybe it all boils down to the contextualization of art, but that’s a topic for another day.

Update on 8/29/18

Just came across this article on a Sotheby’s auction for an art concept. Here’s a quote from the article:

A humorous yet subversive work, Xuzhen Supermarket replicates a Chinese convenience store, housing a functioning cash register and an assortment of familiar merchandise available for visitors to purchase at normal retail prices. From tubes of Colgate toothpaste to bottles of local Kweichow Moutai liquor, each item lacks content, consisting only of its packaging. For visitors, each act of purchasing – or not purchasing – and corresponding thought-process, contributes to a playful yet penetrating critique on consumerism, advertising and global capitalism. The fact that the work is – for the first time – offered for sale at auction adds to the irony.

 

Facing All Decked Out

After I finished quilting “All Decked Out” I decided to try another way to sew on an edge facing. Most methods leave you with lumpy corners. However, Jean Wells gives a way to face your quilt in her book, “Journey to Inspired Art Quilting,” that keeps extra fabric out of the corners.

You sew together the ends of 2 to 3 inch strips to form a frame that you sew onto the edges of your quilt. The tricky part is getting the frame to match the dimensions exactly.

After you sew around the edges you turn back 1/4 inch on the loose part of the frame. To make this easier, you leave 1/4 inch unsewn on the strip joining seams. You then turn the facing, press the edge a lot, and hand sew the facing down.

As the picture above shows, I did a lot of quilting, which doesn’t show that much on the front.

For those of you who don’t remember this quilt, it’s one of two I created from squares of surface design experiments. The center is an embroidered paint stick rubbing of a glass salad plate. The salmon colored squares are sun prints from crocheted doilies. The blue with white swoops and dots I made in by screen printing with thickened dye. The multi-color sort of pink-purple squares are fabric created from scraps, cheesecloth, and stencil prints. The solid pinkish squares are hand dyed fabrics. The border is made from a Spoonflower printed photo of my deck, run through a filter and done as a mirror image. I did throw in some Marcia Derse fabric in four squares.

I quilted it with variegated 40 weight cotton thread, sort of following the curves of the swoops.

This post is linked to Off The Wall Friday.

Artistic Endeavors – Choi So Young

Used denim from pants, skirts, shirts, etc., isn’t the most likely medium for art, but Korean artist Choi So Young can see whole urban landscapes in it. He (or she, websites differ) is especially clever in using the bits most textile artists don’t use – the belt loops, pockets, seams, pocket liners, labels, and buttons. The pieces are best described as collages. I believe acrylic paint is also used.

Hong Kong Soho Street, 2013

London Street At Night, 2010

After The Snow 2, 2011

Gaya, 2005

After The Snow, 2010

Other work by her/him is at artnet. So far my searches haven’t found any biographical data, except for year of birth (1980,) education, and residence (Korea.) I’d love to see a video of the artist at work, but while my YouTube search found some bizarre stuff, it turned up no artists.

Ian Berry is another artist who works with denim, often in portraits. I wrote about his work here.

 

Stars From My Scrap Bins

My last procrastination to avoid my canal project was a scrappy stars quilt. The canal project is onto its next phase, so I can stop making excuses now. Meanwhile, I have yet another top to quilt. I don’t think I thought my diversion through to its logical end.

As I’ve done before, I pulled out my scrap strips bins to create lots of strip squares, which I then cut into two triangles. Many of the light colored squares were made from scrap bags I bought at the Sew Batik sewing expo booth. I just don’t use light fabrics enough to have a good stockpile of light strips.

I paired the triangles in mostly light/dark combinations, with a few all light ones, and had fun creating stars with them. I was inspired by a quilt posted on Pinterest. It was made by Stash Lab Quilts, and is brighter than mine.

I had made a rough drawing of my layout, but found that getting the light triangles to flow together really drove the composition. I guess I know who or what is really in charge. That’s right, color and value.

I’m linking up to Nina-Marie’s Off The Wall Friday.

Artistic Endeavors – Richard Landis

I think weaving could tie with quilting as the most under recognized art medium. Both are usually considered crafts. I suspect the only “name” weavers most art lovers know are Sheila Hicks and Anni Albers.

So, I was humbled when I came across the work of Richard Landis and realized I’m just as uninformed as other art lovers. From what I saw on the Cooper Hewitt website about Landis’ recent Color Decoded exhibit, Landis works combine color, rectangles and squares, and double weaving. The double weave is crucial to the new colors Landis creates. What’s double weave? It’s “a four-element weaving technique using two sets of warp and two sets of weft to produce two interwoven cloths, one over the other.” Essentially you weave two pieces at the same time, interconnecting them at intervals.

Textile Cathedral (detail)

[Landis’] drawings demonstrate how Landis would calculate and visualize every permutation possible within a defined set of colors. While the actual weaving could be completed in days, it sometimes took Landis a month or more to work out the full range of tones and hues on paper, design the geometric pattern, and prepare the loom to weave the cloth. Using his preferred weave structure—double-cloth—Landis would simultaneously weave two parallel planes of fabric, a technique that allowed for the creation of the multicolored complex patterning of his textiles. (taken from https://www.cooperhewitt.org/channel/color-decoded/)

Textile, Red and Green

Textile, Cluster, 1979

Textile, Fourth Dimension (detail)

The short video on the Cooper Hewitt website shows 87 year old Landis dressed in khaki pants and a long sleeve button down shirt, not your standard arty wardrobe. He and my husband must shop from the same catalog.

I’d love to share more information about Landis and examples of his work, but he doesn’t have much of a internet presence. You can see all the work in the Color Decoded exhibition here.

The Nancy Crow Experience

Many art quilters make a pilgrimage to the Crow barn outside Reynoldsburg, Ohio, to study with Nancy Crow for a week or two. Work by Crow and some of her students, as featured in an exhibit called Color Improvisations 2 that’s now touring, will give you an idea of Crow’s style.  I’ve not had the nerve, or cash, for the experience, but I think Julie Fei-Fan Balzer’s blog posts give me a good idea of what’s involved.

Julie is a whirling dervish of a multi-media artist. She paints, does art journaling, hosts the “Make It Artsy” show on PBS Create TV, designs stencils, shows how to make your own stamps, blogs copiously about her work and her trips, and has taken up quilting. She leans toward the modern style, no surprise.

Julie has graciously given me permission to reblog her two posts about her experiences. Please check out all her posts at Balzer Designs. Her week one post is below. You can also check out her five lessons from the Crow Barn here, and her “rear view mirror” view in her podcast. (It’s at the beginning.)

Now I’ll turn this over to Julie.

June 04, 2018

Two Weeks at the Crow Barn: Day-by-Day (part one)

I’m back from The Crow Barn!  Each night after class, I wrote down a few thoughts about the day.  So, here is my day-by-day recap of the first week:

Sunday, May 20, 2018

• Set-up from 4-6pm.  I set up my space and then looked around.
• Everyone seemed to know each other.  I felt very out of place.
• Looking at other people’s set ups: I need to go to Walmart after set up to buy: bed lifts to raise my cutting table and a small folding table for my sewing machine.
• Surprise!  Class started tonight with notes we need to copy.  BUT, I left my notebook in the hotel room…not off to a great start.
• At Walmart, I bought the bed lifts, a folding table, and I found some under bed storage containers that will be perfect for my fabric!

Monday: May 21, 2018

• We spent the first hour-and-a-half of class copying Nancy’s handwritten notes, which she posted to the walls of the classroom.
• We were given our assignment.
• Nancy circulates through the room asking if you want to talk or “pass.”
• I am surprised and delighted to receive a compliment: good eye for composition
• I struggle to understand some of the concepts and terminology but work quickly nonetheless.
• I am enjoying the process of figuring out how to piece the designs I’m imagining.

Tuesday: May 22, 2018

• I finished the assignment before lunch.  Everyone else is very far behind.
• Nancy gave me an extra challenge because I finished early.  She said that I wasn’t exaggerating things enough.  So, she challenged me to take one of each “sketch” and more completely exaggerate it.
• The feedback I received after doing this was: better, but you could still exaggerate more!  She told me to relax and let go.  I find this hilarious because I’m usually completely insane and out of the box, but maybe not with quilting?
• Nancy said that most people have a lot of trouble with exaggerating and I might not be able to get there yet.  Need to keep doing it and practicing.
• She gave me the next assignment and I started to work on it while everyone else was finishing up assignment #1.
• The hardest part was the lines to create the frame — hard to keep them straight.
• I really like my composition.  My classmates were very complimentary.  They noted that I didn’t do a lot of thinking or hesitating. I just jumped in.  I think that’s why I’m faster than others.  I just make decisions and don’t dither around.  Even Nancy commented (on my earlier work) that I just plowed ahead and didn’t give myself any obstacles.  It’s a learned skill after years of creating and the secret to my productivity.

Wednesday: May 23, 2018

• Really really tired today.  Burning the midnight oil at night, after class, to do the work for my job and the lack of sleep is killing me.  Brain hurts.  Body hurts.  Need sleep.
• Spent hours and hours today refining my design.  Very proud of how it turned out.  I never would have pushed myself so hard at home. Very proud!
• However, I am in the hot mess phase now that color is being introduced.
• I chose the most difficult color combination under the theory that this is class and I have an expert here to help me when I fail!

Thursday: May 24, 2018

• Fail, fail, fail.  The switch to color is making me crazy.  It’s so hard!
• I tried piecing together little bits at one point today.  Nancy literally gives it the thumbs down.
• I think that I may have cut every piece of this composition from 4-5 different colors.  Sigh.
• I decide that I have to stop screwing around with the colors and need to just start sewing.  I start with some of the easy areas.  Ugh.

Friday: May 25, 2018

• Didn’t finish.
• I think that only one person in the class finished stitching her piece together.
• I ran into sewing issues.  Major sewing issues.  I just don’t know enough about piecing to get some of these curves.  It’s frustrating.
• Scrimping on fabric has screwed me multiple times.  Each time I end up having to add more fabric.  Sigh.
• Nancy insists that we clean off our design walls.  We can pin the fabric and then come back Monday from 7am-9am and sew.  Should I?  Will I?  I would like to finish, but 7am?!

Saturday: May 26, 2018

• Today is the day off.
• I’ve been thinking about why I was so unhappy at the end of the week after being very happy at the beginning and I’ve come to an important conclusion: I designed my quilt to be black and white,  Therefore it didn’t work in another color scheme.  If I wanted it to be color, I would have had to design it IN color.  I think Nancy’s method doesn’t necessarily work for me.  Good to know.

So, there you have it!  Week one in the books!  I’ll be sharing more from The Crow Barn tomorrow!

Here’s week two.

June 11, 2018

Two Weeks at the Crow Barn: Day-by-Day (part two)

As promised, here is the day-by-day accounting of week two at The Crow Barn:

Sunday, May 27, 2018

• Presentation Day!
• The presentations were fascinating.  I had ideas about each of the women in class after last week, but after seeing their personal work, I have a different or more complete picture.
• Last year, Nancy assigned homework to students and told them not to come back if they didn’t do it.  The homework was amazing — in volume and dedication.
• I have no idea what the rest of this week will hold.

Monday, May 28, 2018

• Wow!  I can actually see that I learned something last week! I created this week’s composition focusing on the white space instead of the black lines. (Not pictured, by the way.  The photo above is just me getting started with a blank slate.)
• Actually, I learned a few things last week:
  • My ambition/imagination and my physical skills don’t match.
  • Simple is actually more difficult in some ways.
  • The rules of art are the same in quilting as in painting: variety of line weights, value changes, tension, etc.
  • Think about the white space as much as the black lines.
  • Be dedicated in refining and don’t get lazy.
• Nancy looked at my composition and accused me of being lazy in one area — she was right.  I was being lazy.  I was surprised that it showed.  I shouldn’t have been.
• I got done with everything before dinner, so I got to go home early!

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

• Fascinating day.  Today we worked in greyscale and my brain is blowing up.  Value is both confusing and elucidating.
• My thought: If you can get the values right, then the switch to color will be easy (famous last words?)
• I’m still struggling with the sewing. I have ripped out so many seams and I can’t get anything to line up.  Sigh.
• I’ve been drawing graphs and charts to try to figure out how to stitch it together.
• I know that I said I’d never go in at 7am, but I’m setting my alarm for 6am and planning to be there early tomorrow to sew, sew, sew!

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

• Sew, sew, sew!  Today was a massive day of stitching.  I definitely got better as I went along — proof that practice works.
• I accidentally cut off the entire lower right corner of the quilt top when I tried to square it up.  Sigh.  Need more practice.
• Understanding color value is kicking my behind and I love it!  I’m struggling to be able to do it by eye instead of relying on the black and white filter in my phone.  It’s not easy.  Must practice.
• I’m starting to see a theme here: practice.  It’s true in quilting.  It’s true in art journaling.  It’s true in everything.
• Starting to feel like my time here is coming to an end way too soon!  I didn’t understand it when other students talked about crying when they left The Crow Barn.  I don’t think I’ll cry, but I get it!

Thursday, May 31, 2018

• I’m so tired.  So tired.  Feel light headed, but pushing through it.  Must.  Finish.  Quilt.
• I’m over the moon when I get the okay to start stitching my colored pieces together.  The question is: can I finish this one?
• There’s one problem area in my quilt where the colors are just so-so and so Nancy says just stitch other parts and come back to it.  Good advice.  Don’t obsess, just work.
• This is my second day-in-a-row of showing up to sew at 7am.  Who am I?  I hate mornings!
• Everyone is asking, “Do you think you’ll come back?”  That’s a tough question.
  • I’ve definitely learned A LOT.
  • And enjoyed myself.
  • And Nancy probably won’t teach for much longer.
  • BUT, this is really expensive.
  • And two weeks is a long time away from home.
  • And I have to work to pay my rent.
  • And I don’t think you get the real benefit of the class unless you really practice between classes.
  • And quilting is not my main focus.
• Over the past two weeks I have become more and more convinced that you really need a large design wall to do any kind of successful art quilting.

Friday, June 1, 2018

• I did it!  I finished stitching my quilt top together!  Had a lot of trouble squaring it up…ending up cutting off a lot more than I meant to in an effort to straighten things out.  Sigh.  I need to practice.
• Everyone who wanted to had an opportunity to present their work from the last two weeks for 5 minutes.
• Nancy asked me two questions:
  • She asked me if Brother had sent me (I had mentioned that I wanted to work on bettering my sewing skills now that I’m demo-ing sewing machines for Brother on HSN). The answer is no.  I sent myself.
  • She asked if I felt like people were watching me and waiting for me to fail.  The answer is no.  I actually found everyone in class to be really warm and kind and generous.
• I’m sure that I’ll have lots more thoughts as I process it all in the next few hours/days/weeks.  At the moment I’m just so tired.  I’m going to bed!

In the next week or two, I’ll be sharing a podcast with some thoughts about the workshop, after I’ve had some time to process it all.  It’s still percolating at the moment.  See you then!

Artistic Endeavors – Yayoi Kusama

Atrium of Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art is now showing the much heralded Yayoi Kusama‘s Infinity Mirrors, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I joined many, many others who shelled out $30 to stand in lines for an opportunity to spend about 30 seconds in each mirrored box.

I have no photos of the box interiors because I spent my brief time taking in the effects. However, this exhibit description contains a photo of “The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away,” as well as other exhibit items. It is indeed all done with mirrors.

Besides those marquee items, the exhibit spans other work by Kusama from the 1960s to the present. Some of her more recent work shows further evolution of her trademark polka dots.

What great ideas for quilt borders!

One of my favorite pieces was “Flower” (1975,) in part because of the reflections off the glass that protects this collage. I think it goes well with the exhibit’s theme.

I also saw dots on other items displayed at the museum, especially these two pottery pieces from the central Andes, made sometime between 600 and 1000 AD.

Catching Up

Despite my preoccupation with canals, I made a few non-related pieces in June and July. Both are improv based and on the small side.

The first is “Primary Directive,” which I showed before. It’s now quilted and faced.

The detail shot shows I quilted it mostly with straight lines, with a few zigzags thrown in.

Once I began sorting a long neglected bag of scraps culled at a workshop, I decided to go raw – raw edges that is. “Mining Copper” is the result. I layered fusible fleece onto muslin and sewed down strips and bits of fabric with machine decorative stitches. Then I sewed on some ribbons and mylar I had deformed with an iron and painted. Finally, I sewed and tied on zinc washers I had painted a while ago. The resulting color scheme led me to the name.

I’m linking up to Nina-Marie’s Off The Wall Friday.