I Had A Dream

At some point I realized that what was holding me back from doing something significant in quilts was the fact that I was always trying to do something beautiful. It is not so much the striving for beauty that was messing me up as the fact that I was trying to please others thereby, and it is not by pleasing others that you find a way to do something powerful and individual.

Subsequently I found myself going off into directions that, far from pleasing others, seem to be alienating them. I don't know where this path is going to lead me eventually, but in the short run it is taking me away from the pleasing place.

I think it started a few years ago when I had a dream of a graffiti quilt, an ugly pink field with the word "QUILT" across the bottom in big, spray painted letters. I actually talked to a graffiti artist about painting a apiece of fabric for me, but he was repelled by the idea. He seemed disgusted that I had suggested it. Now, that is funny: the idea of putting graffiti on a quilt disgusts quilters and graffiti artists alike, because the worst possible thing is for them to be associated with each other.

This spring I ran across this idea in an old notebook and realized that it would be perfect for a bias tape quilt. Graffiti, I figured, would so obscure whatever was in the background that it would not matter what the background consisted of. So I just assembled an abstract field of scraps upon which I could scribble. The day I started sewing it, I received in the mail a package of bias tape from a woman who had seen my lecture in Seattle the week before. It was all various shades of pink. Obviously, fate wanted me to execute my pink graffiti in a sort of mirror image of the one in my dream.

As my friend Barbara Brackman said when she saw some of my new quilts, "Sometimes you can be TOO abstract." Maybe so, but at least I am no longer being a people pleaser--that's for sure.

New Quilt

I made this quilt top when I was the artist in residence at the de Young museum during the month of March. It was just about the most fun I ever had, the residency, that is. But making this was a treat as well. When I started, all I knew was that I wanted to sew a bunch of this aqua blue bias, so I picked these orange fabrics to set it off. The stuff on the left came from a garage sale--the maker was selling this "failure" from a dye class, perfect for my purposes. After a while I realized I was making a river, so I ended up adding some tributaries and mountains and etc., then quilted it all over with crazy salmon.

My only real disappointment came when I took the last stitch on the binding and hung it up on the wall of my studio: the edges looked like the edge of a potato chip. There was nothing to do but to tear it off and figure some way to make it lay flatter. What I ended up doing was just folding the top and back together and whip stitching them--no binding at all. Now it hangs pretty flat and behaves pretty well.

The thing is, it is all enjoyable. Sewing the strips on, quilting it, binding it--I never get tired of taking some simple materials and turning them into something I like to look at. It is, as they say, a hoot. This one is called "Up The River of Good Intentions."

Unknown Block

Here's a pattern you don't see every day. I thought it was a Maltese Cross variation, which I suppose it could be. I found it in a stack of quilts owned by Connie Davidson when she showed me her collection last week in Hilton Head. Anyway, it seems to be a sort of floral design, a tuilp, I guess, made of a Maltese Cross style block. What I like about it is how logical, even inevitable it looks. Of course you would make a tulip like that!

Of course the other thing I like is that women have always invented patterns, anyone who could make a quilt could make it her own way, or could invent her own pattern. Any signs of this creative impulse make me happy.

Looks Like A Mess

It does not look like much at the moment but it will look better when I get it done tomorrow. When I started this all I knew was that I had this green and white pinstripe that I wanted to cut up and piece back together. So I started cutting and sewing, not knowing and not caring what it was going to look like at the end. Then I saw the picture at the top of persimmons in the snow by my friend Gail Anderson of Oxford, England. Yes! I could make a bunch of small orange things and scatter them around and end up with something sort of like that. But from the minute I started trying to make the persimmons, my judgemental side took off and went crazy: "Nope, that's not orange enough...wrong...not over there...looks stupid..." and etc. So I spent a whole day trying to make little orange things I could fit in here somehow.

I finally figured out that I was never going to be happy with it, because I was trying to compete with the image of perfection I had in my mind. I can't work that way, so I quit.

The next day I was idly sipping at my coffee when I noticed that I had originally pulled out this golden African fabric, and had a feeling that it would go well with the pinstripe. So I laid it on the piecework I had created and just loved the combination. Then I could start cutting and sewing again, and waiting for something to develop. At the last minute of my third day sewing, I saw something that made the whole thing come into focus for me. Then I knew how to continue, what kind of effect I was looking for, how to proceed.

"Sewing Without Knowing" is hard to follow.

Random connections

I was looking through my recent pictures for something just now, and ran across this quilt top someone made in my recent workshop in Minnesota, and this picture from my neighborhood the day before I left for that trip. I had little to do with the quilt, made by Mary Nordeng of Rochester, other than forcing the process of making the blocks. Mary made and arranged the blocks, the end result is something I like a lot, especially because it has a great deal of the random. But the layout, sort of a landscape with a sort of a tree or sort of a clump of trees or something, reminds me of the picture below. I could have composed one that would look even more like it, but the reason I liked this one is that I already had it on my computer. I was walking home through the woods one day and liked the silhouettes of the trees.

Anyway, where I am going with this is that the whole point of this workshop, like many of my workshops, is to allow a certain amount of randomness into the quiltmaking process. I like that. I feel soothed and happy when I find inexplicable things on old quilts. I find it hard to concentrate on the formal and symmetrical. So in my own quilts, naturally, that is where I have evolved. Looking at a book with pictures of my quilts from the 1980's I can see how I started out with strictly formal designs that looked sort of like minimal paintings. As I went along, as I became more confident, I became less and less interested in knowing how a quilt was going to turn out. I wanted to set up a process that would allow me to discover a new quilt as I sewed.

We all like different things. I realize that most quiltmakers want to have a fairly complete picture in their minds of the finished product when they start. It's a big job and there is no reason not to have that. But as I say, for me it has become important to work with the fabric, not with pictures of the fabric ahead of time. I will find pattern somewhere as I go, just like the pictures above showed me a pattern.

Living by the Sea

I grew up in Michigan, with the woods for a back yard. Whenever I go home and get a chance to walk through those same woods I have a powerful feeling of childlike excitement, a sense of well-being and simple joy of being back in my home place. It's still there!

But living here in San Francisco, just up at the top of the cliff that overlooks the ocean, also has its rewards. The daily experience of the majesty and expanse, the sheer, dramatic vastness of the place, is a refreshing reminder of one's insignificance, one's mortality, one's minor role, after all. It is about 500 steps from the top of our hill down to the beach. It takes about 30 minutes to walk straight down, turn around and climb back up. But I hate to do that, preferring instead to walk straight down, wander along the shore, climb rocks, watch the pelicans fishing, watch the boats steam through the Golden Gate under the bridge, and sometimes simply to stare at the waves, letting the sound and the motion hypnotize me.

At moments like that I sometimes think about the work I need to be doing, or the dinner I need to get on. But the sea makes it all seem so small.

I lost a great friend this week, Pierre Cabrol, 84 years old. He was an architect educated at the Beaux Arts school in Paris who came here in the 1950's to work with Buckminster Fuller. He gravitated to Los Angeles, took a job with a large firm there and ended up the lead designer. Maybe Pierre's best known work was the new Opry building in Nashville, built in the 1970's to replace the Ryman auditorium. In LA he also designed the Cinerama, based on a Fuller dome.

But it was not architecture for which his friends will remember Pierre, but his way of seeming to love all the world. He was a wonder with plants, constantly nursing some forlorn orchid he had picked up somewhere, or taming a crazy succulent. And Pierre Cabrol, the great architect, 6' 3", handsome, worldly, accomplished, had a way of making everyone else feel charming and smart and delightful. When you were with Pierre, you felt ever so much more so.

So today when we are experiencing the tail end of the typhoon that devastated the Philipines, I intend to take my walk down along the water and remember Pierre. Dinner may be late.