Finding a Studio Space

Every few years I have had to find a new studio space in San Francisco. It could be worse, but given the latest real estate boom, cheap space is just unavailable around here. I end up hunting and pulling strings and seeking the best possible deal.The best possible deal often ends up being something provisional and, eventually, something that disappears. So I am on the hunt again.

This time, however, I would love to find a place where it is not provisional and where I could settle in for a long time. The good thing about moving is the inevitable purge that goes along with leaving a place. I am not a hoarder, but I cannot walk past a handmade textile. So I end up with random unfinished embroideries form Nepal, mostly worn out quilts from India, Mexican weavings still on the frame, acrylic yarn needlepoint from 1972, all kinds of afghans and quilt tops. I end up with odd lots of thread and floss, funny books on creativity, bias tape by the bushel and fabric that goes into my "unsuitable but cool" pile. When I am faced with the idea of putting all these in boxes and carrying them down five flights of steps and up three more, the idea of finding the stuff a new home becomes highly appealing. 

The bad thing about moving is the disruption in my work. I have been on the road for a couple of months, and now I do not want to start a new project until I get moved. 

Oh well. I have loved my current studio, and every day there has been a gift. So I am going to try to relax and hope for the best here. The picture above is one possibility, and it is closer to my home than my current space. 

My wife has pointed out that each new studio brings big changes to my work. I wonder what changes the next one will bring?

Craftsy Class

Having successfully avoided all kinds of new technologies, new social thingamabobs and that sort of malarky, I finally gave in to the peer pressure from all the quilt teachers I know and signed up to do a Craftsy class, or project, or series. A show. What I found was that those Craftsy people are very smart and I would not be surprised if they ended up doing something really great, like taking over Detroit and fixing its finances.

Anyway, they treated me like my last name was Presley. And they let me teach the class I wanted to teach in my own way, on my own terms. It was a lot of fun, a lot of work and a lot to learn before ther launch date, which is TOMORROW!! Oy. So I am doing my homework, trying to learn how to interact with students online, how to check in every morning.

The class is called Pattern-free Quiltmaking, and it is exactly that: how to make a quilt without pattern pieces, but with different processes that  give you controllable, unique results. This is the kind of thing I do all the time. When I decide to strew a bunch of black bias "sticks" across a white field, I am using a process, a one-step process. Each invdividual stick copntributes to the whole, but each individual stick can be applied as I wish, spontaneously. I have made a lot of quilts like this, where I just dop the same thing over and over until I decide the quilt is done. Incredibly, Craftsy let me teach this.

They have a great online platform that lets you ask questions of the teacher, post pics and talk to other students about what you are doing. I am curious to hear what you think of the program and of the company. If you are reading this May 20-30, you can enter the contest to win a free class, right here  http://www.craftsy.com/ext/JoeCunningham_CraftsyGiveaway

Life On The Road

I left San Francisco for three weeks in April for various work dates, from Gees Bend to Atlanta to Sarasota and Denver, stayed home for a week or so, then headed out for my East Coast tour May 1. Since May 1 I have been talking and teaching and meeting with people almost non-stop, and have now passed the midpoint of this three-week trip. It has been a ball, it has been intense, and it has been  a lot of driving, but it has never been boring.

Why, just the salad oil stains I have managed to inflict on three of my new shirts have been exciting, especially when I tried to wash them off during a lecture. When I had back to back video shoots for PBS and Craftsy in my schedule, my wife took me to Nordstrom's and helped me pick out five new shirts, which I have worn every day for six weeks now, cycling through them so as to keep each one as fresh as possible. Finally in Brooklyn this week I took them all to a shirt laundry and had them cleaned, so I would look and feel fresh for the rest of my trip. The next night I went to dinner with guild members before my lecture and dripped salad dressing down the front of the first one. Perfect! A big stain on my shirt for my lecture! The following evening I went to dinner in clean shirt number two and slathered some nice balsamic vinaigrette down the front. The next morning I donned shirt number three, just in time to have a little something squirt out of my ham and cheese croissant, DOWN THE FRONT.

At the next lecture I hustled into the kitchen of the community center, squirted some dish soap onto a sponge and tried to scrub and rinse all three.  This, of course, was in a large room full of women, who all had advice for me: "Use shampoo!", "Hang them outside and they will dry by the time you are done." Indeed, they were--dry enough to see the water stains where I had not rinsed properly.

Oh boy, was I careful with that caesar salad tonight. I'm sure my dinner companions wondered why I was holding the fork by the very end, leaning over my plate and carefully inserting each forkful in my mouth.

I brought more books than I could ever possibly sell, and ran out on lecture number two. Now all the quilters are mad at me for having no books.

Today is not only Mother's Day, but also the day before my 18th anniversary. "You are going to be gone Mother's Day AND our anniversary?" my wife inquired at one point. I could see something behind her eyes that looked like...I am not sure what. Seemed like math of some sort.

Fortunately, meeting new quilters, seeing the personality of each new guild, teaching classes that get people to do things they never thought they could do--it is all fun. One more week til I fly home, and this time get to stay there for a while. Maybe I will get to make a new quilt this year yet.

Yarn Bombers in the Museum

Yarn Bombers in the Museum

I finished my week long video shoot in Denver earl;hy afternoon Friday, so that gave me a while to walk around downtown and to check out the Museum of Contemporary Art. In the entryway to the museum were a few pieces by a local bunch of needlework activists and yarn bombers who had made these enormous banners.

Conceptually, I love yarn bombing, the gratuitous adding of knitted stuff to things in the public sphere. Years ago I noticed the mailbox outside my studio had grown knitted feet overnight. Then the bike rack acquired knitted sleeves. Since then, of course, yarn bombing has gone much more mainstream and gained tremendous online visibility. Here are a couple of my favorite installations:
The Wall Street Bull got it:
http://thestarryeye.typepad.com/streetart/2011/05/yarn-bombing-the-wall-street-bull-in-new-york.html

and here are a few pics, including a tree and a motorcycle
http://syburi.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/yarn-bombing-and-retro-creativity/

Like I said, I am completely in favor of this idea. Anything anyone can do for free to beautify the world, even briefly, is something I like. If the results are not always so artful, that's alright with me too. These banners, for instance, are more interesting to me for the fact that they were commissioned by the museum than for what they look like. To me, they don't really add up to anything visually, even with the limited palette and techniques.

But the idea that museums now are catching on to the action in the streets on such a shortened timeline, is fascinating. That is, it used to take a long time for the conservative institutions like museums to catch on to the trends and directions that the public had long since embraced. It can happen much quicker now.

I loved the Denver MCA and its beautiful building. I enjoyed one show there very much, and I found little to like in another show. But the main thing, for me, was how exciting and open an institution it seemed to be.

Now that yarn bombers have hit the museum we might see less of their work on the street. But I doubt it. Knitting, no matter how cutting edge and artful, is like quilting: a traditional craft practiced by women to make gifts for loved ones. It is difficult to assign monetary value to it. So the yarn bombers will probably continue to embrace the freedom that comes along with anonymity and knit all kinds of amusing and free public works. I am grateful.

The F Bomb Quilt at Quiltcon

On facebook yesterday was a picture of a quilt at Quiltcon, the huge new Modern Quilt Guild show in Austin. The quilt is a sampler made of blocks sent in from people all over to a professor who thought  we should be able to use the full range of the English language in crafts. All blocks have the well-known old English word commonly used to describe sexual intercourse, and also used as an intensifying modifier in all sorts of settings. Like most samplers, it succeeds as an art work only up to a point.  That is, it is just a collection of blocks, not a graphically organized and coherent visual statement. But it is so arresting an image that it packs a whollop.

The fact that the quilt is being shown in a quilt show adds all kinds of sizzle to the statement. People do not expect to see any kind of rawness at a quilt show. The world of quilts is one of earnest, sincere and nice expressions of generally positive emotions. It has long bothered me that our range of expression in quilts is so limited. Nearly all the prize winning quilts at national shows are symmetrical, decorative, frilly. Which is fine, but I can't help being attracted to the older quilts from our tradition that would have no chance in this context--wild, asymmetrical, sometimes crude and and raw. 

So we have this tradition from which we have selected a small slice to emulate. We ignore the rest, and then we are shocked when someone shows up with a quilt from the real world. I do not think it helps us to be afraid of language, afraid of craziness, afraid of the world outside the lovely quilt world. 

The quilt in question, which can be seen here, along with an explanation by its creator,
http://cauchycomplete.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/fckin-done/

would not get a second glance if it were adorned with another word. The quilting is a loopy pantograph that makes it look like a mattress pad. What I thought when I saw it was that it was a pale imitation of the first really shocking quilt I saw at a show in the early 1980's. The Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue, a sampler of blocks depicting Sunbonnet Sue committing suicide in imaginative ways, was shocking to an older generation of quilters who revered the Sunbonnet Sue blocks popular in the 1930's. The quilt was made by a group of quilters in Lawrence, Ks, called The Seamsters Union. http://museum.msu.edu/glqc/collections_2001.158.01.html

The discussion then as now, centered largely on how inappropriate it was to show images one doesn't expect at quilt shows, how disrespectful of the tradition it was. I didn't see it that way 30 years ago, and I don't see it that way now. I think we can respect and love the tradition and enjoy its full range of messages, not just the light and easy ones. We do not have to be afraid. 

Frame Up

Quilt In the Frame

I haven't had a quilt in the frame for a couple of years, and I miss it. So when I started to think about what to do with this quilt top, I thought maybe it would be a perfect candidate for hand quilting. Since it is made of denim, I thought I would use the Gees Bend style of quilting, done with regular thread on a large, size 5, Between quilting needle. I get mine from Colonial. 

Of course the minute I decided to spend some time sitting quietly at the frame my activity chart went crazy...that is, my email started filling up with urgent and cool things I needed to do. I got a contract from Craftsy for a series on my piecing workshops. I got an offer to be on QNN for my computerized machine quilting stuff. And a couple of nights ago I heard from Handi Quilter that I will be getting my own computerized machine pronto. So I have to finish this in a hurry to make room for it. 

One of the great joys of my life has been to be able to work along in my studio while listening to music. I have a lot of musical friends, so I often have discs by them to listen to, but the world of music is so vast that I can hear pretty much anything anytime. I can start out in the morning with a Skip James album and wind through a Bartok piece, Philip Glass, Dr Dog, Jack White, Duke Ellington, Tennessee Ernie Ford and etc.  

At the moment, however, I have so much prep work for the video shoots, so much I need to get done besides getting this quilt  done that I have been sitting there most days in silence. Just working along with my hands while my mind wanders over the coming tasks and sorts them all out. It is a marvelous fact of hand quilting that it is so easy it barely requires any thought at all. And it occupies that part of your brain that needs to be judgmental, that needs to line things up, that criticizes your every thought. This means that the rest of your mind is free to be creative, to float for hours through problems, challenges, strings of thought that you would not ordinarily have time or peace to follow. 

So I have needed to silence. And I have started to feel like silence is the real luxury of my life. To have silence in our world is something rare and something we usually avoid by staying plugged in to all the forms of input we can stand. The news. Music. Facebook. TV on all the time. It's a joy and a luxury to sit quietly and work. All I hear is the birds outside my window, the wind, occasional traffic sounds. 

So while I will be going back to the computerized machine work soon, I have to figure out a way to balance it out with the hand work. They go together nicely.

What I Did in Houston

What I Did Last Houston

Last year I had a chance to go to Salt Lake City for a week to work at Handi Quilter headquarters as an artist in residence. With their best computer operated long arm--the Pro Stitcher on a Fusion--and a team of technicians, I created my first landscape quilt, on that I had wanted to do for years. A 6 x 7 foot all white quilt, it exemplifies my idea of using an old genre for a new statement.

This October as Houston approached, Brenda Groelz of Handi Quilter called to see if I wanted to make another quilt, this time in their booth at the International Quilt Festival in Houston. We quickly made arrangements and I went to work on the files for my next whole-cloth quilt, this one made of indigo blue denim, much like some of the early indigo whole cloth quilts. This one, however, is a brand new pattern, a crowd scene.

I wanted to make a picture of a crowd that I could call "Reception of the Quilter," a big imaginary crowd that would gather when they heard the quilter was coming. I had taken a picture at the tree lighting ceremony in downtown San Francisco last year, a picture I thought would be perfect for the project.

To prepare one of these I first "cut" the picture into a grid of smaller squares in the computer. Then I use a digital pen to trace each square. Finally, I use a digitizing program to convert the drawing to a quilting file that the Pro Stitcher can read. So I ended up taking my quilt design to Houston as 90 blocks on a little USB drive in my pocket.

Assembling the blocks into rows and lining up the rows as they are sewn are big challenges. But I had learned a lot the first time around, so knew some of the important things to consider before I started. First up was thread. I really wanted the machine to work smoothly and uninterrupted throughout the days, so I asked the friendly people at Superior Threads to guide me. They recommended Magnifico quilting thread, which would not only be strong and reliable, but also would give a slight sparkle to the quilting. It looked great against the denim, so I went with it.

It was a little nerve wracking to be working on a new project with equipment I was not exactly a master of, to be in one of the busiest booths in the show with thousands of people looking over my shoulder and to be trying to solve software difficulties in the software I had barely met. Eventually, however, I got the setup rigged and chugging along, so I could actually walk away from it sometimes and let it just keep on sewing my design for me. It was a blast to see the people in the first row to be quilted, figures that looked at first like random lines, but gradually started to resemble faces and bodies. "Look!" people would say, "It's a woman!" and so on. As the crowd grows larger toward the bottom of the design, it becomes much clearer that it is a crowd of people behind a police barricade.

This quilt was a little easier than the first one. The next one will be even easier, I hope, as I learn to handle the software and equipment even better. In any case, it is only because of the great people at Handi Quilter that I have been able to realize my long-standing dream of working with the computerized long arm. I hope I get to do many more.