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.

New Ways to Quilt

New Ways to Quilt!

My friend Luke Haynes is not only half my age, but also someone who arrived at quiltmaking from the opposite direction. Whereas I came to quilts by going through an apprenticeship program with older female quilters, who instilled in me a classical notion of learning and interpreting the classics before striking out on my own, Luke started making quilts as part of his art background and only gradually started to learn about the history and techniques of the past. These opposing origins, however, do nothing to keep us from being great admirers of each other's work. I am crazy about Luke's portrait quilts, and he claims to like my abstract compositions.

Recently I was in Seattle and had a chance to spend the day with Luke, a rare chance to visit with a peer and talk about work and life. At some point in the afternoon, we started talking about our insecurities and how hard it would be to try to do what each other did. Being untrained as an artist and constitutionally unfit for starting a quilt where I knew what the ending would look like, I said it would freak me out to try a portrait quilt. Oh yes, he agreed, the idea of working like I do--starting to cut and sew without knowing what the final quilt would look like--freaked Luke out as well.

Ah Hah! Of course, then, we had to try it. The minute I got home I started creating a background for a portrait of Luke. Of course my portrait will be executed with bias tape, unlike his more realistic endeavors. Still, it was stimulating to try something completely new. At first I tried to figure out how to borrow a digital projector and project his image onto the denim so I could trace it and have lines to follow, but then I figured out that I could simply draw his face freehand...that I could draw at least that well.

So, I have been back out on the road for much of the last week, and I will be away much of the coming two weeks, but soon I will have my new pictorial quilt top ready for quilting. Here it is partly sewn, partly pinned and partly just dropped in place. I love trying something scary and new.

3D Improvement

It has always struck me as odd that the glorious quilts of the 1800's managed to achieve their glory by remaining entirely two dimensional, while an earnest pursuit of many quilters since has been to achieve a three dimensional effect. Many times the pictorial quilts I see look similar to paint-by-number works of the 1950's and 60's--little shapes filled with bits of solid color. In the last decade, of course, the effects of thread painting, as well as, um, painting, have made quilts look a lot more three dimensional and naturalistic. For those who seek that effect, it is a glorious time to be working.

For me, I have always wanted to make it clear that my quilts were intended to be seen as two dimensional objects, (even though a quilt is technically three dimensional.) In other words, I am making a design on fabric and I want it to be seen as that, not to be seen as a fabric painting.

All that is prelude to the big lips above. One of my top two or three favorite artists of all time, Man Ray, was an all round kind of artist. He is well known as a photographer, and he made his living from both art photography and commercial work. But he was also a painter and sculptor. Man Ray was part of the Surrealists in Paris throughout the 1920's and 1930's. He made many paintings, but his best known painting by far is the one called "A l'Heure de l'Observatoire: les Amoureux," a giant pair of lips spread across a clouded sky. 

When I heard this painting and a number of other works were coming to San Francisco for a show, I decided to make my own pair of lips on a quilt, then, to make it my own, to spread a cloud of short bias tape strips over it. One day in my studio, I noticed some red bias strips, and I realized I could double the black strips with the red, in a way that would resemble the 3D effect of movies when you look at them without the special glasses. That way I could ironically point out that I had "improved" l'Heure de la Observatoire  by making it 3D. 

Hence, "Observatory Time, Improved." 

Making and Remaking

I have been writing about this project all summer it seems. I started out with the quilt on the left, the one I wrote about last time. I was very happy with it until I found out the black fabric on the back was going to run all over the place, that it would become the Usain Bolt of fabrics. So I decided I would make another one, a new road with new stick figure skeletons all over it. In this picture the new one was just out of the long arm frame. I quilted both with the same idea of many small picture frames, like those on a wall of ancestors and family photos.

The hard part, I found, was to stay present, to remain emotionally engaged during the remake. As I have said so many times before, you can do anything with a quilt, but each cut and each seam and each quilting stitch has to be the most important thing in your world. I always go off the rails when I think I can just cruise along doing anything, without committing fully to the moment.

I worked at it, however, and used the weird skill of skeleton/stick figure making I had acquired making the first one to choreograph slightly crazier and slightly more conflict fueled actions. I even have a small battle of sorts in the upper middle where the curve is so tight I wasn't sure I could make everyone fit. Maybe because I have teenagers at the moment, or maybe because it is a presidential election year, I had no trouble hooking into a feeling of conflict and weariness in those characters.

Now I do not know what will happen next, only that I have two quilts to deal with now where I meant to have only one. It is possible that I could use this as a starting point for a series of skeleton quilts, but I think I want to go somewhere else with my next quilts.

When I start to get discouraged about things like this, the world will often tell me what to do next.  This time I got a message from the Shelburne Museum that the director had signed off on buying my quilt that is on display there, "The Rule of Three."

This is a quilt I made only for myself, based on some ideas I had about memory, longing, and certain fabrics. Maybe that is the way to go: making things only to please myself. Hmmm.