foundation pieced circles

A diary 

I worked on this blue piece for nearly 3 weeks.  The plan was to make a circle from triangles. Foundation piecing gave me security.  Drawing the shapes onto a base cloth and then using the stitch and flip method gave me freedom.  Sharing here with humbleness. 

Feb 22:  First I pinned a cotton sheet to my pin-wall that would be my master life-sized drawing. Using a washable marker, I traced around a circular tablecloth. This is the size I want my finished circle to be.  

Then I cut out tissue paper triangles intuitively. I made enough tissue paper triangles to go around the diameter of the circle and pinned them to the wall. The short fat triangles on the left were the size I used.     

Feb 24:  I had been hoarding this dotted fabric and was excited to use it. The triangles were cut out one at a time and pinned to the wall.  It took a couple of days just to cut and pin.  

Feb 25:  Once I had all the outer triangles cut and pinned to the wall, it was time to cut fabrics for the narrower inside triangles that would be used to join them together.  I had to make a decision about whether to use more dotted fabric for the inner triangles or use contrasting fabric.  I made more tissue paper patterns.  I looked.  I made decisions. 

Feb 28:  I sewed all the triangles by hand and was able to create a complete circle.  As I sewed two together, I pinned them to the wall and continued looking and considering.  

March 1:  I moved everything onto the table.  

March 1:  With a washable marker I began to fill in the circle.  My idea is to use concentric rings of triangles and work my way to the centre.  The first ring is three inches wide.  

I traced along the inside edge of the sewn triangles and then a second line 3 inches in.  Within those two lines, I drew triangles to fit the curve.  I did not measure these triangles, but trusted my intuition.  All drawing was directly onto the bedsheet.

March 2:  Using a separate piece of cotton gauze fabric, I traced the triangles.  This is my foundation pattern. Use a lightweight see-through fabric for your foundation cloth.   (The gauze I use is available here .) 

March 2:  Stitch and flip through the drawn lines on the foundation fabric. I made four curved gauze patterns with the traced triangles on them.  

To guide my cutting and to be frugal with my hoarded dotted cloth, I made tissue paper patterns for the triangles.  A fatter -based one for the outer triangle and a thinner -based one for the inner triangle.   

March 4:  I was soon able to sew the inner curve to the outer curve.  (by hand of course)

March 6:  The two outer rings of a large circle are now pieced.  I might continue making foundation rings of triangles and work my way to the centre.  I'm not sure anymore.  

I was so happy creating this, but the amount of activity in the white dots on the blue base challenges my pared down aesthetic.  I’m putting it aside to steep for a while.  

Love Spreads

Another post about doing my work while grandmothering the new twins.

I only had one piece with me for nearly three weeks and it's gone through several nick names.

For a while I called it Holy Rothko, because of the dark reddish field of colour floating between the warm grey linen borders and because of the holes that marked it in a grid.

Then as I continued working on it, I called it Holy Holy, because it had taken on a spiritual quality.

For a while it was as if this piece helped me confront my own mortality.  

Grace with Juni

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Judy with Daisy

I'm working it from the back side, stitching with running stitch around and around the backsides of the reverse applique dots, and then cutting away the sheer fabric that covers them.

So that the velvet circles bloom.   

While in the rented house, I'm taking care of Grace's cat for a while as her household gets used to the twins.    In the above photo, you can spy the quilt I mended last year on the bed.  Ned didn't come this time, but our other two daughters took turns helping their sister.

Mostly I've been cooking for the new parents.  I've been using recipes from the pandemic cookbook I compiled in 2020 of family favourites.  

I've been able to get in an hour of stitching by the window in our rented house each morning.

The piece is still not finished, but getting closer.

Love Spreads pinned to studio wall, nearly finished.

Newest title?  Love Spreads 

Inspired by a quote Maria Popova  sent me in her newsletter:  

Love is essentially self-communicative:  those that do not have it catch it from those who have it.  True love is unconquerable and irresistible; and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.  Meher Baba   

Autumn Song

We closed our cottage on Thanksgiving weekend, just Ned and myself.

We got there around 2 pm on the Saturday.  It was very blustery. 

I started a fire in the kitchen stove and he started one in the fireplace.

We had an early simple dinner.

I had my holy Rothko piece with me.  

I am thankful for the angle of the sun that makes the water sparkly at 5 pm

and for all the pillows, blankets and quilts that I prepare for winter storage

and for my teacup of gin and for Eleonor Wachtel on CBC radio. 

Ned wore his red toque all day and night and I wore my undershirt.    

We have started into our 50th year or marriage. 

On my mind is the spring 2023 exhibition.  

To help me plan, I have been writing out the measurements of the walls   

and pinning different pieces up to see how they look together.

I want to choose a collection of work that is beautiful but also a bit raw.

I want my exhibition to be like a poem that reveals an inner self full of love and emotion and worry. 

I stitched my red Rothko piece by the fire both nights. 

Meaning in art often comes from the materials it is made from.

Repetition is a material.

The over and over gestures made by the body calms the maker.

The sight and feel of the repeated marks soothes the viewer.

On Monday we finished up and drove into the setting sun with the boat on its trailer.   

We were home in time to see the  moon rise.

and the next day's sunrise 

Why do you stand at the window abandoned to beauty and pride

the thorn of the night in your bosom, the spear of the age in your side?     

Leonard Cohen.

Circles, red thread, domestic textiles, ancient marks, 

whirling spirals, grids, time, dream and the vulnerability of sleep.

All of these are in this work of mine.  What do they mean?

And what does it mean that there are two-sides 

and that I work the marks from the back? 

The first thing I did in this piece was to dye it red.  

It is a full size linen damask table cloth.  I made holes in it with a kind of acid.  

This was in 2011.  See here. 

then in 2020 I planted velvet in each hole with reverse applique.  

A garden of dots arranged in a grid, like Agnes Martin's idea of perfection. 

"it is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is an awareness of perfection."  

Now there is a layer of dark sheer fabric covering the reverse side. 

And I am stitching circles around the reverse dots using a running stitch.

The stitches get smaller and smaller as you go around.   

It takes time.

When I finish, I clip the sheer cloth away and the velvet is set free.  

The raw edges flame into petals that stand up from the base cloth.  

This work is about finding a way to meditate. 

These repeated circles help me to feel my own spirit.

This work doesn't address the outer world.

(There is a war going on that we fear any day will turn nuclear.

There are school shootings, children are being killed for no reason.

There are floods and hurricanes and fires that ruin people's lives for years.)

My circles do not fix these things.

My circles do not comment on these things. 

They do not try to convince people.

These circles are a way to find emptiness and calmness.

I was sad because I was alive.  I did not even know all the things I wanted, and that is what made me saddest.  If I were more religious than I am, I might say that the feeling was yearning for the place we came from before we were born. 

Perhaps instead, it is about the human search for perfection, the perfection we find only in great works of art and out in the landscape.  Sharon Butala

I think that we yearn for perfect peace, which doesn't mean being in perfect solitude, but for peace in the heart.  A peaceful heart in the midst of the multitudes, tumult, chaos, violence, sorrow, and beauty of everyday life.  We can never have that peace.  (Except in a work of art or in the sunset we have intimations of it.)  That is why we feel sadness.  Sharon Butala

 I will continue stitching these flowery circle stars.    

Carry on bravely my friends. xo  

praise the wordless speaker I am

Colourless, nameless, free - 

That's what I am.  

When will I see myself as I am?

Put mystery in the middle.

Where is the middle

in the middle I am?

And this silver-tongued stream in me  - 

when will it grow still enough to know

the streaming stillness I am?

The ocean

I am drowned in the ocean I am - 

shoreless, boundless, wonderful.

Don't look for me in this world or that world.

Both worlds are lost in the world I am - 

My soul, you are my true eyes.

What are eyes in the invisible visible I am?

Then what do I call you?

SILENCE.

words can't name what I am.

Settle in the nowhere everywhere I am.

Gold mine I am.

Rumi

solitude is a place

Q  Where have you been?  

A   I've been visiting a place that encourages me to work by instinct.

Q  What is the name of that place?

A   Solitude.

Q  Don't you get lonely?

A  Sometimes.  Most of the time I'm fine.  

Q  What do you do all day? 

A  I make my own coffee and don't follow my usual routine. 

There is absolutely no agenda on the weekends. 

However, during the work week,  I work.

The difference is that the solitude gives me a feeling of freedom.

I can't explain it. 

I don't think about the work first.   I don't plan it.

I just start.  

It's as if I am a four year old child and the adult who loves me gives me construction paper and scissors and  crayons and says:  "make art".  

So I just start.  The adult who loves me (myself) tells me to. 

Q  Can you give us an example?

A  One example is the new quilt that I started two weeks ago.  

I didn't know that I was going to make it when I went to bed the night before.

It's a huge piece, at least 100 inches square, but very light. 

I am using up the cotton that I painted with iron water dots in July 2020.

That cloth had been folded up in a basket for nearly two years.  

Q  So you follow the materials?

A  Yes. 

I also think that something intuitive happens with the passage of time and personal and world events.    

My brain didn't know, but my spirit and body did.

"knowledge grows slowly like a wisdom tooth"  said poet Adam Zagajewski

Q  Any other examples?

A  I did make some break throughs in other media.  I may post about them in the future, not now.  

Q  Tell about the circle stitching that you are doing.

A  After mounting the exhibition last fall I had started an embroidery on some wool cloth dyed with avocado.  It was like hugging myself, going round and round with the running stitch, but I had put it aside.  I picked it up again in May.  I hope to finish it this summer.   

Q  So this avocado piece was not planned either?  

A  That's correct.  The two pieces in this post have no plot.  They tell a story, but there is no plot.

Q  But I thought that you sketched in your sketch book and worked with the design wall.  

A  With these pieces, I sketch them after I've stitched on them rather than before.  

I figure out what to do while I do it.    

Q  How come you have solitude in May?

A  Well, it's a busy time for my husband so he's been going in to work rather than working from home.  He's also been away opening our cottage for one of the weekends and this last week, he's been on a fishing retreat with the guys.  He comes back home today.  I will be glad to see him and have him here with me at night.  

Q  Do you always have projects like this when he is away?

A  Probably.  But I think that this year something is different.

I seem to trust myself more.  I don't care if I please others.   

I don't know where it is coming from, but I am letting it come.

Q  Please tell us about your unique mark making.

A  Timeless geometric motifs have become my language: Circles, dot grids and simple running stitch.  

And like a mother tongue, I speak them without thinking. 

They seem so normal to me, yet at the same time,

I know that they are not normal because the way I use them is my own personal language. 

Q  Do you have a philosophy?

A  I am a woman artist.

I look at the horizon from my window or I sit outside and listen to birds.

I always have stitching in my lap.

The archetypes and the female in me rise up like clouds and stars in the sky and I let them.

Carl Jung struggled with understanding his own unconscious. 

He tried to find an image for the feeling, as if that would help him understand the feeling. 

He identified the first shapes that all humans seem to understand.  

It is difficult to translate our inner reality into a visual symbol.

Abstract art is a valid way. 

Abstract art with the touch of my hands it my way.   

"Classical art depends on inspiration.  It exists in the mind, it doesn't exist in the world.

Many artists live socially without disturbance to mind,

but others must live the inner experience of mind,

a solitary way of living." 

Agnes Martin. 

"I found a means to express my vital concerns as a woman; 

my body, my feelings, my relationship to others, my frustrations 

and my values: tenderness, resourcefulness, endurance."  

Radka Donnell