When we feel and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love.
You can't offer happiness to another until you have it youself.
Learn to love and heal yourself, then you have something to offer others.
Images of one of the quilts I've been growing my heart with this summer. In progress.
When Frances Dorsey was seven to ten years old, she lived in Saigon, Viet Nam. She remembers "a paradise on the edge of conflagration". When she was twenty-one, she moved to Canada. She has a duel citizenship with USA. "I am a citizen of North America."
This piece, Shot Through the Heart, is made from used table linens that have been naturally dyed with extracts and earth oxides, as well as discharged and immersion dyed with mechanical resists. Some have been over printed with silk screen and also with block printing. The linens were cut up and reassembled. They were embroidered hand stitched. It is a large piece: 11 feet x 11 feet. It was made in 2010.
Suzanne Smith Arney saw this piece at a conference in Nebraska in 2010, and wrote about it in the fall 2011 of the Surface Design Association's journal.
"The napkins and tablecloths are soft with age and use. Looking closely, I can make out a nine-block structure, with those blocks subdivided into four. Each discovery revealed another level to decipher. Stepping closer, I read the fabrics' histories written in monograms, embroidery, as well as small tears and stains. Dorsey added her own text in faded yellow, red and purple dyes. There are folds and stitchings and photo -derived images of her father's army photos and letters, such as b-52s and mortars. I read the title and stepped back. Shot Through the Heart infuses the room with a chilly clarity; the whole and partial circles are no more suns than dinner plates. They are targets."
Frances Dorsey taught about textiles at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for sixteen years. Her father was a rifleman "who relived his combat daily." She currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and continues to make thoughtful and beautiful artwork with textiles.
This is the first post about a new series on this blog:
The quilts I make are not clever.
They are not intellectual.
The quilts I make are love stories.
Remember this.
Often, quilts are gifts.
We sleep with them.
They touch us.
Quilts are a language of care.
Quilts are not about the things that happen out in the world,
Quilts help us recover from that world,
Quilts protect us when we sleep and dream.
Quilts also comfort the ones who make them.
That is the language of care.
Your Fragile Life
old damask linen, natural dye, silk batting, silk backing and borders, cotton thread,
entirely hand stitched, 70 x 68 inches, 2024.
Kindness is our only hope.
We were with our family in a Mexican resort during that unreal time between Christmas and New Year's. We had a very beautiful escape.
I took my handwork with me and there were moments of quiet when I turned to it, mostly in the early evenings in our very clean and white room when it was a relief to be away from the sun.
I am pleased to finally be able to share on this blog that I have been invited to mount a solo show at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham England this coming August. For the exhibition, I plan to finish up the quilt tops I put together during the pandemic so that I can display mostly all new work. And this is one of them.
Quilting it surprised me. When I hand piece a quilt, I usually need to strengthen the seams by quilting them 'in the ditch' and that is the case here. However, this is the first time that I have added a secondary grid and that simple stitching made the old damasks express a softness that I had not expected.
It became a quiet safety net full of PEACE.
A traditional one patch quilt has a timeless quality, not innovative or risky. Quilts like this make me think about my 50 year marriage to Ned. We celebrated it in Mexico with our children and there were many speeches and teasing about our long marriage and one of the kids asked me what my favourite thing about being married to Ned over the years and my answer was that I felt safe with him.
I'm a timid person. It's a scary world and I am afraid of it.
And this quilt. It is so safe.
Our world goes to pieces. We have to rebuild our world. We investigate and worry and analyze and forget that the new comes about through exuberance, not through a defined deficiency. We have to find our strength rather than our weakness. Out of the chaos of collapse we can save the lasting: we still have our right or wrong; the absolute of our inner voice. We still know beauty. We still know freedom and happiness, unexplained and unquestioned. Intuition saves us examination. We have to gather our constructive energies and concentrate on the little we know, the few remaining constants. But how? We neglect a training in experimenting and doing. We feel safer as spectators. We collect rather than construct. We are proud of knowledge but forget that facts only give reflected light. If we want to learn to do, we have to turn to artwork, more specifically to craft work. We learn that no picture exists before it is done. The conception of a work gives only its temper, not its consistency. Things take shape in material and in the process of working it. Anni Albers
This is a simple post about the simple quilt that I am hand piecing this week.
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| ten thousand piece quilt by Yoshiko Jinzenji, naturally dyed cotton, 72 inches quare |
Inspired by Yoshiko Jinzenji's ten thousand piece quilt that she made in the 80's and included in her book, Quilt Artistry: Inspired Quilts from the East.
I started it during the drive to Kitchener to deliver the Inside Out exhibition .
Simple because you begin at the center, and then go round and round, increasing the number of patches in each strip as you work towards the edges.
My one patch quilts are usually made from collections of nine patch blocks that I join up.
This one is different. Simpler in a way.
We continued on after Kitchener to a resort in Mexico.
The fabrics are left over linen scraps from previous projects that I am using up.
This soft textile is a journal of days.
It is recording memories of this week in Mexico with our daughter and her boyfriend.
Good bye 2020.
We've had many challenges this year.
We've learned a lot about our selves. We've learned that we can rely on our own selves. We've learned that we are strong and we are beautiful. We've learned that we will figure it out.
Thank you very much for being with me through 2020. I felt your support. Love You!
