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.  

My quilts help me to be brave.

Last Tuesday Rachel from Breaking the Blocks / Crafty Monkees interviewed me.  She asks artists to talk about their lives and how their artwork helps them cope. I woke up that morning wondering what I might say. 

What are my "blocks"?  

How do I "break" them?  

One block would be isolation but the internet broke that one for me. 

Another could be the mothering of four kids.   Many people would say this.

Except that I truly believe that motherhood gave me a subject and a reason to create so it was not a block for me.  It was a door.

Maybe I could talk about the breakthrough that happened when I became aware of my inner world and how huge it is and how stitching gives that world to me.  

It's interesting that this interview comes along at the same time as I've been working on my memoir.

My recent self study gave me more confidence when I spoke with Rachel.   

1.  I grew up in an isolated rural place with lots of books and art supplies and plenty of solitude.

2.  I met and married Ned early and had the four kids.  We determined to raise them with natural beauty outside their door.  Around age 30 I discovered how I could use traditional quilt pattern as a code to tell the intimate stories that were happening in my life.  I did a lot of teaching of watercolour painting, art quilting and classical piano for about 20 years along with full time parenting.  It was a busy time. 

3  In 2005, we had an empty nest and this began a new period.  Digital photography.  The internet.  

In 2006, I started writing this blog.   I took a degree in embroidery from the UK.  I retired from in-person teaching.  Over the next twenty years I stepped back into solitude and into the inner world.  

4  I guess that I am now in the period of my 'late work'.  

The unavoidable fact of life is death, but handmade quilts challenge that.  My quilts will outlive me.

Human mortality is a major 'block' for everyone but those of us who create hand-made objects break that block.   

All the images in this post are of a piece that I thought was finished.  See it here on my website.   I cut it in half up the middle and put a lovely wool batt in between the two pieces.  I've really been enjoying stitching it during this beautiful month of May.  

The title will stay the same:  Sky With Many Moons.

The podcast is available where ever you get your podcasts. Rachel called our podcast The Art of Imperfection.  Here is a link.   

BLOG

Just a quick note here to let people know that I am fine.    

The exhibition is beautiful and I will write more about that soon.

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Things keep changing in Blogland, and it's hard to keep up. 

For those of you on Instagram, follow me there @judithemartin

I'm home now and loving being here after traveling to the exhibition near Ottawa and visiting some of our grown children and young grandchildren in Ottawa and Toronto.  

These days I am cleaning and decluttering my house, gathering my life story from my old journals and stitching in the mornings on my 90 inch square muslin and indigo quilt, grateful for it.   

The island state is a state of remaining within one's own boundaries, undisturbed by any external influence; it resembles a kind of narcissism or even autism.   One satisfies all one's needs on one's own.  Only the self seems real.    Olga Tokarczuk  

year 6

I've been working on this quilt since 2014. 

six years

it's hand pieced nine patches that measure one inch when sewn

the photos in this post were taken over the last week at the family cottage

I spent three nights alone - I loved it.

I've written a tutorial on hand piecing using the nine-patches in this quilt.

That was in 2016.  here

Projects that take a long time seduce me.

It is so comforting to go back to them and not have to think.  Just stitch.

Family visited last weekend - April had the idea to photograph her quilts floating in the water.

Aren't they great?

'But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next, how it gave birth to itself and grows up and is educated in its own nature, and all we basically have to do is be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure. "  Rainer Maria Rilke

poetic

 the poetic image is sudden

psychologists and psychoanalysts can never really explain the unexpected nature of the poetic image

 the sudden flare-up of being that happens in the imagination

 it's metaphysical

when confronted with a poetic image we experience a resonance with deep repercussions

something about it seems really true
we are pushed over a border line within us
between non-knowing and knowing with all our hearts

 our soul responds

 our inner light

I brought three linen cloths to work  on
while Ned and I are in Mexico for a bit

 last night I realized that I could look at them as sculptures and photographed them hanging from the outdoor shower in the balcony

Gaston Bachelard has written about the poetic image in the Poetics of Space 

mystical landscape

go on
move forward

consent
receive

give myself to the open

 make my way without a map

 trust beyond measure

if something is to come, something sublime
it is through risk

leading no one knows where

because there are still flowers
there is the rose

the rose forever opening for the first and the last time

images of sky with many moons, wool, indigo, hand stitch, completed today,
text by Luce Irigaray
the title of the post is because I started reading Mystical Landscapes am filled with emotion by the words and images.