Do you think the world has enough quilts yet?

the rescued Dresden plates from my earliest quilt,
re-appliqued onto new plant dyed linen, silk, rayon, wool

The title of this post is from my journal.

I wrote it a few days ago at 2:30 am when I was in the middle of un-stoppable creativity. 

 

You Are a Single Star

the round and round one-patch quilt that uses up my remnants of dyed damask 

I've been allowing myself to make and make without a plan or purpose, just a deep need to create.

What I make with my hands is related to the rhythm and finality of a human time span.

Your Fragile Life

I usually finish the quilts I make, but sometimes I don't.

Sometimes I come across false starts and don't understand them.

Other times I come across things I've started and become excited and need to work on them again.

 

on the wall left to right:  Suvi's baby quilt, White Cross, A Sky Full, and untitled, 
the folded green quilt was made by April, on the railing is Canadian Pioneer,   
left side of sofa is a wool grid backed with red silk,
right side of sofa is New Beginning, my pandemic patchwork

Creativity is a human activity. 

hand stitched cotton

I live my life.

I make quilts.

inspired by cloth and play and by that pink doily quilt I made a few years ago 

I know myself by making my quilts. 

Labour Day weekend

My quilts make my personal daily experiences meaningful.  

Marimekko cloth I have been hoarding

American sculptor, Anne Truitt, said that her work helped her to see her own life as something between natural and abstract.  

A Sky Full

"As I live, certain aspects of what is happening adhere to me as if magnetized by psychic gravity.  I have learned to trust this center"  Anne Truitt

The Countdown Quilt

"The process of art contains my intensities but also exorcizes those beyond my endurance"  A.T.

The Countdown Quilt with one layer of gauze upon which I've gone over with ink the weekly journal notes that I wrote on the back of the foundation blocks. 
One log cabin block each week, this quilt contains 49 weeks.  
I started it on our 46th wedding anniversary.  I appreciated every week that we both kept our health. 
 I was counting down towards the 50th, which happened this year.

"I depend on objectification for defense." Anne Truitt  

The weather this month was unreal.  

It poured light and imagination every day. 

celebration quilt

I finished my indigo checkerboard quilt last week.  

The one I've been working on for nine years.  Completely hand pieced from muslin and commercially indigo dyed cotton, using the nine patch method.  

I took it with me on all the trips that Ned and I have made over the last decade.  Whether plane or car, I pieced it and then hand quilted it.

It nurtured me through the pandemic as I quilted it in its hoop.

In a way, it is a celebration.

I'm glad that I finished it this year - the year that Ned and I celebrate our 50 years of marriage.

It is also the year that the family cottage turns 100 years.

our sleeping cabin 

We slept under it for three nights to celebrate all those things.  

It fits the Amish four poster bed that Ned made for the annex.

the dining room

This cottage, with it's old wooden furniture and floors and crooked windows has a timeless quality. 

the middle bedroom of the main cottage

the front bedroom of the main cottage

Our daughter April thrifted this quilt top and then hand quilted it.

the living room looking towards the dining room

the living room looking towards the bedrooms

looking into the kitchen from the dining room

Puckwana cottage today

the drawing I made on our honeymoon, 1973

Celebrate life my friends.

one patch quilts

My hands ache from stitching.

My feet ache from ageing.

My heart aches from continuing on, 

through all the sadness and uncertainty.

I make textiles using just one patch.

(the technique is explained here)

I select one square of cloth and sew it to another one. 

Once I have a field of one patches, I make them stronger by quilting the seams.

The squares are all the same.

The squares are each unique.

Some are organized into rows.

Others appear random, but don't believe it.

They are also organized.

I feel powerless, unable to start the new textile pieces that flood into my brain.

I feel that if I can just finish these two simple cover ups, I can move forward.

I am calling this one Sunshine and more Sunshine

I wonder what is the urgency?

These quilts are not going to fix the war.

I am calling this one Lamentation

They do not protect against the illness.

They do not save beloved children who die.

But they are not a waste of time.

Rather, they are evidence of a time.

A time that we are living through.  

A time that we are grieving through.

All of us.   

Each unique.

Lamentation:  an expression of sorrow, mourning, or regret

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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You can find my email address in my profile and also in the sidebar. 

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  

sunshine and shadow

November 4: Mending my father's quilt for an hour, it's sunny outside.  The waves still come in, the aspen leaves still tremble.  Ned still brings me coffee.

November 5: The mending I did today was my navy house-coat and Dad's shadow-sun quilt.

November 6:  I'm mending my dad's quilt again.  It really is therapy to work with colour and sew squares.  Squares are such firm shapes.   It's a feeling like no other.  Very healing.

November 12:  I'm at my window, mending dad's quilt and feeling peaceful, thinking that it's nice to mend.  It's nice to add to something that already knows what's what.

I do love creating new work because it's such an adventure and it's gives me an exciting feeling.  

But not this week.  I am not able to be tentative and unsure this week.  This week I'm staying with one and a half inch squares and satisfying juxtaposed colour.  

November 15:  Been mending dad's quilt ALL DAY.  It's very dark and rainy and wavy.  I listened a bit to The Handmaid's Tale but mostly it's been silent work, and I felt myself sink into the November darkness.  Ned spent the afternoon repairing the little-girl bicyle we've saved for so long.  "You never know" he said. 

November 16:  Snowing today.  Apparently the article in quilting ARTS magazine is published.  Two or three people told me they've seen it.  I have not seen it.

I have a new idea.  To begin a linen tan and pastel sunlight and shadow quilt using my dad's for inspiration, one 9-patch at a time.

November 21:  Ask people who I have gifted quilts to over the years to please send them back to me and let me mend them.

November 23:  I am in a shift.  I am slower.  Zoom-type meetings drain me.  I'm emptying shelves so that I can find space for journals and I'm mending family quilts.  Those things are all I have time for.  

At one of the recent Zoom conferences, Marlene Creates was part of the panel and she asked the hard question.  "How can we keep making art in a world facing climate disaster, in the midst of pandemic, social unrest and looming fascism?"  And then she answered herself:  "We have to continue because art can move people in ways that science cannot.  We have to re-examine our own cultural practice and lead by example - not wasting, not poisoning."  

It was inspiring to hear her say that artists should look at their own practice and lead by example.  Heal through our work.  And it occurs to me that there is a connection how I'm feeling this autumn and my father's soft quilt that I'm making stronger each day.

It nearly fell apart.                                                                                                                                        It nearly died.

But with each day, it is becoming more lovely.  The more love I pour in, the more it returns to me.  

November 24:  Everything seems different today.  I am starting a new piece inspired by my dad's quilt and the citrus colours that April dyed last sumer.  I've lined up fabrics on the studio wall and today I will iron them and cut enough to start.  A shadow quilt like this demands a dedicated design wall.

 

I watch the mist hover over the grey waves,the constatnly moving horizontal ripples.

November 25:  Mended all morning.  

December 2:  Sunshine and Shadow.

I'm so glad to have started.  I pinned some last night and also this morning.  Now I'm piecing nine-patches by hand.  I take groups of 3 squares off the wall and then sit in the big leather chair to sew them together.  We listen to music.  

I think I will do only these 2 things all day tomorrow.  One hour cut and pin.   One hour sew 9 patches.

Solid and firm.  When I hold up a double 9-patch square, I feel so re-assured.

December 4:  All day, I cut and hand-stitched the shadow squares.  Maybe I will remove some of the red ones, I'm not sure.

It makes me feel amazing, to watch it grow.

December 5:  I came early to my window to stitch becuase Ned has put the coloured light tree in my line of site and timed it to come back on at dawn for a few hours.  I like to look at it, a beacon in the still darkness.  I'm stitching the new sunshine/shadow quilt top - 9 patches.  I've put in too much red and am removing some.

It's crazy how the balance of colour shifts so much everytime I add a new one.  Red is very powerful - such an eye magnet.  Yellow too, which I will cut and pin up today I think.  I'm afraid of yellow and red.  They are so powerful.  But I want them in this piece.  Truthfully, they are the whole reason that I've been ironing, cutting, pinning.  

It's satisfying to stitch nine-patches and place them one by one on the velvet pillow on my footstool, and then add them to the wall.  When I'm in the middle of a project like this - I feel really safe.

I fill the birdfeeder of my self.

December 6:  An object is not an object; it is a witness to a relationship.  Cecilia Vicuna