help me to balance

I made another sleeve this week.

Making sleeves so that my quilts can hang on the wall is not my favourite part of making quilts.

The problem is that most of my quilts have two good sides.

I never know myself which one is really the front and which is the back and both sides are the right side in my mind.

The brown nine patch side of this flannel quilt is named Dear Earth.

The Dear Earth side will be the back-side for a SAQA global exhibition coming up in France.

The show is called Minimalism and it was juried by Dorothy Caldwell.

Dorothy chose the other side of this quilt, 'help me to balance', to be in the exhibition.

I made a sleeve from a narrow domestic wool textile already hand stitched with red thread.  It has a few moth holes, but I think it is OK.

I lined it with a silk tube and attached everything by hand to Dear Earth.

It's not invisible, that's for sure, but I think that it is functional.

SAQA exhibitions require that a cloth label be attached to the back

I had enough cloth to embroider a label and attach it to the lower right of Dear Earth, see above photo.

'help me to balance' old domestic sheets and towels, machine pieced, hand quilted with red thread,      90 x 66 inches, 2018.

Dear Earth.  Help me to balance. xo

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

.

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   

what is it that I do?

new sleeve for Awakened Heart

You have to do work that's meaningful to you, and then you have to keep on doing it.  (Ann Gillen)

new sleeve for The Forever

I try to do only what I want to do.  

I try to do what feels necessary to do.

I do what I love.

view from the door of my town studio 

I got back into my town studio this month.  .

The Forever on the town studio table, side b

I was able to complete the sewing of a new sleeve for the largest of the blanket pieces, The Forever.

The Forever on town studio table, side a

I am returning it to it's original design - a horizontal swath of marks.  click here

The Forever on dining table at home

It's nearly 14 feet wide, 10 feet high.  It's larger than me.  

Moment to moment, day after day.

I stitch it.  My body touches it.

Eternity and the kitchen rug

The work I do takes a long time and I like that.

new sleeve for Eternity

My work is a statement about life itself, in a way.  About lived time.

Every day, we have to just go on.  Waking up and getting dressed and looking at the sky and being gentle with those we live with and touching them and moving out the door and interacting with the air and greeting strangers and getting in a car and hearing terrible news and picking up the bread and turning the key and putting on and taking off our coat,  zipping and unzipping, buttoning and unbuttoning and returning home and starting dinner and petting the cat and pulling the quilt up and kissing our loved ones and turning out lights. 

It's energy.

a new sleeve for Eternity side two

My work holds all that time.  That energy. 

My Heart and Her Arms Wrapped Round in the rocking chair

Time is my subject and my method.

new sleeve for Noble Tenderness

The images in this post are of some of the pieces that I'm getting ready for the Kenora, Ontario exhibition of In The Middle of the World that begins on March 30.   This exhibition was shown in late 2021 but I continue to improve some of the pieces.    

It's what I do.

My awakened heart / noble tenderness : A two-sided piece. 

 Time is packed into what I do

quilts deserve respect

I think we need to believe that we have all the time in the world.

I think our inner sense of time has no boundaries.  While living as normal people in the every day present, our inner sense of time flips around, going back to childhood and leaping ahead to future plan or worry or dream. 

This is a post about the new sleeve that I invented for my large linen damask quilt

 'underfoot the earth divine'.

I consider most of my work as having two interesting sides, an outer front side and also a beautiful second side.  

The problem is how to show both sides with elegance.

The usual way to hang quilts on the wall is to sew a sleeve on the back side, but this method covers up the top 4 inches of the second side.  I reject it.

Colour is important.  The second side of 'underfoot the earth divine' is a buttery coloured linen damask.   Dyed with natural wild golden rod blossoms, I call this second side 'overhead the sun'.

For my sleeve, I found several damask napkins that had previously been dyed with golden rod.

I assembled them into a long strip along with a layer of batting and gauze backing cloth and spent a few days quilting the strip so that it would blend with the main quilt.    

My idea was that I could extend the top edge of the quilt with this sleeve and although the function would be obvious, I hoped that  the eye would not be disturbed.   I really didn't know if it was going to work out, but I felt it was necessary to keep going.

It was necessary to take the time to do my best.

Quilts are valuable.

They deserve respect.

This particular quilt has been shortlisted for a major prize in England.

We tested the sleeve in the outdoor gallery.  

The shortlist exhibition is part of Festival of Quilts Birmingham.  

Before I shipped it from Canada for this exhibition, 

it was necessary to create a new label for the piece and sew it to the back.   

(I'll remove this label after the festival because I prefer a more unobtrusive signature) 

Underfoot The Earth Divine

In rural areas of Canada, you can see for miles across the fields.

Inspired by this vastness, I dyed ancient table linens a variety of earthy greys with natural tannins and iron and then cut the cloth into long strips.  The strips were then joined together into a large square that resembles a plowed field. 

Within the large square, a small taffeta square marked with a velvet cross and red thread sits inside a large circle. 

The holes cut into this sewn surface reveal soft earth-coloured velvet that we yearn to touch.

My work starts and ends with the inner world.  

If you live in England and are thinking of going to The Festival of Quilts to see this exhibition, The Fine Arts Textile Award shortlist, along with many many other amazing quilt shows, there is a code that you can use to get a discount on tickets.  Just type FATA 22 into the form.

Enjoy the summer my friends.  It is here.

two things in July

One: 

At the end of June I went to Toronto so that I could stay in the famous Gladstone House in the same room as our daughter April's commissioned art.

I wrote about her art at the Gladstone on my moderinist aesthetic blog.  

 April took me to one of her favourite galleries, Cooper Cole.

We saw the Father Time exhibition by Daniel Rios Rodriguez.

There was something about his archetypal body of work that resonated with me and I couldn't put my finger on it until I read the gallery text.  "He does not separate his role of father, partner, and artist.  "a father can be an artist, a home can be a museum, a studio can be a home."      

Also on view at Cooper Cole were Laurie Kang's large film pieces in the exhibition New Document. 

The large pieces of unfixed film are suspended from the ceiling and continue to change because of exposure to light.      

I found this moving and also just plain beautiful.

left: molt (oakville, los angeles, toronto) , right molt (los angeles, toronto)
both by Laurie Kang

We visited the Museum of Contemporary Art. 

On display was the work of one of my favourite artists, Felix Gonzales Torres.  

His simple pieces are installed differently in every gallery they are shown.  I've seen his work before and it appears on this blog here and also here.  

Untitled (Golden) by Felix Gonzales Torres looking through it from the main part of the gallery

Untitled (Golden) by Felix Gonzales Torres looking at it from the window side

I spent two nights in Toronto. 

Two:  

Underfoot The Earth Divine / Overhead the Sun has been shortlisted for the Fine Arts Textile Award which is an international honour.

I invented a way to make a sleeve that was incorporated into the artwork and will allow both sides to be viewed.  

I approached this task not knowing exactly how to do it or what I even wanted. 

It took the better part of a week.

I really don't mind spending this kind of love on my work.

It's what I do.