Keeping the creative juices flowing

 It was a long day and a good day. Being Monday, it was entirely devoted to software technical documentation. But now it's Monday night, and the creator has come out to play. Yesterday I cut the pieces for the quilt.  It's an ingenious technique: First you find the repeat in the pattern of the fabric you've chosen, Then you cut six selvedge-to-selvedge lengths of the fabric one repeat wide. Once you have these six identical strips, you layer them on top of each other so that the patterns of each layer line up exactly from top to bottom... Have I lost you yet? For those of you who are curious and aren't lost, read on. For the rest, skip to the next paragraph. For the pattern I am using, the repeat is 23" wide. This is an awkward, indivisible size because the next step is to cut the lengths into even smaller strips--3.75"-4" in width. These strips will then be cut into equilateral triangles with the aid of the lovely device above right.

The goal of all the pattern planning and laying out and cutting is to get sets of six identical pieces of fabric to arrange into hexagons. You can either put the triangles in each set together randomly (pick one of the points and use it as the center of the hexagon for each piece), or you can be like me and try out all three combinations for each hexagon, taking pictures of each in order to decide which of the three you like best. Then you pin them together and set them aside to sew.  

Last night I put together 43 hexagons. Tonight I finished the last 27. I wish I hadn't finished listening to Kitchen Confidential over the weekend (read by Anthony Bourdain himself) as that would have been a perfect accompanying activity for laying out hexagons. As. it was, last night I watched See, a series set in a dystopian future where all human are blind, and tonight I indulged in three episodes of Clarkson's Farm. Dave couldn't get through either of them with me--and you can see why with Clarkson's Farm featuring Jeremy Clarkson nattering on about planting crops, raising sheep, running a farm stand, raising chickens, planting trees, the bloody regulations, and irrigating--all from the perspective of someone who has no background in farming, no patience, and very little ability to listen to the advice of the people he hired to advise him. If you don't know who Jeremy Clarkson is, look him up. A less likely English farmer you would be hard pressed to meet.

But back to the hexagons. Every part of this quilt process so far has been magical. When I sit down to sew all the fiddly little pieces together, I may feel differently,. But I don't think so. Each hexagon is a tiny work of art--and no two of the sixty I cut are the same. I think opening up each one of them to sew it together is just going to be another ooh-ah moment.

I close with some of my favorite sets. Each of the pictures in the sets of three is made by turning the triangles in the hexagon in a different direction. Sadly, only one of the three will be realized as no two sets are alike.

I guess I should have taken the pictures on a plain background instead of my ironing board cover...

And finally the quilt

 

Coffee in my all-time favorite mug (it says, "I try to act all nonchalant but inside I'm actually chalant AF"), the sound of Gallifrey dreaming and breathing for music. It's a cold, rainy day in Montana--unusual for August but very welcome. It is a good day to snuggle up and watch old black and white screwball comedies from Criterion--and to cut quilts... and maybe shirts. 

It's amazing the things I find in the oddest places! Last week I was lamenting not having the pattern I use to make Dave's shirts. It's out of print, and a friend suggested I look on eBay for it. I did find one in Australia for about $30 (item and shipping), but I have two copies in Austin, and since I'll be there soon for a week, I decided to wait and bring one back. Then today as I got ready to cut strips for my quilt, I opened a box of sewing supplies and found two copies! I also found my mother's serger (I serge all the edges of the shirts) so I am in business! 

Before this post--and my time--gets hijacked (again), I am going to hold off on the shirts and stick with the quilt. The technique is over 20 years old and is called by several different names: Stack and Whack, One Block Wonders, and Kaleidoscope Quilts--just to name a few. The premise is that you can make an entire quilt top out of one fabric, and it will be complex and unlike any other quilt that could come out of that same piece of fabric. It can be as symmetrical or asymmetrical in design as you wish. This is not your grandmother's wedding-ring quilt. (Which is not to say I don't like wedding-ring quilts--I love them. I just don't think I'd have the patience to do one.) I like projects with tension and abstraction to them, and this quilt really fits the bill.

It's also interesting because it's all about geometry--equilateral triangles made into hexagons to be precise. I won't go into the hows here--you can look up videos on You Tube or buy books if you want top know more. I bought two books by Maxine Rosenthal et al (shown here) and am using the fabric I posted a couple of days ago (shown again at the beginning of this post). I also used the Design Helper tool on the one block wonder website to see what my fabric would like. Below is what one version of the quilt in my fabric would look like when run through the Design Helper. Got to get cutting now. More pics and a longer, more thoughtful description of the process and my experience with it later.

I wish I had a big freezer in Montana...

 ...Come to think of it, maybe I do! Definitely time to look in the garage. I was cleaning up the sewing area here in the basement and I found a large, green, garbage bag under my cutting table. A wave of foreboding swept over me, you might even say my blood ran cold. Let me back up a bit.

Early in July--not too long after we arrived from our annual migration from Austin--my cousin and his children came to Polson for a visit. Evenings, as we'd sit in the cool of the basement watching tv or exchanging stories of the day, Charlotte (the daughter) would run about the room chasing after little moths. When she'd catch one she'd exclaim with joy as she squished it. The moths looked like India meal moths or wool moths--but I couldn't figure out what their food source here could possibly be. When our guests went home, I still saw the occasional moth, but apart from squishing them myself, I didn't do much of anything about them.

For a little background: I had a horrible infestation of wool moths in my fiber studio in Austin a couple of years ago. I NEVER want to go through that again! I had over 300 lbs of raw wool and roving and who knows how much yarn. The two easiest ways to kill moths, larvae, and eggs, are to heat them over 120 degrees F for more than 30 minutes (the dryer works well), or to freeze them for 72 hours to two weeks--depending on your source. I could not imagine tryin to run all that through the dryer--and potentially getting eggs and larvae everywhere. Instead, I got a new chest freezer and used it (along with our giant freezer and smaller freezer in the laundry room, and the bottom-of-the-fridge freezer in the kitchen) as a fiber de-incubator. I bagged and cycled all my infested yarn, fleece, and roving through them in multi-week stages to freeze everything dead. Since then I have been vigilant for their return, but nothing yet. 

Flash forward to today. I gingerly peer into the garbage bag and immediately slam it shut (you can slam a plastic bag shut if you really put your mind and hands to it). Then I race outside and open the bag again. As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, a flutter of small brown and white wings lift towards my face. I pull back and start removing small white plastic grocery bags covered in moths--many of the bags were more hole than bag--and throwing them to the ground. I finally upend the bag and dump a slurry of moths, chewed bags, and... sand to the ground. Only it isn't sand. It is what the moths turn raw fiber--in this case yak fiber--into over the course of three years. 

There is still the occasional fluttery critter in the house--and the birds are feeding well outside--but I feel confident that the sweaters, socks, and other apparel knitted by my mother and my father (which is still in the house) is safe. Mostly because they preferred to knit with acrylic rather than wool. I never thought I would be grateful for that choice, but here we are

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An end and a beginning...

Coffee is a large iced latte with no sweetener in a McDonald's go cup, my music is provided by the water in the fountain next to me. It feels both poignant and fitting that I start this post with the same cadence I used over 15 years ago when I began writing this blog.  (Sidenote: Does anyone even blog anymore? It feels like everyone who is compelled to write puts it out on Medium. Bleh. Too many lurid peeks into other peoples' dysfunctional relationships. No thanks.) But writing here feels right as it is official and out in the world (and if I'm honest it really has been true for awhile): I am no longer a working glass artist. 

Life in pandemic times caused a major evaluation of my life and its parts, and I decided to go on to the next chapter. I am selling all my kilns but one. I already sold my sandblast cabinet, and now I just have several hoarder's crates of glass and other misc supplies to sell. No, no I am NOT selling my flat lap grinder--don't even ask. I am selling my pottery kiln (which I shamefacedly admit has never been fired). It's a studio-sized behemoth I got as a sweet deal as a-scratch-and-dent sale from the manufacturer when I was a dealer for them. The kiln is neither scratched nor dented, but the box it was shipped in arrived damaged at the school that bought the kiln so they refused delivery. I don't know what I was thinking when I bought it... Yes I do. I was in Atlanta, I had space there in my studio to set up a ceramics area, there was nowhere else close to drive to do it, and I was annoyed at Spruill Cneter for the Arts and unwilling to give them any more of my money to take classes there. I also had a friend who lived nearby that I potted with and she was keen to set up our own area too. I have no such circumstances in Austin, and I do have a good arts school near the house where I can take classes and use all of their equipment when I get jonesing to put my hands in the clay. So bye-bye massive ceramics kiln!

It's time to take the website down, and to put up a notice up that the artist from Siyeh Studio has gone on to her next chapter. It is weird: A major part of what defined me for the past 36 years was my identification as a glass artist--whether part time and yearning for a full-time career, or full time and wondering why I had ever thought it was a good idea. Now... I am an artist and a craftsperson, but not a "working" either of them. 

I am happy to say that I have FINALLY--for me--resolved the distinction between "artist" and "craftsperson. Everything I see and often what I hear, evokes a vision in my mind of something else that it could be, should be, wants to be--or just inspires. Colors, textures, materials, clouds, songs, wood, textiles, rocks, gems, shells, paper, huckleberry compote--they all come together. I see them all extended, aggregated, reduced--transcendent. That's the part of me that is an artist. 

Realizing the visions in my head? That's the craftsperson, and in most instances I fail. There are many, many things in my head that I cannot realize. It is frustrating and disheartening, and the way it is. On the bright side, I see the work of other artists and craftspeople and I no longer want to make what they made for myself. Now I prefer to buy the work of others and admire it for what it is instead of thinking "I could do that." I am not driven to be able to do everything. I used to be driven to do everything except draw or paint--I always knew that those two were beyond my abilities to master, and I didn't love them enough to be willing to be mediocre at them. Same with dance and music. It takes time, focus, pain, and hard work to master those disciplines, and I could never see myself giving any of that to those disciplines.

 

For the things I do choose to create, the prospect of the production of mediocrity somehow doesn't bother me. I can see something beautiful in my creation even if it isn't technically masterful. I can feel the connection of the muscle memory in my hands with the vision in my head. This object that I just finished may be only okay, but the next one will be better and then better. I have the relationship with the muscles and nerves in my hands and the focus required to realize my visions of some things. Typically the things I do well at are things combined of objects that I already find beautiful. I see a selection of fabrics and a quilt appears in my head. I see gems and stones and a complex necklace in silver, gold, or copper coalesces in my brain. Glass still inspires me as much as did when I started working with it over 36 years ago, but now I have circled back to my first glass love--stained glass. Fusing no longer pulls me, and I don't have the patience for casting (too much time waiting for something to be done and too little time with my hands actually on it).

Wow. This was supposed to be a post on a quilting technique I just saw for the first time last week when I was buying batik fabric for more shirts for Dave. I fell into my own vision of a quilt using this technique, and I have given myself up to the rabbit hole. Ah well, there is always tomorrow. Today it is time to cut! I end by popping up a visual teaser for the quilting project at the top of this post.