This is one of those questions that guarantees the page will remain blank, the canvas untouched, the design wall bare. This is a question best left unasked. It’s like asking, “Do I look fat?” Whatever the answer, it will do nothing to placate the nagging doubt. Ask 100 people how they define “art” and you will receive 100 different answers, and anyway their definition likely is not yours. Getting caught up in what is and isn’t “art” is pointless and ultimately not helpful when it comes to creating. Or so I keep reminding myself. Still, these are the kinds of questions that lurk in my mind, sullying my ideas before they’ve even made it out onto the wall or page.
Yesterday I returned home from a week in Ohio where I was lucky enough to be with a terrific group of women all there for a workshop with Sue Spargo. Sue developed an original way of working with hand dyed felted wool; creating layers using other fabrics, ribbons, velvets, cotton, linen, wools and then applying embellishments and stitching to create yet another layer, before machine quilting. Her work is exquisite and unique, and while many have taken her techniques to use in their own creations, her layering and designs are easily identified as “Sue Spargo”. So much so that I began using her name as a verb and noun, as in – “this needs to be Spargoed up” or “I’ll just add a little Spargo to it,” or “once I’ve Spargoized it, I think it will be finished.” All of which meant that whatever it was, it needed layering, embellishing, more, more, more!
My dilemma has been that because Sue’s style is so utterly unique, it is difficult to use her techniques and do anything that doesn’t feel to me like something she’s already done and done much better than I ever could. As a designer/artist, I don’t want my work to look like someone else’s. When I began designing jewelry, my cousin’s wife, who had started a jewelry business and was designing stunning pieces, had a huge influence on me and in the beginning the things I designed, looked a lot like her work. However, over time, I began to find my own voice and my work became more and more unique to me and my vision. This is what I hope will continue to happen with the things I am designing, using fabric and stitching. I have to trust that over time, just as with my jewelry, I will create things that look more and more like my own creations and unlike anyone else’s.
Last week’s workshop began with the idea of a landscape. As I thought about what I wanted to create, I incorporated some of Sue’s son, Jason Spargo’s gorgeous hand dyed wools, for the sky, moving into more sunset like colors, to greens and earth tones. But first I began with a very rough sketch.
A Sketch beginsAnd it continues…My initial sketch begins to take shape
As I developed my idea, I added to the large shapes…
Adding layers
And finally when I felt I had what I wanted, I began appliquéing everything down…
Stitching everything down
Now I will begin stitching using a variety of threads and stitches. As I look at it, I am thinking I need to add something to the right hand side as it’s looking a bit claustrophobic. It is likely that this will become quite a bit larger than its current 18″ x 26″. This piece is still very much in its adolescence. But is it art? I don’t know and I don’t care. It is in the beginning stages of a much longer, wonderful, and thoroughly enjoyable process that I have only begun to explore. Asking that question ruins the process and makes me want to tear everything down in an effort to pursue some elusive enigmatic goal that I may never realize. Someone once said to me – “Start where you are.” And so I am.
In January I had the opportunity to go to one of Sue Spargo‘s fabulous workshops in Tucson, Arizona, a place I’d never been. While there I met some lovely people, one of whom was Anna Bates, who has a blog, Woolie Mammoth, a YouTube channel – Quilt Roadies, and blogs for The Quilt Show once a week under the heading – Anna and G on the Road. During the course of our five days together, Anna interviewed me and wrote a lovely post about me and my work. Though I realized afterward that while I sent her photographs of my early designs in fashion and knitting, even a photo of one of my hand thrown and hand painted pots, I didn’t send photos of my jewelry! (insert wide eyed emoji). So here are a few additions to her post…
Because of my conversation with Anna, I reflected on the past (almost) forty years now, when I began my studies at Parsons School of Design and now, when I am learning everything I can about quilting, quilts, dyeing, and manipulating fabric in different ways to create an image, a feeling, an idea…
Another of my knit designs for Elle MagazineAn early design ensemble from my days at Parsons School of Design
All of which led me to a recurring topic – finding one’s artistic voice. How does one find it? How can it be nurtured, cultivated, encouraged?
While listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, two musicians were discussing this very idea and one of them repeated something they’d been told by another artist friend, who basically said – the only way to find your voice is by doing, and in the doing, you will not only find your voice, but it will make itself heard.
I love that! And it aligns with what I have learned through my experiences designing, whether that was fashion, knits, jewelry or quilts and fabric art.
A few months ago I decided I needed to learn how to piece. In quilting terms this is the ability to make something that looks like this: (This hen block was designed by Janet Nesbitt of One Sister.)
I have had a number of design ideas, such as combining pieced blocks with appliqué blocks and overlapping design elements that I cannot realize because there are some pretty basic things I do not know how to do. Piecing was one of them. I’m working on two quilts at the moment that cover all of these things, but in order to do them, and do them well, I need to learn how and then to practice, practice, practice.
So I signed up for Sarah Fielke’s 2019 BOM and began making Janet Nesbitt’s Half Crazy Quilt (which the pieced hen shown above is part of). In addition I joined a craftsy, now Bluprint class – Learn To Quilt with Amy Gibson. And while most of that class I was able to fast forward through, there were a couple of key take-aways that have helped me, such as getting seams to meet up perfectly and squaring up.
With each of these projects I’m learning and in learning how others do it, I am practicing and expanding what I can design, and hopefully my own voice will become clearer and more refined.
I think about art all the time: the process, the way life impacts it… Wondering about how other people will see it, whether they will approve, like or dislike it, is the biggest buzz kill to creativity that I know of. But, I find, silencing those worries often difficult. The best steps I know to do is to dive in head first, and just go for it.
This last year has been one of exploration, diving in head first and going for it. If any of you are on Instagram, I post my works in progress almost daily. Below are three projects I finished this past year. I have four more in the works, but nowhere near completion.
This first is titled: Wandering Through the Past and was inspired by the International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico where I went for one of Sue Spargo’s fabulous workshops put on by Madeline Island School of the Arts. As I wandered through the museum much of the work felt oddly familiar. I remembered that my grandparents had honeymooned in Santa Fe & much of the furniture in their Colorado home came from that part of the world. As I designed this quilt, I began adding things from my childhood spent in Northern California with parents who collected modern & primitive art. Wandering Through the Past was thus born using wool, cotton, velvet & silk, & embellished with a wide variety of threads and stitches.
Wandering Through the Past
The next one is a complete departure from the one above in that most of the fabrics were hand dyed, hand painted, using stencils, screen printing and mono printing, and is not representational. All techniques I learned from the talented Pat Pauly in a workshop I took last April at the Pro Chem studio. It was the first time I’d ever tried my hand at improvisational piecing. I free motion quilted it following the general shapes and paint strokes.
Reflections
And this last one I began designing with the idea that I would use an old skirt from my mother. After a few weeks of struggle, I pulled out some of my hand dyed, Shibori, stencil printed, wax resist, silk screen & low immersion dyed fabrics. The fabric from the old skirt was pushed aside to make way for my hand dyed fabrics, which I then began piecing together with a few commercial prints. “Hope” was very bossy right from the start; demanding I use this or that fabric, slashing & piecing, reconfiguring… Mostly I just had to get out of the way & listen to its demands.
Last month I went to Hudson River Valley Arts where Jane Davies was teaching a week long workshop. I found Jane on Pinterest, which led me to her website where she has tons of videos showing her process and work. As with most things I find interesting, I soon became obsessed and began systematically going through almost all the videos she has created. When I saw that she was teaching at Hudson River Valley, a place friends have urged me to look into, and an easy train ride from New York City, I decided to sign up.
It was above and beyond my expectations. First of all Jane is a fantastic artist and teacher, which is not always usual that one leads to the other. But in her case it does. She gives great demos, has a sense of humor, is smart, talented, and she plays the ukulele and might even sing, if encouraged to! The class was full, with 18 people, all strong, interesting women from various parts of the world, including Chile, Quebec, Germany, and Norway! I didn’t get permission to post photos of any of the other women or their work on this blog, so I’m just posting photos of the work I did while there.
We began by exploring lines with different mediums and then moved on to making collage papers that we would then use in our work for the remaining days. Making collage paper is a rabbit hole one can easily become lost in! There are so many ways in which to combine the paint, get it on the paper, scribble, smudge, streak, spray, dribble and the end results can be wonderful. Here are a few of mine.
Reluctantly and with Jane’s encouragement we began using those papers in our work, while also incorporating a variety of techniques that Jane demonstrated. These first two photos are two of six pieces I worked on simultaneously. The other four are still works in progress. They are collage, acrylic paint, and ink and measure 11.5″ X 11″.
Boundaries Unobserved
Murmuration
This next series were all worked at the same time and are collage, acrylic on paper, measuring 11″ X 11″.
Dyeing fabrics is an obsession. I began with cottons as directed in the Elizabeth Barton class, Dyeing to Design, that I took over at Academy of Quilting. I had little interest in dyeing or so I thought, and only took the class because Elizabeth was teaching it and I wanted to take a class with her and it was the first class closest to the date when I started researching her classes. I had no idea I’d fall so completely in love with dyeing. But I did. After her class ended, I took her other dyeing Class – Basic Dyeing for Quiltmakers where we learned to over dye and dye just about any color we wanted. It was thrilling to see a color, figure out what primary colors went into it and then create it! But as is my way, I wasn’t content to dye just cottons.
I decided I had to learn how to dye wool, which is a different process entirely, so I could finish my block of the month designs (more on that in another post). So I went over to Dharma Trading, a great company that sells dyes and everything related to dyeing. I sourced wool fabric, also not as easy as one might think, and then purchased a small amount of wools, silks, raw silks and silk/wools from a couple of different places. I even found some lovely silk velvet at Dharma, perfect to use on my wool appliqué pieces that I began designing a few months ago. And I began dyeing.
Aren’t they beautiful?
Here are all the cotton fabrics I dyed in Elizabeth’s class, including some of my silk screens and shibori dyed cottons…
Now I’m back to designing so I can use all of these lovely fabrics. This is the beginning of Mr. Pig. He still needs to be embellished and is one of twelve blocks for my Block Of the Month project featuring cookie jars that I’m in the midst of creating patterns and, hopefully, kits for, that will come with many of my hand-dyed fabrics as well as everything you’ll need to make each block.
Notice the cotton fabric to the far left? That is one of my shibori dyed cottons and the green wools and pink wool and velvet are all my hand-dyed fabrics too!
Last fall I decided to design my own bed-sized quilt. I wanted a quilt that would remind me of spring and summer, that was colorful and had big organic shapes that inspired cheerfulness. This was before the election and though there were many things being said that were ominous – calls for great walls to be built, mass deportations being touted as campaign “promises”, comments about bringing back the “good old days”, leading many of us to wonder to whom those “good old days” applied, (obviously not women, minorities, and anyone who didn’t conform to traditional gender roles and relationships) all this from a man dogged by bankruptcy, lawsuits, accusations of fraud and sexual misconduct, a man who bragged about assaulting women, not paying his taxes, and encouraged his supporters to physically assault those who voiced opposition to him – still, it seemed there was room for optimism, and, if nothing else, the elections hadn’t taken place yet. Those months and weeks before the election now feel like the “good old days”.
So in the midst of all that, I decided to design my own quilt and was inspired by the shapes in a fabric covering a chair and couch my husband used to have in his office at his advertising agency, that now occupies the western portion of our bedroom.
Couch in our bedroom
I wrote about this quilt, that I began designing and intended to make, just after I’d chosen all the fabrics for it. I discussed the process of taking a sketch and translating it into an actual quilt. That post is ‘here‘.
Matisse reminds me of the playfulness that can be a part of life if we allow it in and the shapes he created make me smile. The colors he frequently used tended toward bright, primary colors, and I decided to stay close to those as well. It took ages to figure out where everything would go, what fabrics to use, how to fit everything in to the size quilt I knew I wanted. The quilt kept getting bigger, and even though it is intended for a twin bed, I wanted it to be long enough that I could tuck it under and over pillows. I really wanted it to be the size of a bedspread.
And then the elections took place and I threw myself furiously into escaping what was now to become our collective reality learning how to dye my own fabrics. I took several classes at the Academy of Quilting taught by the extremely, talented, artist Elizabeth Barton. Between learning to dye, which I love, love, LOVE, playing with colors, and sporadically working on my “Ode to Matisse” quilt I managed to avoid getting too depressed by the events and endless drama that has now become commonplace with this new administration. Still, I knew I’d have to make a concerted effort to concentrate on my Matisse quilt if I was ever going to finish it. So about a month ago I began working on it daily. The free motion quilting, which I’m very new to, was challenging and I ran into lots of tension issues, but then went back to one of the dozens of Craftsy classes I have enrolled in and was reminded not to be afraid to turn the tension down as far as needed in order to get the threads to behave with each other, no matter how imbalanced that relationship might seem. Read whatever you like into THAT statement, but it did seem ironic given who now occupies our White House.
There are many wonderful free motion quilting classes on Craftsy, but the two I particularly love are Free Motion Quilting Essentials taught by Christina Carneli, her blog is A Few Scraps and Divide and Conquer: Creative Quilting for any Space taught by Lori Kennedy, who also has a blog, Inbox Jaunt. They are both wonderful. Christina also teaches several other free motion quilting classes for those who are more experienced. But for me, starting out with her class was perfect and just what I needed to attempt this:
and this: and this… And this…
From Lori’s class I began with doodles of things I saw others doing and then took it to the quilt. Patterns like this…and this…and this…With each block, I tried a different free motion quilting pattern that I thought complimented the shape in the block. I know many feel the shapes themselves should also be quilted and I may have to go back and quilt the larger shapes, but I wanted them to pop, so decided to leave them alone. Once all the blocks were quilted I agonized over the binding. Eventually I opted for the darkest background beige fabric I had used. I cut it on the bias, pieced it together and then following the instructions in Mimi Dietrich’s book, Happy Endings I bound the whole quilt with mitered corners. I added a label and voila!
And here’s a shot of the label
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as finishing such a mammoth project, except of course writing about it while it is draped over your lap!
I forgot to include the contents of this quilt on the label. They are: 100% cotton fabric, Wool Batting, Cotton thread.
Next up – my Block of the Month quilt that I’m currently designing and working on, inspired by the fabulous Sue Spargo, who is to blame for my current obsession with all things fabric, quilted, embroidered, embellished, etc.
My son, Nic, who is a teenager and has been painting since he was old enough to pick up a brush, just won an award from Scholastic Art & Writing for one of his pieces. It’s a portrait, done in acrylic on a large piece of wood, of a friend of his. That painting will be hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, here in New York City, in an exhibition featuring the award winners. To say that I’m proud of him would be an understatement. I’m beyond ecstatic. Every time I think of him and his beautiful painting I smile. A big, sweeping, all-encompassing smile. A smile that makes my cheeks hurt and my whole body feel as though it were filled with sunlight.
When Nic was little he began painting every day. We have drawers filled with his work. When he was three, a friend of mine wanted to buy one of his paintings, but it was one of my favorites, so I wouldn’t let her purchase it, even though Nic was happy to have her buy it. He sold his first painting to an art collector when he was 8 or maybe he was 9, I can’t remember now. It had a Basquiat feel to it, lots of color, playful and yet there was an undercurrent of something deeper. Nic was thrilled with his first sale and said he was going to save the money so he could buy himself something important, “like college”. He was 8 or maybe 9.
Nic’s always been a collector of sorts and, like both his parents, tends to get obsessed with things that interest him. I see this as an excellent trait. Every member of my immediate family is passionate (another, more accepting, word for obsessed) about their line of work. I say YAY to obsessions! I cannot imagine life without obsessions. This is also something that some people frown upon in the world of disability, particularly autism, where an obsession, having a passion for something, is called, “special interests.” There’s something so condescending about that. Why should a passion be called anything even remotely derogatory? Every human should be so fortunate as to have passions in this life.
Here’s to a life filled with passion and obsessions. And here’s to my son, Nic, his talent and this award! You’re amazing and I’m so proud of you!!!
I’ve been alive for over half a century and have witnessed a great deal of beauty as well as tragedy, both personally and in the world. However the current political climate is unlike anything I have ever experienced. The take away from the past three months is that we Americans are as divided, if not more so, as we’ve ever been. Our planet and its people are in jeopardy and we Americans are in crisis. Even those who backed the current administration seem unable to accept that their man has won and leave it at that. There is a combative rage that masks the fear and despair of so many.
What I find most helpful in coping with my concern regarding the world and our place in it, is to take action, speak out, write letters and postcards, make phone calls, join protests, get involved and take at least a couple of daily, anonymous, kind, actions toward another human being. And then, with whatever time I can carve out, I create. Every day. I work on something, whether it is my Ode to Matisse Quilt, which I’m now free motion quilting (yay!) or working on a block of the month or throwing pots or painting or sketching out new ideas, I create. Every day. It’s the thing that has always saved me over these past 56 years. I create.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a fine artist. I loved pen and ink, but also acrylic paint. I studied with the great Nate Oliveira, who also happened to be a close friend of my parents. While at Parsons School of Design, one summer I took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. I painted, drew, designed, sewed, embroidered, knitted, wrote… I have explored many different artistic mediums, but in the end, I kept going back to designing, whether it was hand knits, fashion or jewelry, design was what I did, more often than not, to earn money. But fine art, is always there, somewhere in the background informing it all.
Last month I took out my paint brushes and began painting again. It’s been years, no decades! I’d forgotten how much I love it. The following images are all collages with acrylic paint and a variety of other things, such as pastel, ink, torn newspaper, cardboard, etc.
Red
On the Horizon
Dawn
Obscured
America
Wishing everyone a peaceful day filled with creativity and ART!
Fabric painting was something I knew nothing about before taking Elizabeth Barton‘s online class Dyeing to Design at the Academy of Quilting. Fabric painting is the process of combining fabric dye with a thickener so it can be used to paint fabric, just as one would paint on a canvas. Think about that. The possibilities are endless!! As we had been silk screening the week before, I used a couple of my silk screened fabrics and painted on them and then decided to branch out and paint on a blank white piece of cloth. Here are some of my doodles.
As you can see I had fun! I also painted the fabric in the photograph below, but I didn’t have a clear idea of what to do with any of it. While painting the fabric in this photo below I was thinking about how we are all moving along in our lives, sometimes following, at other times leading, sometimes crossing paths with others, but can often feel we are alone even though we live in a world populated by so many. Still, if we can just remember to reach out to others, we find our experiences are shared by many. Should I have just written all that in the first person singular? But then I might have felt that alone feeling again… Anyway, I sat with these various fabrics and did nothing for several days.
Then, having given up on the idea that I was going to be miraculously hit with a blast of inspiration, I cut up the fabric (just a little, nothing radical) and sewed it back together (photo below.) And then I sent it off to my class for feedback, that’s the whole reaching out thing that I mentioned above… Elizabeth is an excellent teacher and can be depended upon to make terrific suggestions. Which led to this…And this…And this…
And finally, finally, finally… this…Which became this… traveling along our various paths…And finally, this… reaching out to others and no longer feeling so alone…Here are a few close ups of the machine and hand stitching…
And this is the back.
Traveling Together measures 21.75″ x 21.75″ All the fabric was hand painted and hand dyed. Then quilted using a cotton batting and kona cotton back. I did the hand stitching using a perle cotton thread as well as a wool thread. The binding was hand dyed and sewn on, as was the label.
I still have not figured out what to do with my various silk screens, but I just finished painting over a few of them and plan to over dye a couple of others, so will see what the results are after that. In the meantime I painted a few more half yard pieces of fabric and am eager to see how they turn out.
Elizabeth’s Dyeing to Design class is over, but she’ll be teaching it again in the spring, I believe. I cannot recommend it more highly.
I was going to entitle this post Fear of Dyeing (and Silk Screening) but Where’s the Pun in That? But it was too long so I just went with the edited version… a girl can have a little pun. Okay, okay that’s enough. I’ve filled my quota of puns and I’m barely out of the starting gate. It’s all going to be very serious from here on out.
In my last post I promised screen printing, so here we go. All the photographs below are of techniques described by Elizabeth Barton in her wonderful class Dyeing to Design over at the Academy of Quilting.
The last and only time I did screen printing was when I worked (briefly) for the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes while living in London having just graduated from Parsons School of Design about a hundred years ago. Zandra Rhodes is known for her beautiful silk screened fabrics as well as being the “Queen of Punk” a distinction given to her back in the late 70’s. All I remember from that time, aside from the time she told me to clean her bathroom, was using a huge squeegee-like thing to scrape paint across the enormous screens she used. I wish I could remember more as it might have helped me get over my fear when tackling Elizabeth’s silk screening lesson. I have to admit I was completely intimidated reading the lesson over, so much so that I read the lesson and then didn’t do any of the exercises mapped out in it for at least three days. Then another person in the class posted her gorgeous silk screened fabrics and it motivated me to at least try some of the techniques suggested.
Using newsprint this was my first attempt at silk screening on white cotton
Have I talked about fear during the creative process? I know, I know, I have. But maybe you didn’t read that post and anyway, I’m feeling compelled. I’m always surprised when I feel fear while designing or doing something art “worthy”. Why feel frightened when creating something? Why should I feel anything but joy? How does fear, even a twinge of it, make itself known through all the curiosity and excitement? And while I don’t have complete answers for these questions, I do know it isn’t unusual for artists to feel tremendous fear when creating. So much so that there’s even a terrific book written on this very subject called Art & Fear ~ Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland. Heading up the chapter entitled: The Academic World is this quote from Howard Ikemoto –
“When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw.
She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”
I went to Parsons School of Design for my undergraduate degree and majored in Fashion Design. Much of what I learned had to do with the business of fashion design and that there’s no such thing as new, that everything is recycled and that in order to succeed one must be as determined, if not more, about the business as one is about creating. The truth is, I learned little about being an artist and more about the challenges of being a designer in the business world. By my last year my fairy tale notion of what it would be like to be a fashion designer was thoroughly squashed and in my disillusioned state I felt only dread at the idea that I was about to go out into the world and seek a job, much less in the fashion world. After floundering for a few years I abandoned fashion design in favor of a series of jobs/careers that I thought might be more fulfilling and less soul wrenching. And while all the things I tried my hand at varied, even dramatically, they were all in the “Arts” of some kind. What I’ve learned is that artists tend to have a difficult time making a living with their art, no matter what the medium is.
There’s a wonderful quote from Oscar Wilde that begins Part II of the book Art & Fear.
“When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money.”
How does one price one’s art, something that might have taken hundreds of hours to create through trial and error, through missteps, through experimentation, through FEAR? If artists used an hourly wage system to price their work, all art would be so expensive no one could afford it. So most of us don’t. We can’t. And while in an ideal world no one would have to concern themselves with making money from their art, and instead would just spend all their time making it, few live in such a privileged world. The fear of being able to sell our work, and how that inhibits the process is a whole other topic and one most of us can understand, but there is another fear that is far more complicated. It is the fear one feels when confronted with something new, something one has never done before, but would like to learn. There is the fear of failure or appearing incapable or of ridicule, criticism or being seen as incompetent by others, but also by oneself. To create art, is to be at once vulnerable and confident, and it is a tricky balancing act to not lean more one way or the other. Both carry their own pitfalls.
Creating is a messy process. Most people never see all the discarded bits, the beginnings and first steps taken to get to that finished piece. What I love about blogs is that people are willing to show their process. My favorite blogs, in fact, are the ones that do just that.
Adding color to the purple
When I am starting something new I often have an idea in my head. What I envision is always spectacular, but creating that idea takes skill, talent and knowledge, things I do not always have. So I have to learn, practice, and explore in order to be able to get the skills to (hopefully) produce the image I envision. Sometimes I’m successful, but more often I’m not. Sometimes I realize it will take me years to achieve the level of expertise required to make what I envisioned. So I have to accept that I won’t be able to do something as I’d hoped or modify what I’m doing to compensate or continue to practice, with the idea that eventually I might be able to produce what is in my mind.
Torn newsprint
For this piece I cut stencils out of a thin plastic sheet, before silk screening on top
This is the result of using those stencils that I removed for the red piece above
A technique attributed to Kerr Grabowski. This piece has yet to be washed, so who knows what it will look like!
Another technique described in Elizabeth’s class.
Regardless of the approach I take, perfectionism is truly the greatest kill joy and, for me anyway, the root from which almost all my fear springs. While some argue that without perfectionism, we would settle for less or not work as hard, they are misunderstanding perfectionism at its most destructive. I am referring to perfectionism that lacerates, the kind of self-talk that abuses and brutalizes. It is that awful voice that needs to be muted before anything can be created. Free from perfectionism I am allowed to explore and play.
I have no idea what I’m going to do with any of the fabric I’ve silk screened, and in some ways that’s beside the point. I didn’t approach this lesson with a preconceived idea. And that’s the beauty of taking a class like this one. The assignments require you to explore and play first and then after you’ve done that, consider what you’ll make. Most of these fabrics have been done for almost two weeks now and I still don’t know what to do with any of them. Or as one of the many talented and wonderful people taking this class said, “I’m waiting for divine inspiration.”
and this…
And this…
and this…
and this…
With each block, I tried a different free motion quilting pattern that I thought complimented the shape in the block. I know many feel the shapes themselves should also be quilted and I may have to go back and quilt the larger shapes, but I wanted them to pop, so decided to leave them alone. Once all the blocks were quilted I agonized over the binding. Eventually I opted for the darkest background beige fabric I had used. I cut it on the bias, pieced it together and then following the instructions in Mimi Dietrich’s book, 
Then, having given up on the idea that I was going to be miraculously hit with a blast of inspiration, I cut up the fabric (just a little, nothing radical) and sewed it back together (photo below.) And then I sent it off to my class for feedback, that’s the whole reaching out thing that I mentioned above… Elizabeth is an excellent teacher and can be depended upon to make terrific suggestions. 
Which led to this…
And this…
And this…
Which became this… traveling along our various paths…
And finally, this… reaching out to others and no longer feeling so alone…
Here are a few close ups of the machine and hand stitching…
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