After I finished the QFM – Quilt For Mom – I felt at a loss. It’s the same feeling I experience after finishing a wonderful book. Elated, but also sad it’s over and wondering what’s next. I knew I wanted to design my own quilt, but am still so new to this form and didn’t want to be too ambitious. Things were in limbo.
My life is busy, I homeschool our daughter, as well as, like and need to, spend time with my eldest and then of course there’s FH (fabulous husband) and did I mention I have my own business? All of this means I have a full, albeit hectic, and at times, overwhelming life, and I desperately need time to design and create without worrying about how to promote it, the cost basis, manufacturing, orders, etc. When I don’t have the time or when other things make it impossible, I feel off, am more easily stressed, saddened and even depressed by things that happen in the world and in my life. I worry more. I feel more sensitive, raw and fragile. These same things don’t have as devastating an impact on me when I carve out time for my artistic pursuits. Because of all this, I knew I had to start a new project, and given all that is happening in the world and my life right now, the sooner, the better!
Out came my sketch book. I began doodling. From those doodles I found a few shapes I kept coming back to and slowly a design came into focus.
This is my Ode To Matisse.
The Sketch
After I finished the first sketch, I photocopied it several times and began mapping out the measurements. I knew the sketch was going to be skewed and out of proportion because I wanted the quilt to end up being 80″ by 105″, which is big enough to drape down on either side of a twin sized bed or even skimpily cover a queen sized bed and long enough to allow for folding over pillows. This will be the quilt I take with me to my retreat at Quilting by the Lake next summer where we stay in air-conditioned (last summer I was FREEZING) dorm rooms, which have twin-sized beds!
I needed to figure out how I was going to block it, in other words how I would divide it up as I envisioned several different background fabrics, all beiges. With colored pencils I marked out my blocks, with approximate measurements and numbered the blocks.
Blocking out the Sketch
I then went to my stash and began pulling background fabrics. After a trip to the fabric store, I decided on eight different fabrics, all beiges/cream of some kind.
Placing the Background Fabrics
Next up was working out the colors for the shapes. This process took over the floor of our bedroom for a couple days. I wanted bright, cheerful colors, that reminded me of spring and summer and I wanted them to stay close to the colors Matisse used when he created these kinds of organic shapes.
Deciding on Fabric for the shapes
Finally I was ready to cut out the shapes, using freezer paper first to lay them out, tweak when necessary and rearrange if needed. This is what I came up with… Still not convinced the three round shapes in the lower portion of the quilt are working as well as they could. I might need to move them all the way over to the left side and take the shapes on the left and put them to the right end of that block or maybe reduce the size of the skinny large circle on the left and make the flower shape at the edge larger…
Freezer Paper Matisse
Even though I have a few reservations with the design, I’m going ahead with it and will see how I feel as I go. I’m also not sure if I will add other fabrics and hand stitching as I did with the QFM or if I’ll just appliqué and then free motion quilt this one, giving it the versatility to be thrown in a washing machine and dryer, unlike the QFM, which must be dry cleaned because of all the beading, wool, velvet and hand stitching I did. Also I need this quilt to be finished no later than July, so I’ll see what I end up having time for.
An Ode To Matisse
I’ve started on the bottom block and am almost finished appliquéing all the shapes down.
I would have gotten more done by now, but got a little way laid as I also signed up for a five week online class with the talented artist Elizabeth Barton at Academy of Quilting. We are supposed to produce a small quilt each week. Yikes!!! More on that later…
My mother has always been a self proclaimed “student,” whether that’s a student of life or of a specific topic, she has always been curious and an avid learner, and as a result, she is a really interesting person to talk to. I, too, am a constant “student.” What this means is that I am often a beginner, which means I’m learning, practicing, making mistakes, perfecting, learning more. When I was younger I wanted to be an expert at something, anything, but as the years wore on I have learned to love the “beginner’s mind,” which can be applied to just about anything. (There are some things I do know quite a bit about and as a result I have strong opinions about those topics, but I’m talking about learning and how it applies to the creative process.) Having a beginner’s mind means being curious, open and filled with wonder. This post is about creating, and in order to create I need to be open to new things.
Last January I took a class, an actual class, not a virtual one, at the soon to be closed City Quilter. It was a BOM (Block of the month) class, and though there were not 12 blocks, but instead six, I figured it would be a good way to learn the process of taking a quilt from start to finish, and it was! I learned a different appliqué technique, I had the support of other classmates, I enjoyed going in once a month to see what everyone else was doing. It was wonderful. It was my first BIG project and I’ve written about it at length in previous posts ‘here’. Each block was hand appliquéd (I’m adding the link to the Craftsy class I took, that helped me enormously, with the hand appliqué technique) and I applied all the stitches I learned from Sue Spargo’s Craftsy class. I’ve talked about the joy of Craftsy in other posts ‘here‘ so I won’t go into all that again.
Once the quilt top was put together, I had to learn how to quilt the whole thing, which took me to this class and this one and this one. I am now in the final stretch and I continue to learn, make mistakes and try again and then learn some more. Each time I don’t know how to do something I google it and look for websites that focus on what I want to do. For Free motion quilting, Lori Kennedy’s The Inbox Jaunt blog is absolutely fantastic with free tutorials on specific motifs. For stitch inspiration there’s of course Sue Spargo’s fantastic website, store and blog, but there are also some great blogs out there that concentrate on stitching, such as Sharon Boggon’s Pintangle where she features a TAST (take a stitch Tuesday) and Mary Corbet’s NeedlenThread, which is more traditional embroidery and oh my goodness is her work beautiful, then there’s Eleanor Pigman’s blog, she’s a bead artist and her work is absolutely incredible! A couple other, not-to-be-missed-blogs are: Kelly Cline Quilting, a blog filled with amazing work, both stitching AND quilting and Trish Burr, the queen of embroidered birds and flowers, though all her work is absolutely incredible and beautiful.
There is a whole world of knowledge, expertise, creativity and art out there and I love finding, learning, applying that knowledge and then creating my own designs. Interestingly I’m drawn to similar motifs over and over again, no matter what the medium is. Below is my 18 kt Gold, Tourmaline and Paraiba Bracelet from my Lotus Collection. It’s no surprise one of my favorite free motion quilting motifs is Pebbles!
At three in the morning, in a fit of frenzied sleeplessness I decided my work space was in desperate need of reorganization. And what great idea that comes to you in the wee hours of the morning isn’t a brilliant one?! However, upon further reflection, I decided reorganizing is not one of my strengths and so, I did what anyone would do. I solicited the help of someone who excels at reorganizing. Step into the limelight my fabulous husband (FH) and take a bow. He is extremely good at just this sort of thing. “Okay,” he said, all business-like, “talk me through this.” And then proceeded to ask me a series of questions.
From this conversation he prioritized and broke down what I needed to do in manageable steps. I forgot to take a photograph of the disaster that was once my work space, but this is what it looked like at about the halfway point.
As I was trying to decide what color I should paint that great expanse of white wall (this was a tricky decision as it is a dark room, made even darker by the red carpet I bought decades ago in Turkey) I thought, “I need a design wall!” This is not essential, after all I have sketch books and a table where I can play with ideas, but a design wall would be really, really nice to have. So I googled design walls and found some wonderful ones. I decided I wanted one that is at least 62″ x 72.” In order to do this I needed to get rid of a great many things scattered all over the place.
I decided on a bright mango color to brighten the room up. However, as with so many things in life, painting one wall proved more complicated than I anticipated. I ran into bubbles. Thousands and thousands of tiny bubbles appeared after the first coat of paint. I pricked one of them with a pin and, much to my horror, the bubble expanded exponentially, revealing all the coats of paint below the fresh coat I’d just painted, so that I was staring at dry board! I was so horrified I didn’t have the presence of mind to take photos, but my FH was witness. I ended up pulling off great sheets of bubbled up paint. After running to the hardware store for advice, making a couple of emergency phone calls to friends of mine who are far more experienced in painting walls than I am, I finally pulled up as much paint as I could, sanded, dusted, spackled, sanded some more, dusted some more and finally repainted and held my breath. What should have taken a few hours took more than a day and a half, BUT it came out pretty well, if I do say so myself! FH had the great idea of hanging my ironing board.Then there was the question of my design wall, which is removable.I needed to organize my fabrics and other materials that I use for my jewelry design, such as wax, files, metals, wire, etc. While I was doing all of this, I came across my old portfolio from my days in fashion design and got a little side tracked… Finally, after all of that, I got back on track.
And here is the finished space!Now it’s time to get back to work – I have a queen-sized quilt to sandwich, baste and free motion quilt and then there are these little guys who keep calling to me.
Remember those “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” books?
This is my version of that…
If you show a girl a quilt, she’s going to wonder how it’s made. When she wonders how it’s made, she’s going to take a Block of the Month class to see how it’s done. Once she’s signed up for the class, she’s going to begin making a quilt herself.
Center Block from the Flower Pots Quilt Designed By Kim McLean
When she starts to make a quilt herself, she’s going to think about how she can make it uniquely hers.
Detail of one of the Center Blocks
When she begins to make it uniquely hers, she’s going to incorporate all the stitches she learned in the Craftsy class given by Sue Spargo that she wrote about a few weeks ago on the post, Change.
Detail from Flower Pots side panel
Once she begins adding all those stitches she learned…
Almost finished Flower Pots Quilt!
she’s going to want to start designing her own blocks…
Rhino Block designed and stitched by Ariane Zurcher
The artist’s retreat will be life transforming and will give her all kinds of ideas for new pieces that she wants to design and create…
Manhole Cover at Onondaga Community College
While she marvels at all the things she’s seeing and learning she will be reminded of other things she’s already working on…
Detail from Flower Pot Quilt Border
One of those things will be manhole covers! Who doesn’t love manhole covers and if you love manhole covers, wouldn’t a quilt inspired by them be even more fabulous?!
So it’s probably best to give a girl her first quilt while she’s still very young so she has plenty of time to learn and do all of this!
Merlin overseeing the work.
Coming next week: pots! Not flower pots as in the quilt, but real pots, thrown pots, hand painted pots… gotta love pots!
You’ll notice it’s been awhile since I’ve written anything here, but not for the reasons you think. It became necessary to give up my studio when we made the decision to pull my youngest child from school and began homeschooling. That was over two years ago. We felt we didn’t have a choice. There is nothing, absolutely nothing I can create that is more important than my daughter’s education. We are all happier as a result.
Which leads me to this blog. Just over a year ago, last May of 2015, to be exact, I signed up for a Craftsy class. Do you know about Craftsy?
WHAT?
YOU DON’T???
Craftsy is fantastic. There, I even added the link for you to go check them out. No, I am not being paid, nor do I, in any way, get anything for writing about them. This is my opinion and experience. Okay, so I took a class on Craftsy called: Embroidering Texture and Dimension by Hand by Sue Spargo and it changed my life. I loved the way Sue used stitches on layers of wool and fabric. I loved how she created something so different from what I was used to seeing. She didn’t “embroider,” not in the way I was used to seeing embroidery done, but instead created a whole new three-dimensional textile. I was utterly enthralled.
I knew nothing about quilting. When I signed up for her class I did not know that her work was considered quilting. In fact when I took the class I wrote her and asked what all the stitching was in the background, was it done by machine or hand and when and how did she do that and, by the way, why and how was it all so puffy looking? Someone helpfully suggested I take a beginning quilt class and my first thought was – “huh, I didn’t know a quilt could do that!”
But back to Sue Spargo’s class. It began with a download of one of her lovely designs, a butterfly sampler, but as I have a strong independent streak, I decided to design my own piece and use what I learned in her class on my design.
A few weeks before I found Craftsy and Sue Spargo’s class, my husband came home with a photo of a West African Long Tailed Hornbill that was perched on a railing at the Central Park Zoo. He, the bird, not my husband, though my husband is also fabulous, was so captivating I decided to use his image in my piece. Here’s the photo my husband took.
A West African Long Tailed Hornbill. Look at him!
C’mon, admit it, he’s adorable. So here’s what I started to do and you’ll notice I got way too involved with everything BUT the bird, which was the focus… and again, this is something I also tend to do – do everything but the thing I’m trying to focus on. Look, squirrel!
The Beginning
He began to take shape…
I gave him some much-needed feathers on his head, because he was getting cold, I could tell.
A little hair/feathers/plumes, whatever are good, but he definitely needed more…
More, more, more and while we’re at it, let’s toss in some black beads. I am a jewelry designer after all.
There, that’s better
And some more circles, because honestly who doesn’t like circles?
Circles can go anywhere I always think and I wanted to try my hand at all the different circular stitches from Sue Spargo’s class.
And if one or two circles are good, well many, many circles can only be better, right?
Okay, so maybe I got carried away….
And here it is, the final piece. As an ode to my beautiful daughter I call this piece Thunder Bubbles.
I used every single stitch Sue Spargo taught on this. It really should be called, “Thunder Bubbles Sampler.” Because I knew nothing about quilting I didn’t know that you should leave an edge so that you can bind, face or otherwise somehow finish it off. I also took a hand quilting class at the local quilting shop and did my best to hand quilt more circular shapes. I didn’t know to iron in between, so the back isn’t as flat as I would have liked and the weight from all those drizzle stitches on his head pulled the batting and backing fabric into a kind of crater. Anyway here’s the back of my very first hand quilted piece!
Next week I’ll write about where all of this has taken me and what I’m doing now.
Ariane Zurcher Jewelry ~ Juno Collection: 18 Kt Brushed Gold Bracelet With AZ Logo Box Clasp
On my other blog ~ Emma’s Hope Book ~ where I write about the ever evolving process of being a parent and human being and how my daughter’s autistic neurology has made me rethink everything I once thought I knew (in the best possible way), I wrote today about her perfecting a “catch” at the trapeze school she has gone to for several years. You can read the entire post ‘here‘, but that process, hours and hours of practice that led up to the video clip I attached, showing her flying through the air on a trapeze and then letting go and catching another person’s arms, looks so much easier than it actually is. So much in life is like that.
Most works of art, whether the written word, paintings, sculpture, or things we wear, took time to create. Like a terrific actor who makes the role they’re playing look believable and natural, luring us into the story so we forget this is someone acting a role from a script they’ve memorized, the most beautiful works of art make us forget there is any process at all. We have an emotional connection to the art, the hours, days, weeks and even years it may have taken to produce it, is not something we think about. But usually the process of creating is messy… in my case the creative process means metal dust gets under my fingernails. My hands, face and clothing become covered in a fine dust. So much so that once, on my way home, a friendly stranger asked, “Oh! Are you a mechanic?” There was a trade school for mechanics across the street and no doubt she assumed I must work or teach there.
So I want you to see where I go everyday. Welcome to my studio! This work bench is one of two, where I make the models of designs I’ve created, sometimes from a sketch, sometimes from wax I’ve carved or hot wax I’ve shot from a gun, sometimes I just start playing around and things happen, things I hadn’t intended. Often what I visualize in my mind isn’t at all what I end up creating. Other times it is exactly what I visualized. But the actual process is always similar. I have to sit at that bench and work to create anything. Michael Crichton once said that to become a best-selling author, he had to sit down and actually write. He used a commercial airline pilot as an example. He said, “If I am due to pilot a plane filled with people, I can’t say, “You know, I’m not really in the mood to fly today. Let’s reschedule.” I love that! So yeah… I have to show up and do the work…
This is one of a half-dozen sketch books I have. I always carry a sketch book, a pencil and an eraser with me. As you can see, I made lots of notes and drew pretty detailed sketches for what I wanted to create.
Ariane Zurcher Jewelry ~ Juno Collection: 18 Kt Brushed Gold Orbs Strung on 22 Kt Gold Chain With 18 Kt Brushed Gold AZ Logo Box Clasp
The finished product ~ an 18 Kt Brushed Gold Necklace with Hand Fabricated Box Clasp took a number of tries before it looked like this! And in the process I went a little box clasp crazy. I made a square box clasp, an oval box clasp, a rectangular box clasp, a small circle box clasp, a medium-sized circle and a large circle box clasp, I even made a box clasp with a false bottom that no one would see except the wearer.
I’ll have to devote a post to box clasps one day, they are a beautiful thing!
Then there was the question of my design wall, which is removable.
I needed to organize my fabrics and other materials that I use for my jewelry design, such as wax, files, metals, wire, etc. While I was doing all of this, I came across my old portfolio from my days in fashion design and got a little side tracked… 
Finally, after all of that, I got back on track.
Now it’s time to get back to work – I have a queen-sized quilt to sandwich, baste and free motion quilt and then there are these little guys who keep calling to me.
circles, because honestly who doesn’t like circles?
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