People often say to me things like – “You’re so patient” or “I could never do that, it’s so tedious.” What I want to tell them is that I am so NOT patient. I am incredibly impatient, so much so that as a child my impatience was something often commented on by others, not just my parents! I would like to report that I’ve made massive inroads with this since then, but the truth is, I tend towards impatience rather than the other way around. However life has a way of throwing things at you, and over the years I’ve had to dig deep to find ways to temper my impatience. One of those ways, ironically, is through stitching.
Stitching is like meditation. It calms my mind, gets me out of myself and my often whirlwind thoughts that can ricochet from one crises to the next if left untended. Tending to my ragged nervous system requires vigilance and a whole series of things that I must do each day so that I have a chance at making sane, calm choices. Stitching is something I must do. It doesn’t feel like an option. It feels like a necessity. I must have material, needle and thread in hand or I feel off, the day is destined to be more difficult, life’s problems feel more acute, small problems take on a razor sharp edge, things begin to feel increasingly chaotic and impossible. Stitching gives me some semblance of order, a feeling of being a part of something much larger; a feeling that I am part of something inexplicable and unknown.
As I design and look at each shape, consider which thread to use, what stitch will best compliment that shape, those colors, that idea – it feels like I am inserting a little beauty into the day. And so this is how I cope. This is how, when everything feels impossible, when I am overwhelmed by life, through stitching I feel some semblance of calm in the midst of, what otherwise feels like, a tsunami.
Bullion Knots, Picot, Running Stitch, Backstitch & Beaded Backstitch on Wool & VelvetBullion Knot, French Knot, Backstitch, Running Stitch on Wool, Cotton & Dupioni Silk
I am left-handed. While only about 10% of the population is left-handed, there are a great many who work in the arts. I don’t know that a greater percentage of artists are left handed than in the regular population, but I do know that we lefties have had to come up with a great many work arounds to accommodate our left handedness in a world set up for right handed people. I am also left eared, left footed and left eyed, meaning that I am able to hear, see and kick better with my left side. Also, weirdly and this may border on TMI, when I was nursing my two children, then babies, it was my left breast that filled with milk far more readily than my right.
Moving right along…
When I found the artist Sue Spargo and began learning the stitches she uses in her work, I found it challenging. There were certain stitches that no matter how much I tried, mine didn’t look the way hers did. The Pekinese Stitch is an example of that. I remember doing her Fresh Cut Block of the Month and she used that stitch on one of her flower stems. I kept trying to replicate what she was doing, following her instructions, as laid out in her book Creative Stitching, but somehow my Pekinese Stitch looked all wrong. Finally, when I was with Sue I showed her what I was doing and she said, “Oh, but you’re doing it as though you were right handed, but with your left hand!” Then she showed me how to do it left handed. It was a game changer! (I have since taught myself how to do this stitch using either my right or left hand.)
The Pekinese Stitch using my right hand (on purple wool) and left hand (on green wool)
I’ve encountered similar issues when trying to learn how to needle turn appliqué, sew on a sewing machine, put a zipper in, buttons, and any number of other things that I’ve attempted over the years.
In the coming months I am collaborating with my favorite artist on a You Tube project that we think will help us lefties in the world! Stay tuned.
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.
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.
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!
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