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.
I almost didn’t post this today as it’s Election Day and figured many of us would be out voting or thinking about voting or waiting in anxiety for the presidential election’s outcome and then I thought – a perfect time for some levity while waiting in line to vote or for those reading this from elsewhere… okay not sure where I’m going with this, so here it is…
“Dyeing to Design” is the title of the terrific five week online class I’m taking given by the talented artist Elizabeth Barton through the Academy of Quilting. I wrote about the first week ‘here‘ and promised to write about the second.
I started the second week by pretty much dyeing every bit of white cotton fabric I had. Seriously. I went through the ten yards that was suppose to last us the entire five weeks of the class. Restraint is not a strong suit. In addition I went through so much dye that I realized I was not going to have enough to get me through the rest of the course, which meant I had to order both fabric and dye. Waiting was excruciating. I was going to work in a pun using the word “dyeing”, but restrained myself. See. I try where and when I can. While I waited however, I had all these beautiful fabrics to look at and consider for my next design.
The design I decided to do used shapes I come back to again and again, long ago when I was a fashion designer, now still designing jewelry and again this past week while using my hand dyed fabrics. Let’s not spend any time analyzing this, yes?
R17 – 18 Kt Brushed Gold
I chose two colors to work with, red and, with Elizabeth’s suggestion, an olive color. Elizabeth encouraged me to play with the olive color using it’s various gradations, which of course required more fabric that I didn’t have. Not easily thwarted, I pulled out some muslin and dyed that. It was at this point that the faucet in the kitchen sink suddenly stopped working. It was a drought. Nothing, but the slightest trickle of water, a whisper, really. However, we have a slop sink in the pantry. It was one of my brilliant ideas when we gutted the place; I envisioned our loft as a veritable greenhouse with furniture. Think Max’s bedroom when he falls asleep in Where the Wild Things Are. This vision of mine never came to fruition and so the slop sink became a receptacle for rags, cleaning supplies and other items no one knew what else to do with. And to add insult to injury underneath the sink we keep the kitty litter box. As we live in NYC our “pantry,” while sounding grand and spacious, is actually the size of a very, very small closet, combined with the kitty litter under foot, a stacked washer and dryer, the slop sink overflowing with assorted cleaning supplies… Let’s face it, it’s really really cramped.
I was determined to make it work, and while this made for some interesting maneuvering on my part, I did fall in love with my slop sink, but not so much that I didn’t call the plumber. He came a few days later and fixed the kitchen faucet, but in the meantime I washed all my dyed fabrics in my now beloved slop sink inside our closet, I mean pantry. It was all very Alice in Wonderlandish.
Two days later, after the sink was working again I came home to the smell of smoke and asked FH (fabulous husband) what happened. “Well,” FH said, and then after a lengthy pause and with a pained expression he finally added, “I think our washing machine blew up.” I would have suspected wild exaggeration on his part had it not been for the lingering evidence of noxious smoke wafting through our home. Evidently he was doing a load of laundry and heard a loud bang. He went over to investigate to find smoke billowing out of our front loader. You have no idea how happy I am that I was not there to witness. So for the next few weeks we are without a washing machine. But I digress… Here is the preliminary piece on my design wall.
Slowly it began to take shape and as everything seemed to be falling apart, exploding, going dry and whatever else, my sewing machine, not wanting to be left out of all the fun, decided it was no longer going to play nice with my walking foot, perhaps it was taking a cue from our presidential race, requiring me to spend more than five hours watching various you tube videos, reading the instructions over and over again to troubleshoot. There were a LOT of late, late nights. Eventually I was able to convince my sewing machine it was in its own best interest to get along and all is well. In actuality I realized that my walking foot was causing the automatic threader to jam. When I thread it manually everything works.
After I did the quilting I decided to add some hand stitching, but couldn’t decide whether to do more or take it all out. So what does one do when you’re not sure? Ask Elizabeth and others in the class for feedback, of course!
Which led to this…
And here’s the back.
The third week of the class is well underway, my fabric arrived, the sink is running as is my walking foot (haha) and oh what fun I’m having! We are learning basic Shibori arashi dyeing. I still don’t have a washing machine, (and have two teenagers in the house) but these are luxury problems. I haven’t figured out what I’m doing with my beautiful dyed fabrics, but will come up with something in the next day or so. Here’s a sneak peak at this weeks dyeing and drying New York City style. And I didn’t make a single dye joke. The title doesn’t count because it’s Elizabeth’s name for her class. How can you not love that title? I may go back and edit a few in, just to amuse, or you can make a few in the comments!
Yay, I finished it!! My first large quilt. I began it in January and finished yesterday.
This is the queen-sized quilt that I have written about ‘here‘, ‘here‘, ‘here‘ and ‘here‘. In a nutshell this quilt was my starter quilt. I wanted to learn how to make a quilt start to finish. This quilt was designed by Kim McLean and is called Flower Pots. I took a class where we followed the pattern, learned to appliqué, and got to use all the things I had learned from Sue Spargo – layering, using different fabrics such as wool and velvet and then perle cotton and other threads and a multitude of stitches to enhance the shapes. I hand stitched all the appliqué and machine stitched the panels together with the sashing and border. I then used a wool batting and learned how to free motion quilt. I used a red batik for the binding, cut on the bias and hand stitched the back. Finally I made and applied a quilted label.
This first picture is of the lower center panel where I decided to try an emerging pattern of double leaf free motion quilting shape. I used a slightly darker grey thread.
Center Star Panel
For the upper center panel I wanted to try my hand at McTavishing, which is named after a woman who created a specific way to free motion quilt. After a few times, I went off and did my own thing, echoing, but also playing with flame shapes.
Top Center Panel
On this long side panel I decided that the paisley fabric was so cool I would just use it as a quilting guideline. I really loved how this turned out, though it’s hard to really see, I did add a close up below.
Side Panel
Detail of the free motion quilting on the side panel
This is the bottom panel and I included pebbles, echoing and swirls, which I did again on the top panel.
Bottom Panel
More of the center panel
Merlin naps as I work
Merlin was constantly coming over to nap or pretend to nap while secretly inspecting my work. He loved snuggling up amongst the folds as I worked, making for some interesting adjustments on my part as I hated to disturb him!
The border
The entire border I did in a pebble stitch, which I love. It’s so reminiscent of shapes I used for my jewelry collection, The Lotus Collection. And now that I think of it, the swirls in the bottom and top panels remind me of my Samadhi Collection.
Hand Sewing the binding
Finally I had to learn how to make and add a binding. After a number of different ideas regarding what fabric to use, I decided, with my FH’s (fabulous husband’s) help, to go with a red batik. Batik tends to be pretty densely woven, and as the binding can get more wear and tear than the rest of the quilt, I thought it was a good choice, plus, I love the red. I cut it on the bias, mitered the corners, and hand stitched the back.
For my beautiful mom ~ Merry Christmas
And then I had to learn how to make a label for my quilt. There are wonderful ideas on Pinterest. Are you on Pinterest? I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE pinterest. I made a label using word documents and then used a freezer paper and cut a piece of fabric that I adhered the freezer paper to and copied the printed label onto the fabric, lightening the tone so it was just readable, but wouldn’t show too much. I then removed the freezer paper, sandwiched the printed material with a cotton batting and muslin and then used red wool thread and stitched the text. I added the little wool red heart and cut out another smaller heart in the same fabric as the binding because I figured I can’t add enough hearts to a quilt made specifically for my mom.
So Mom, if you’re reading this, the cats out of the bag. Merry Christmas!! This quilt was made for you. I thought of you the entire time I was making it. I hope it will keep you wonderfully warm during those cold winter months and I’m told wool batting breathes and should be perfect for the summer months as well. I love you.
What’s next? A twin-sized quilt that I will design, stitch and quilt!! I’ve got my sketch book and am playing with some ideas… I’ll keep you posted! Heh-heh, a little pun to end this post.
And I didn’t make a single dye joke. The title doesn’t count because it’s Elizabeth’s name for her class. How can you not love that title? I may go back and edit a few in, just to amuse, or you can make a few in the comments!
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