Textile work-- It's been so long.... Quilts from the past, long forms phase....

I have done quite a few densely quilted quilts & quite a few with long linear forms.
I called this one Journeys.


           

I love the look & feel of dense linear quilting!
The next work I called Indigo Braiding.
I tightly braided three strips of white cloth & dip-dyed them several times in indigo. After the braid was dry the braid was opened and the strips sewn together to make a single central piece.
The side panels were thinner braids, less dyed.

This one is Giacometti Gestures... those long sculptures of his!!
        

Then came Miro's Moves.
  

In the one below I used offcuts from Maiwa's dress-making.
The partial ovals are armholes' offcuts.
The colors came from a favorite spring-time shrub.


Below: Red Veins [bleed] You can't see the bleeding, but I had to wash this quilt and some of the red veins red spread out!


11 Suits on a Green Field


A very densely quilted piece  I call Chickens & Chicken Scratches, but no linear forms.



The chicken scratches were sewn when I was blindfold & with my left hand!!!
All of the chickens were created in a stitching class with Dorothy Caldwell.
You can really appreciate the ripple effects of dense quilting.

Two quilts experimenting a bit with transparent cloth &long forms. oops!! the one below is upside down!! See my name on the upper edge?
     

Three final ones
Two inspired by colors & forms of oriental carpets.
I dyed the cloth for these.




And one in the same zone as 11 suits....

That's it for now.

Sculpture & Another Threads in My Life

My life has been not totally absorbed by the pit that is slowly filling with concrete & rebar in the 1400 block of Howe Street.

So I thought I would show you snippets of other things I've been noticing or doing. I have made some small new pieces.
    
I had never tried doing 3-D sculpture before. I had made something like this sculpture with paper & matte board. This was my effort to carry the idea into cloth. It was a pretty awkward piece to make & it isn't stable, but I might carry on in some way.

            

And here at home shadow noticings continue. a candle burning!

    
 
my desk clock & calendar

That's it for now.

The Day of 400 Concrete Trucks

Sunday, March 19 starting at 5am trucks from Ocean Cement started appearing in the 1400 block of both Granville Street & Howe. About 400 truckloads arrived that day to pour 4000 cubic meters onto the prepared ground for Vancouver House. This is the base of the 52 floors above ground & 7 below.
This is how things looked on the day before this historic 'pour', the biggest in Vancouver's history. The historic crew too!

 

I got out to the Bridge at 8am. There were concrete trucks on Howe, Beach, & Granville.

There were two trucks feeding into each concrete pump.

It was pretty amazing. There were lots of people out on the bridge with me, including a top person with Dialog, the architectural firm here working with Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect for Vancouver House. Some of the site supervisors were out there-- a safety man, and a man from Carion Construction. I'd talked to him before.

Conferring, watching, working, & there for the event.

The work is really strenuous. Someone from above manipulates where the pump hose is, but sometimes some one has to handle it. 

When I came back at 4 pm you could actually see that the job was nearly done.

              The detail men. They did all the edges, tight places, & smoothed it all over.

Pretty near the end. I left at about 5pm. 

The next day there were new things to do. The place looked different with white plastic!

Gravel was being poured in from Howe to level another patch of ground for a lesser pouring of the north end. A little front loader was buzzing around moving it to flatness. The guys on the right are attending to a detail I never understood.

                              

Then there were a lower layer of the stabilization pipes that were removed.

                            They will all be stored off the east side of Granville Street.  

 A man on the bridge told me that every 3 weeks another floor will be added to Vancouver House. Soon another part of the site will be excavated for the stage two building. I am torn about all this. I still see signs of sadness, messiness & struggle around the block. 

           That's it for now.