Journey with the Wall of Serenity.

 My wall fascination has been going on for some time. Even before 2005 when George & I had our first of two trips to Oaxaca, Mexico. There was a wall that I photographed....

Such great colors! 

There were other walls there too I noticed, but not quite as serene...

Other textile artistic responses have happened since then....

The first was a utility quilt....

...and this one I called The Wall of Serenity.

The next inspiration in this vein came from a wall in our condo swimming pool. I was swooning over it. I loved the simplicity & warmth of it, same as with the Mexican wall.

So I made a new quilt to celebrate my enjoyment.

My regret here was the central squares are too big & the lower right corner is too bright. I actually wrote on the quilt back behind 'brighty' about this rue-ing!

In September this quilt was posted as for sale on Marketplace. So much for ruing, people loved it. The biggest response to something I wanted to sell ever. 

AX & I agreed on a price & I got her address & was getting ready to mail it to her when I ran into a huge snag. Not only could I not find it, my 3 daughters didn't have it either. Good grief. Was I mortified. So I confessed to AX, & then day or so later I realized a very simple solution: I would make her a new one!! So, before I went east on a 10 day trip, I mapped out my replacement [notice smaller central square patches & no too-bright square] & messaged AX to tell her  about this possible solution. 

But while I was away I didn't hear back from her. I stewed over that a bit & started to feel annoyed by her stubbornness [?], shutting me off [?], silence, or I knew not what. Time to move on. I would carry on in my own way with what I wanted to do, no longer hoping or intending to satisfy AX.

The first thing I did was decide to make 2 quilts. My original quilt had 25 blocks. I would break it up into two smaller ones: one a 4x4 & the other a 3x3 central grid. 16 + 9 =25. Perfect. Make lemonade out of the lemons of this experience with her.

So here's the first one in what was going to be another suite, another symphony, in 4 movements.

The second one was more complex.

The 3rd movement was a presto!

Hmmmm.... did I like it?

I pressed on to the next.

Now I had a symphony with 4 quilts, but...as I could clearly see, "One of these things doesn't go with the others, one of these things doesn't belong," as in the famous Sesame Street song.

Undaunted I dismembered the presto quilt. It took me a night. I didn't feel any misgivings in doing this at all. What you do for love, what you do for art!

And onto another 4th movement! Here almost mapped out... I've got the body & am thinking about the border.

Here's what the finished final movement looks like....

The Tranquility Symphony....

That's it for now.

Two Symphonies

 The "symphonies", well the first one, happened by accident. The second one happened more on purpose. Right now each has four movements with a color guiding me.

This was the first one. I called it Not the Last Piece. That was because I had used some handwritten cloth in it & the one at the lower right border had the words Last & Piece written one above the other. It played into a thought I occasionally have about whether the quilt I am working on will be the last one. I used two Indian wood-block stampers on the piece. You can see it in their effects in the close up.

So I decided to hold onto some aspects of the design elements & do another.

I kept the two stampers, kept the long skinny lines moving through, & kept some large L shapes.

The next one was in red. This is a detail the look before I quilted it...

& after it was finished.

Finally the blue one before it was quilted up...

 & after it was finished.

Here are all 4.

And I recognized at the time I was getting tired of the work of sustaining all the elements. The blue one didn't get a fancy L shaped border!

Sometimes on my workwall there is a "seed" lying there waiting to be acted upon. Now the seed was a block from a quilt I made in 1970 in anticipation of the Joslyn's birth. The block had been there for years!

Here was that baby quilt.

Somehow I had harvested a block, one of the green ones, from it!

Too bad I hadn't harvested all salvageable blocks! [sigh]

[I also used the sawtooth pattern for Lucy's baby quilt in 2006. A sawtooth variation.]

So the first movement of the next symphony got called Left-over Triangles. There were other much smaller triangles lying around on my work wall. They got harvested.

Left-Over Triangles II came next, because there were more still lurking up there.

The reverse of this quilt was pretty cool I thought...

How to complete the symphony? Of course No Left-over Triangles & No Left-over Triangles II.

 The final movement in yellow was helped along by another seed on the workwall... I loved these colors & was looking for a way to employ them.

So the 4 movements together....

Having special cloth on the borders became an important unifier.

Signing off in one of my favorite new shirts...[see above seed colors]

That's it for now.

Busy Woman

 I have been a busy woman.

I think this may be because I have been feeling unhappy about how the world is turning out & making things is a place where I feel calm, purposeful, & productive. I feel impotent to change the Bad State of Affairs, but I can make things that make me happy & maybe bring pleasure to others.

It's crazy that, having gotten rid of unwanted cloth in 3 different ways [Sally Ann, Emily Carr soft sculpture studio, & FabCycle] I am working from the smallest collection of cloth ever!   Regardez!!

Well, actually, that's not really all, I have two small scrap containers: one for darks & one for lights.

So here is my latest batch of work.

This one I call 30 Inch Square Dance.

This one I call Quintet. I see the 5 shapes as buddies playing in the orchestra of my dreamy happy color zone.

Immediately there were leftovers that lead to My Garden of Eden.

They clearly are a duet!

Ooops, the quintet players are standing on their heads. Oh well....

After that.... I harvested some cloth from some pants that were tripping me up. It's cloth from India using the ikat technique on the warp & weft of the weaving process. The result is that the checks are a bit fuzzy. The other colorful cloth happened [unconsciously] to be ikat from Indonesia. Squares & Stripes

Here's a detail, so maybe you can see the fuzzy edges of the weaves, especially on the black & white cloth.

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On my work wall for years I have has some scraps that were treasures. One was the very last remnant of a silk Italian scarf my mother had given me when I was a teenager. The others were just charming not-to-be-thrown-aways. Time to use them, said my inner voice, they've been ladies-in-waiting for long enough.

Special Treasures

details

I wrote on the back of this piece telling the treasures story.

And then, in the waste-not-want-not tradition, I cut up some cloth pieces on which I had written. As with the last quilt a few of the scraps had been on my work wall forever!

Writing Lines

It was delicious fun to leave the ruffly look at the top & bottom & not put a binding around the whole thing as I usually do. I wrote on the back of this quilt too, telling the story.

And finally for this post....

A zone that is very much in my old quilt-pattern-roots. The pattern in this case is called Irish Chain, but because it's a bit uneven I call it Tipsy Irish Chain.The blue & white cloth is from a tablecloth that I decided to harvest for my own work. It is from China & the patterns are made from a very old "stitch resist" technique, way more sophisticated than tie-dye. This photo is an in-process shot. The quilt top is not fully assembled.

Then I quilted it up & now...

I confess I was bit bothered by the wonkiness of the chains, but then I tell myself (& I believe) that wonkiness is what makes work lively. You can't just look at it & notice,"Oh, that's an Irish Chain" & move on to the next. It's more than that because of its irregularity!

Here's a detail showing the indigo-dyed cloth more clearly.

That's it for now.....

....Except people have been asking me about purchasing my pieces. I'm totally up for this, so in the last two posts if there is something you would like to have I will come up with a reasonable price for it.