Chapter 1, Maui Quilts 2012

It pains me. I wrote this chapter yesterday & thought I had saved it. When I came looking for my draft today: gone! Oh well, gradually, gradually I'll learn my way around this blogger format. I no longer 'poof' my entry with the delete button.That's progress!

Yesterday I finished off two quilts that I made after my eye problem.
I ran into all kinds of trouble with my machine quilting.

In 1951 when my mother decided to buy her 3 girls a portable Singer (which I still have) she stayed in the kitchen while the man went over the basics with us in an upstairs room.

The big rule I remember was don't fool around with the tension. The lesson I took from that was that girls couldn't be mechanical enough to be taught how to control/manage that zone.
That was the man's world zone. How sad is that? So for many years I kept hands off unless I was totally desperate and dared enter that no-no dial. Just think of how many precious hours of experience I missed that way. So sad. So sad that I was taken in by it.

So when I had trouble with tension I kinda unhappily and somewhat helplessly toughed it through. Afterwards made up my own test assemblage that I would sew a line of stitching with the presser foot I use for machine quilting. Upper tension over lower tension & spool thread over bobbin thread. Keep records! What a concept!

So I quilted up the pattern piece that I painted in Susan Shie's class. Doubling the image for fun. It's about spirals & different ways of getting logarithmic spirals. It's also about constructing the golden rectangle. It's about patterns in my life!

Then the 3 most recent quilt finishes. Before quilting & after.... oops.... upside down.. oh well (& oh hell, too late)

In some ways I don't have the same sense of exploration as I had last year, but I am not hard on myself about that. Art development has ebbs & flows. And EBBS are just as important as FLOWS. The quilting was difficult because I did many changes of direction, but I am really unhappy with the overall effect. Maybe when I get it home I will redo it. [I didn't!]

 This was before I quilted this piece. I love the liveliness of the colors. In a way I was echoing colors from an earlier quilt done 2 years ago.

That's it for today.