Sew Daphne: July 2012

For quite a few years I have been working on my numbers & quilts project. This project didn't make it into my two most likely galleries, but I've heard that competition for show places has really gone up. No matter, I am plowing on and although this blog is called first & last that is only because I have finished the cover 'page' & the colophon of the series. Really I have one more I am doing a lot of thinking about: The Look of Numbers. That would be the ways numbers are treated by graphic artists.

One night George and I played a magnificent game of other sensory ways of thinking about numbers: the sound, the taste, the smell, the tactile feel of numbers.... all of the was hugely entertaining, but I'm not sure if it's quilt-worthy!

The quilt list for this project
a white quilt about zero
a 'spiritual' [also mostly white] one about one
double double is about the powers of two
a my torso body-print for 3
4 is about my 4 usual ways of thinking about numbers [derived from the children's book I wrote but didn't publish]
5 is about what follows from tying a knot from transparent ribbon just so
6 is about hexominoes
7 is about my birthday 7/7
8 is about symmetric numbers [point & line symmetric]
9 is about patterns hidden in the times table
10 is about my hands & feet [fingers & toes]
11 is about eleven-point stars [in the pentagram, hexagram, octogram sequence]
12 is about clockfaces
13 is about cards
And there is one quilt about fractions which is basically a pure math lecture from a book I studied from twice.

So my First, which will be first when I show it, which I completed in April.... detail....

... nearly finished [when I took this photo].. just the last 2 inches to do the quilting.... and, yes, the lopsidedness becomes unnoticeable to all but the QP [there are such people, believe me, Quilt Police]. This one also has a dedication on the back: for all my children: biological, pedagogical & magical. I don't think I have a photo of that yet.

And today I finished my last in the series, the Colophon Quilt. The colophon in a hand printed, artisan printing pressed book is where the artist gets to tell some of the story of the fonts, the paper, the binding type, & maybe even the history of the book making.

I have had so much fun with this project and now have 3 or 4 new reading books in my house about numbers, mathematics, & mathematicians. I have for sure reclaimed that part of myself. It feels just fine. Oh, & I watch Vi Hart videos & the British math-geeks who do Numberphile videos on Youtube.

I have no idea yet how I'll pull this together for A Show, but I will.

Working to get the Cuisenaire rods onto the quilt was a bitch, frankly. I really got messed up with measurement & unevenness problems. But in the end I do believe in the forgiving eye, within limits, and this Colophon Quilt really tested me. Much had to be redone to allow even my eye to not get caught up in non-perfection. Lots of problem-solving!

That's it for today.
Today I got a proposal for a show together.
Tomorrow I hope to mail off to the Surrey Art Gallery a proposal for a show with my Project called Oh, Solo, Double Trio: Numbers in my Life.
The next day I'll prep the similar proposal for the Richmond Gallery which is due in April. I dasn't mail it in too early. Things can get put in drawers & forgotten if timing isn't right. That happened to me once being too eager.

This proposal has been on my To Do list for quite a while.
I still have 3 quilts to finish, but that's ok. Even with a go-ahead, I'd be given a date a bit off from acceptance time.
And I'll have some time to develop the peripherals to the show that I'd like to do.
I have quite a few number artifacts... that would be fun to have there.

So here's Fingers & Toes, the quilt about the number 10. I made the stampers for this, from my own hands & feet. I even used the off-cut from the first hand stamp to make the negative image for the other hand. Similarly for the feet.

This one starts with the careful knotting of a transparent ribbon -- one of those really nice-edged ones. If you knot it just so, not too tight & not too loose a magical pentagon will show up, as will most of a pentogram. [Hold it up to the light.]

This one is for the number 5. Well, it's actually getting too complicated.... but by a few more steps you can construct the famous golden rectangle, and build several more on top of that. And if you turn this quilt over I stitched a logarithmic spiral into the back that goes with the quilting on the front, but I have to make it darker, it doesn't show up enough yet. Maybe you can see a faint spiral arc above my head.

# 7 below. This one is about all my 07/07 birthdays that I can remember, with various xeroxed photos stitched on to the quilt-top.

For 12 I decided to do a clock face. One of my favorite features of the graphics for the quilt is how clearly 1/2, 1/4, & 3/4 of an hour gets shown. So innocently.

That's it for now.

August 11, 2013

I have planned this day for over a year, maybe longer.
I did several dry runs out there in the grove-in-the-park of choice.
Evenly spaced trees, 4 benches. No trees that wept sap.
Wainborn Park across the park from our apartment. West of us.

I watched the weather with a wary eye.
I thought Wednesday or Thursday I should send out the invitations, so I did that Wednesday evening. Commitment.
A half an hour before the mounting time I was still no-ing & yes-ing. I woke George up at 9:00 for decision-making. Go for it, we decided. What the hell.
So what I got out of the whole experience was a dry run of the process. Joke! (A dry run that turned wet!)

Douglas, George's brother-in-law, carried the precious bundle of quilts across the park.

The wind was up to 10 mph... a bit of a problem... with a few gusts.

The quilts run from 0 to 13 plus two others.

This is the title quilt. On the back is the dedication: for all my children, biological, pedagogical, & magical.

The look of the whole thing.

When Rosamar said to me,"Don't do a children's book, break the mold. Do your own art about numbers," this was the first quilt I conceived of in 10 minutes or less. I was ready & the teacher came. Thanks Rosamar. Thanks for the whole thing!

I call the first one A Lot of Nothing.

This quilt is for 1.

right to left: 2 [Double, Double], 3 [Three Points of Interest], 4 [my four lenses for looking at numbers--any number, but in this case the #4]

Right to left... 5 [what happens when you tie a knot in a ribbon], 6 [hexominoes], & 7 [my July 7th birthdays]

Right to left... 8 [about numbers that have line symmetry or point symmetry], 9 [about some of the amazing patterns hidden in the multiplication table] & 10 [fingers & toes]

right to left 11 [11-point-stars], 12 [clocks] 13 [a deck of cards, 4 x 13]

Right to left The quilt about rational numbers, the quilt about the look of numbers, & the colophon quilt.

Now the backs.... Zero...
It started to sprinkle. I rushed around photographing the backs.

right to left: backs of 2, 3, & 4

left to right: 5, 6, & 7

left to right 8, 9, & 10

The backs of 11, 12, & 13... left to right

The backs of rational numbers, look of numbers & colophon.

By then I was in a total rush to dismantle because of rain! There was a flash & a clap of thunder! Faster & faster! I call George & Douglas, come quick!

That's it for now. I have my eye on September 1, the day before Labor Day for the next remount. Help me get good weather!!

Starting in the spring there have been 5 deaths of people I knew.
Is this a season of death? My time of life? A coincidence of grouped occurrences?

The first of the cluster was Tim Whyte, George's house renovator in Lively. He had a sparkling personality, raised a passel of 5 smart children, had a marvelous singing voice [I surmised] & was a staunch church-goer in Lancaster, Virginia's black community. He was a brilliant problem-solver when it came to building, and we adored him. Cancer of the stomach.

Then was Rick Bunning, our realtor for selling 3675 & buying 101-426. I blogged about him before. He died in May.

The next was a woman I met in the context of Imagination Market. She was radiant, funny & beautiful, Les Senesac. She worked for Imagination Market after I bowed out of running it. She died of a brain tumor. I hadn't seen her in years, but a bright star went out, that's for sure.

After that my mother's oldest living friend, Ruth Emerson Cooke, passed away at 101. Faith, my mother, & Ruth went to Vienna together in 1932. They studied modern dance with Mary Wigman & hung out from time to time with the Olympic American hockey team. Faith's brother, John Garrison, was on the team. Ruth married Alistair Cooke, & divorced him circa 1945. John, her son, was my classmate at Putney. Ruth spent her lifetime devoted to liberal education in a variety of institutions. She was a frequent visitor in my life, in many phases.

Finally, Eloise Feigal. Ellie married my uncle Gene & was a fixture of my life in Maui. She had been failing with worsening atrial fibrillation over the past 3 years or so. She died on July 17 of a stroke, having just been diagnosed with kidney cancer. She found a better, less painful way out. Ellie was an accomplished pianist, a mother of 5, married to two doctors [in sequence], was an avid reader, knew braille & worked with it professionally, & was a travel agent, back in those days when we had such things.