Process

Or, perhaps there is a different route...

Here's some Major Process for you, an Australian 4 year old who really throws herself into her work, and this is something she has done all her life. She has her first US exhibit at the Agora Gallery in NY this spring. Now, I am not one to badmouth a gallery BUT, if you google Agora you sort of get the message that this is perhaps a scam, a vanity gallery at best. So don't put too much weight on the fact that a 4 year old has galleries clamoring for her work while YOU and I fritter away daily at trying to keep our heads above water. The important thing here in the video is that she is having one hell of a time. This mother has more tolerance than I do, but there is only one of them. Don't ever ask me to babysit, even my grown kids acknowledge that my skills lie elsewhere.

Now, an aside: Imagine my first day out teaching art and being assigned a kindergarten class when I had been trained for secondary level teaching (new guy gets the crap!) and having them all ready to Paint, thanks to a classroom teacher who knew diddle squat, but that was indeed a whole bigger load of diddle than *I* knew! The room looked just like this TIMES TWENTY KIDS. They had a ball, the school system thought perhaps I was a friend of the janitorial staff trying to keep them employed, and I was cleaning for days after. I put the paint in the highest cupboards and warded off angry parents who couldn't get their kids pants clean. Tough Nuggies, I couldn't get the damn Room Clean. And that, dear reader, is the point that I stopped liking kids, abut two years before I found myself parenting.

Found a website that asked me to pledge that I would post about PROCESS, and since I already do this it was easy to sign on (see my new badge to the left). This is one of the Modern Quilt sites, where all bets are of on following tradition so, since I guess I have been a Modern Quilter since 1978, it's easy to join on! Bet I'm their oldest member too. Want to know more, go here to sign on or just find out what's happening in this parallel universe!

I found Rossi's blog by following links from this piece I stumbled across. Since I have done a couple of these charted-up plans and am dealing with one right now, it caught my eye.
No, I am not a Spock fan, just a grid fan. Carol has done this by charting up a cross stitch grid and assigning values to each area. Rather than do one square for each cross stitch, she has combined areas to slightly simplify the design. She details her process on her blog, an it pretty much parallels the way I built this quilt for my son way-back-when:

Except in 1980 I didn't have a computer to use a cross stitch grid! I simply drew out a picture using his first school picture, drew grid lines across it and assigned colors. If I had a readable close-up of this picture you'd see it's all made up of calicos because that's about all there was back then! Unfortunately most calicos were florals, admittedly bitty ones, but my son felt they were too feminine (Boyz Don't Wear Flowers In Their Hair!) so sat up late one night cutting them out of the quilt top. Boys will be boys. Like I said, don't ask me to babysit.

Guess that was HIS 'process' on MY 'product'. I folded it up and am saving it for him when he has kids.