"I do not explain, I explore,"
Marshall McLuhan.
Marshall McLuhan.
As I was showing a current piece under construction to my husband years ago, he said to me that all my quilts seem to be autobiographical because nobody can read my handwriting! I am used to his snide remarks but as I thought about it I realized he was right. I kept it in the back of my mind and looked at my slides (yeah back then we had slides!). All my quilts are based on things from my own activities, my family, old stories, whatever. I can look back and relive my experiences through them. Sometimes they are a bit more universal than personal, sometimes the other way around. So I stopped fighting it and gave in using my work as a diary, my way of journaling. The trouble is that when I used to give a slide show (before Powerpoint) I would take all my time telling the stories that flashed on the screen. Some of the hard times were met with private expressions of sympathy, but I most appreciated coaxing some laughs from experiences the audience recognized as theirs also. Symbiotic stories.
So, point to any quilt, any time, and I will go on and on with it's story. As I said already, I am missing maybe 20 of my old pieces, history over the dam. Many more are hanging happily in private homes as offices across the country, and the third category is the few pieces I still have- mostly things that were already out on exhibit and escaped my murderous scissor attacks. Good thing because as they came home to the scene of the crimes, they were boxed up for our 30th Crit Group Retrospective at the New England Quilt Museum which ended last month. Now I am waiting for those things to be returned minus the several pieces they kept for their permanent collection- another way of divesting myself I hadn't thought of!
But today I am going to walk through a couple of thought processes making my newest quilt called, 'WHAT I SHOULDA SAID'. It is the result of the refolding project where I kept all my hand dyed and hand printed fabrics in one plastic bin but it was overflowing and I needed to reduce and reuse the amount so I started auditioning the fabrics together on the design wall. Every day as I was working on other things I'd pin up a few more pieces- all of things out of the special hand work box. Pretty soon I had to start editing it all down, adding some of my Spoonflower yardage (counting it as hand prints just because I can), and lovingly contributing some very old yardages from all sots of places. I found my head kept saying, 'I shoulda, I coulda, I shoulda, I woulda' with every addition as I remember why I hadn't used it before- basically because I liked it too much. Not this time, I would use it or else. Some fabric was big, some small scraps but I used it up as I went cutting away at things to make it all fit. Pinned up, here's the skeleton of the plan as it runs off the design space in all directions- that's 8 feet x 8 feet so it is in need of massive editing still:
And that dear folks is why I never worry about anybody copying my work. I double dog dare 'em. No watermarks, no copyright, nothing to stop them!
ARTY ARTY PARTY PARTY
pretty, eh?
The first blue pigment to have been created in over 200 years will serve as the newest Crayola crayon. “YlnMn blue” was not developed within an arts context, but rather accidentally discovered in in an Oregon State University (OSU) chemistry lab in 2009. Graduate student Andrew Smith made the discovery alongside Mas Subramanian after combining manganese oxide, yttrium, and indium, elements which also serve as the inspiration for the pigment’s name.
I would wager we are looking at Das Subramanian instead of Andrew Smith, maybe just my Armenian radar!
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