Homelessness

"Always read directions first." I must say this once a day to my children, but I rarely listen to my own advice. So when I saw the call for entries for a quilt exhibition "No Place To Call Home" I immediately thought of an art quilt composition and started working on it. After binding it I looked at the specifics. It turns out there is a size limit. Of course I should have known to look at the details first, but no harm done. I'm making another. In fact, I have a whole series in my head of all different sized wall hangings and surely one of them will be the right size for the show. The one shown above utilizes old clothes and cloth given to me by people who know I like fabric, some of which had been sitting in attics for decades. The back is an old army blanket. I hope I can use only recycled cloth in the making of these quilts because it seems unethical to go out and buy new fabric for a project like this.

More on art vs craft.

I'm reading Choosing Craft the artist's viewpoint, edited by Halper and Douglas. I find much of the artists' writing selections to be filled with semantics. However, I recently read through these quotes which were thought provoking and to-the-point.

"Crafts have to be made, crafts have to be objects, and crafts usually must have some connection to traditional materials, techniques, and histories. Being necessarily limited, craft is thus not fully commensurable with art. It is philosophically different. Like it or not, craft and art are somewhat different things... Crafters respond first and foremost to the material in their hands...I propose that a crafter will not subordinate his or her medium, whatever the medium, to intellectually interesting ideas." - Bruce Metcalf (metalsmith and critic)

I have been reading a lot about art quilters who do their work on fiber and spend inordinate amounts of reworking the cloth. They paint it, embellish it, stain it, rip it, and fuse it. Is this what makes me a crafter and them artists? I enjoy paring a landscape down to only the essential shapes and colors. I have no desire to manipulate the cloth other than with stitches and I always have three layers stiched and bound together which is the basic definition of what a quilt is.

Wild Turkeys in Amherst College Fields is one of many pieces I hope to sell this spring.

Wedding Commissions

One of the most satisfying kinds of commissions are those intended for wedding presents. In the past two months I have done two and I thought I would share them.

For September Wedding Memories the client asked me to focus on the bride's bouquet flying through the water. I also tried to incorporate the Minister's impromptu cairn alter and the rubber boots the bride wore into the water. I was lucky because I had just the right color green for the brilliant trees in my stash. As I did for the VT water in the next quilt, I used my wrinkle technique to depict ripples and reflections. I quilted the groom's words, "Stepping into this ole river we call life together" into the river bank. It was a fun quilt and I hope the happy couple hangs it for years to come.

The second is a quilt depicting one of the wedding couple's favorite places, Lake Willoughby, VT. I have visited the family cabin throughout my childhood so I had a good idea of what it looks like, but photos from one of the grooms helped me capture the shape of the mountains. I hope this quilt remains in their family and serves as a wonderful reminder of a quiet peaceful place. My only regret is that I forgot to hide their dog in the stitching!

Two Season Lake Champlain Quilts

When I saw the hand dyed sky blue fabric, I knew exactly what scenes I wanted under it. Half a yard later - two scenes of Lake Champlain from my childhood home. I've been sailing many times in my father's yellow sailboat. I've only been ice fishing a couple of times, and never in a pick-up. But lots of people do drive their vehicles out on the lake, pull their ice houses into place and set up camp for weekends of fishing. A really fresh fish jumps in the pan and Lake Champlain perch are sweet and flaky. I am reserving the other half a yard for a scene near where I live now, that is unless I can't resist another lake scene. It's funny, I never think of moving back to the islands, but when I am quilting, sometimes it feels as if I never left.