zoethe

I am still thrilled to bits with my studio, which I continued to "feather" yesterday, and delighted that I will soon be sewing in there.

But one of the reactions I saw to sharing my pictures was, "I wish I had space for my crafts." It was a vivid reminder that we - all of us, me included - make limitations for ourselves where, really none should exist.

The best example of how such limitations are self-imposed is my buddy Craig. When John and I first lived in Fairbanks, we made friends with a great couple, Robin and Craig. Robin and Craig lived in the a tiny, lopsided cabin. The house consisted of a living room about the size of your average dorm room, one bedroom just large enough for their kingsized bed and a couple dressers, a small kitchen with just enough room for a breakfast table, and a tiny bathroom. The most spacious area was the artic entry, which served as storage for all the stuff they would have kept in a garage if they'd had a garage. Standing flat-footed, I could put both hands on the ceiling, palms flat.

In that tiny space, Craig ran a darkroom. He repaired, tuned, and waxed skis. He practiced his martial arts skills and went from novice to black belt in Tai Kwon Do. He crafted and finished a gorgeous blanket chest. He sewed gear for back country use. Together the two of them butchered a moose, cleaned and processed countless salmon, prepared for extensive trips, and probably some other skills I'm not remembering. Oh, and he played a mean guitar.

All of this in a space not as large as my living room.

Yes, practicing his Tae Kwon Do meant a lot of turning carefully and backing up so as not to kick through the TV. Yes, his craftwork meant that there were weeks on end of stepping over power tools in the middle of the floor. Yes, his darkroom meant lifting the developer out of the tub every day in order to shower (and then returning it to the tub because its alternate resting place was the toilet). Yes, it wasn't unusual to step the wrong way and create a domino fall of skis and poles. None of it fit neatly into the space. But he still did it. He still accomplished amazing and beautiful things, even without a dedicated space.

So don't give up. Don't get discouraged. You can still accomplish your dreams. You may just have to step sideways through a hallway to get there.

It was not the Tuesday I was looking for. This was probably obvious from my earlier post demanding sympathy (and thank you all for doing a bang-up job at it). By the time I got back in the house and got settled down from all the chaos, it was obviously not going to be a business day. Hell, there was no "day" left.

So, my intention was to go to bed early. This is often my intention when Ferrett is out of town. It is an intention seldom accomplished, however, since I find it hard to go to sleep without him. And the fact that I am writing this at 2:30 in the morning is proof of my utter failure this time.

But that failure was not caused by sitting at the computer, playing mindless video games and getting frustrated with myself. No, tonight's failure was generated by action.

As many of you will recall, a while back I organized myself a sewing space in my laundry room so that I could get back to quilting. At the time I was pleased to have a space to sew, and eventually I added some fabric storage, but try as I might I didn't feel like it was a space in its own right. A couple months back, I expanded that space by getting Ferrett to move his drums to the empty corner of the family room and taking over the last bits of the laundry room. It's a large space, more room than I've ever had for sewing before, and when I got it arranged I wanted to feel excited about it as a space. But it wasn't there. I felt awkward and silly calling it my studio - it was a laundry room with sewing stuff in it. And I couldn't figure out why.

Then this evening I was reading a magazine I picked up called "Where Women Create" that's all about studio spaces. And it just made me more hopeless - well, of course their spaces are awesome. They are old barns or airy lofts or screen porches. I've seen this before, and I know that what I've got is a basement. An unfinished space of concrete and appliances, plumbing and electrical.

And, it hit me like a smack to the back of the head, absolutely nothing of me.

The factor tying together these women's spaces was not awesome location; it was what they did with that location. They made it their own. They filled it with inspiration and memory and comfort.

I'd stuck a couple tables in a room and waited for the magic. How oblivious could I be?

My first thought was, "gods, now I have to spend money buying myself stuff." But you know what? I have stuff. But because of my clutter-averse nature in my living area, lots of it was stowed away in an attempt to keep things clean.

All I had to do was open some cabinets.

I started hauling bits and pieces of things half forgotten, things loved but crammed away, and before you knew it, the room had flashes of character. But the washing machine area was a glaring eyesore, ruining it all for me. And then I realized part of the reason why: it looked like a basement because it was grimy like a basement. That set me to cleaning the floor under the laundry sink and around the machines. It was transformative.

The other thing I realized that that I had neither art nor craft on display in the room. That's right, my "studio" didn't have a single thing I'd made hanging on the walls.

How

Fucked up

Is that?

Now there is, at the cost of an entire evening. And, yes, now that 3am is rolling around, much of a night. There are still plenty of things I want to do there, and I'm sure there are other items that will make their way into the room. But I made a good start on creating creative space.

For those who are interested, ( here are pictures )
Now I really do have to get some sleep!

The challenge was simple, the results complex and beautiful. yuki_onna (otherwise known as award-winning author Catherynne Valente) announced an invitational art show for the release of the concluding book in her two-book series, The Orphan's Tales. The medium in which people could work was unlimited; the theme of the show was art inspired by either book.

Now, it's always a little scary when you first read the book of a close friend. What if you hate it? What if it's dreadful? What are you going to say, "My, didn't they choose a lovely typeface for the text"?

I needn't have worried. The books are so luminously written that the pages practically glow. They are retold fairy tales - some familiar, some obscure - all twisted and turned to give fresh insight to the familiar icons of our youth. The tales are nested like a Russian doll, pulling you layers deep into the story of the story: a former slave telling the story of her life will lead into the story of how her master received his fortune by magic, which will lead to the story of the wizard's training and so on, until you are several layers deep in the tale. And then the layers will be added back, one at a time: the wizard's story finished, the master's story finished, and finally back to the tale that began the journey.

Honestly, if you haven't read the books yet you should stop reading right now and go order them.

...

Everyone back? Good.

The tale in the book that struck the deepest note in me (and in several others, as you can see from the other art show pieces) was the pirates. Their ship, The Maidenhead, has a tree for a sail, and the crew is made up of women who don't fit into society - a ship full of monsters, and proud of it. Also, the fabulous SJ Tucker (s00j) had written a song about the ship on the album she made to accompany the firstbook (you can hear a sample of the song on Amazon - go here and click on "Shipful of Monsters" ) I decided I wanted to make a quilt based on that tale.

But how to you portray a tree as a sail? It's a lovely mental image in the abstract; try to make it concrete and suddenly you've got all kinds of problems. I thought about an evergreen - the triangular shape lends itself to the image of a sail. But that didn't feel wild enough for this ship. Then I hit upon the notion of a weeping willow. They are trees that dance in breezes, and their long branches make a perfect stand-in for the ropes of rigging. I was getting close, but the pale green uniformity was still not quite the right look. So I changed that to deep tropical greens, and finally had the look I was seeking:


A slightly closer view:


Detail of the sea:


Detail of the tree:


Once I had decided on the look I wanted, I had to figure out construction. I knew I wanted the richness of lots of color in the water and in the tree, so would be working with small scraps of material. In the end, I stuck with the wild and changing theme of the ship and her crew. Except for the base shape of the ship and the bole of the tree, all fabric edges stand loose and subject to raveling - slow change over time, but changeable nonetheless. I spent a lot of time snipping bits of fabric, laying them out on the foundation fabric, standing back to look at them, adjusting, coming back the next day, changing the lighting, until I was finally satisfied with the look. At that point I added the silk cording vines in the tree, tucking their top ends among the leaves and branches and pinning them down. To add to the changeability of the piece, I skipped over the areas where the bottom end of a vine passes behind a cloth branch - that leaves those vines free to be adjusted to different shapes.

That left the sea looking rather empty, so I added silk cording to it as well. I then hand-basted everything down, sandwiched with the batting and backing, and free-form quilted the layers with metallic thread. For the tree, I straight-stitched along all the shapes and added lines of quilting that followed the flow of the branches, but the sea I just stitched wave shapes haphazardly across the surface. In the large sky spaces, I quilted in other forms: a griffin, another ship in full sail, three geese flying, the names of the ship's crew, and the first line of the song's chorus: Sing of the Maidenhead, lass of the sea. Once all that was done, I hand-stitched beads and metallic thread embroidering in the sea and the tree, and added brass findings as ship details. The large red-orange bead along the ships railing is, of course, Captain Tommy's fox tail.

And then I didn't get around to photographing it before it had to go away to the auction. Fortunately, Cat loved it so much that she had to have it for her own, so I can go visit it now and then. And the last time I was there, I took these pictures with my Blackberry. They are pretty poor, but at least they are something. One of these days I will get over there with a proper camera and take decent pictures, but I wanted to at least get these up. Of all the quilts I've made over the years, I am proudest of this one.

Whenever I have been seriously ill, my first acts upon achieving any level of recovery inevitably involve some sort of insanely giant project. This has been the case since I was in high school. I remember being just home from the hospital after fighting off spinal meningitis. I could only stand up long enough to go to the bathroom, but I realized that it was my brother's birthday, and everyone had pretty much forgotten about it. It suddenly became very important to me that he have a cake. We didn't have any cake mix.

I made a cake from scratch, sitting on the floor. I pulled the Sunbeam mixer off the counter, and crawled from cabinet to cabinet, gathering ingredients. I even made frosting. Because being sick getting well makes me crazy.

With that in mind, I think it's clear that fountain was enough to establish that I was, in fact, sick as hell. But I was not done, oh no. I still had crazy energy stored someplace in my body.

I opened the Big Box o' Fabric.

Now, that probably doesn't seem like an undertaking, but in order to make that fabric - and other fabrics I've been gathering for a project - actually usable in a quilt that's to be washable, they all need to be washed thoroughly in hot water to remove any excess dye and then dried on hot to take care of any shrinking. And in order to accomplish that, each piece of fabric has to be separated and unfolded so there aren't any unexposed clumps.

Between the Big Box and other fabrics I'd picked up on sale, I had a lot:


The picture really doesn't convey how much fabric is there. It reminded me of a pile of fall leaves:


I told myself that my back is messed up. I told myself that it was silly. But in the end, I had to do it. Yes, I got down on the floor and rolled in my fabric. Yes, I giggled.

And yes, I even took a picture:


gieves? My contribution to Craft Night tomorrow may be bringing bags of fabric and borrowing your iron....

I finally finished the first project of my renewed quilting career, an Amish-inspired wallhanging that I began almost 18 years ago when living in Fairbanks. I made the top then and quilted the middle portion of it, then could not find a border pattern I liked. Then I got away from quilting for a long time. When I picked it up again, finishing this piece seemed like a good place to start, and in a moment of serendipity I happened across the perfect border pattern in a local quiltshop. This morning I finished the binding. Here's a picture of the whole quilt and a bit of detail on the border. (Crossposted to my journal and a couple communities)

I have not yet begun to quilt.

Though this sounds like a revolutionary's declaration, it's simply a fact of logistics: the quilt shop is only open until 5pm most weekdays, and I was too sick this weekend to shop. Ergo, although I have chosen a pattern for Amy's quilt, I do not yet have fabric, and as I don't want to get mired in another project that will distract me, I have refrained from utilizing my lovely new sewing space.

I have not yet begun to quilt. I have cross-stitched - a much more illness-friendly activity - but not quilted yet.

I hope to remedy that this weekend. In the meantime, my older daughter has made a plea that I share her favorite quilting anecdote with all of you.

It is from a long time ago, in a state far, far away. Alaska, as it turns out. I had been quilting for a few years by this time, and Erin had grown up surrounded by fabric. Sometimes literally - one of her favorite activities when I was sewing was to pull all the fabrics off the shelves in my sewing room and wrap her 2-year-old self in them. This served a couple purposes for me: first, it kept her happily occupied when I was trying to get through a project; and second, refolding all that fabric meant that I stayed aware of what was in my inventory. If you know anything about quilters, you will know that they have a love even greater than cutting large pieces of fabric into small pieces of fabric and then sewing them back into large pieces of fabric.

Quilters love buying fabric. I often purchased fabric that I had no idea how I would ever use - it was just too beautiful to let it come and go from the shop without me owning a piece. So refolding all that fabric was like revisiting dear friends.

All in all, it was a happy, symbiotic relationship. For a while.

I can still remember the day. It was in December, so Erin was not quite three years old. I had just finished making a king-sized quilt of beautiful Christmas fabrics, and was sewing the binding around the edge of it, the very last touch, when the phone rang. I got up from the couch, answered the call, and returned only a moment later to find my cherubic, blonde daughter sitting in my place on the couch. In her left hand was my king-sized quilt.

In her right hand, a pair of scissors. With which she had snipped more than a dozen holes into the back of the quilt.

She smiled up at me. "I kilting Mommy! I kilting!"

She was so proud.

I was so furious.

You see, this was not the first scissor incident in the house. We had gone round and round on the topic of not cutting things up. And here we were again. Only this time, it wasn't just a t-shirt or her bangs. It was an object into which I had poured weeks of my life.

I stood there, paralyzed with anger, and thought, "If I touch her, I will kill her."

I snatched her up and deposited her into her crib with an order for her to stay there. Shaking with fury, I picked up the phone and dialed my friend Barbara, the leader of our quilting group and the mother of Erin's best friend.

I told Barbara what Erin had done. Barbara said, "Kill her."

This helped me regain my composure.

In the end, all the damage had been done in an area only about six inches across. I appliqued a large heart over that spot, and that heart is still on the quilt to this day.

Erin is 20 years old now. But she still remembers. As do I, every Christmas when I get that "kilt" out of storage.

Yesterday afternoon I put the final touches on what I can now refer to as my "studio."

Laughingly, mind you. Laughingly.

The impetus for finishing was telling Amy that I'm starting up quilting again.

"That's great!" she said. "You have to make me a quilt. You made Erin a quilt, but you never made me one."

"I made you a quilt," I protested.

She scoffed at me. "A baby quilt! You never made me a big quilt, and you did for Erin."

And she's right. I did make Erin a big girl quilt, but by the time Amy was a big girl, I was not quilting. So now I am tasked with making her a blue and purple quilt out of sturdy enough fabric that it can be hauled about and thoroughly mauled without falling apart, but also soft and cuddly.

Will get right on that. Bought the tools, chose the pattern, now I just have to get the fabric and get to work.

But I realized that I lacked a working space. I mused this issue, lying in bed Sunday morning, and I remembered that the best working surface I ever had was actually an old door laid over two book cases. It was supposed to be temporary, because it was so ghetto, but in actuality the sturdiness of the door made an exceptional working space and I kept it for years.

What a shame, I thought, lying there, that I don't have a stray door n--SAY!!

Turns out we did, in fact, have a stray door lying about, the door that was at the top of the basement stairs, which I took off its hinges as soon as we moved in (it blocked a window and was never going to be used).

I was in business.

I no longer own half-height file cabinets, but there were other possibilities: book cases, for example. I didn't want to spend very much money, however, and found myself strapped with Golidlocks issues - this one is too low; this one is too high. Eventually, "just right" turned out to be a 4 shelf storage rack from Home Depot, made up into two units in what they call the "work bench" configuration.

( Pictures of my basement: scaaary. )

The room is also the laundry room, which is actually quite handy for prewashing fabric. And there is a large double-sink washtub, so if I ever get back into dying fabrics this is a very convenient setup. All I'm really lacking is storage space - not a problem now, but I know quilting. It will be.

What you can't see is that Ferrett's drum kit takes up a large corner of the room, off to the left of the first picture. He has not been using it at all of late, and unused space in a sewing room soon becomes comandeered. My mind's eye can already see shelves and cabinets there, brimming with bright-colored fabrics. Because, after all, if he's not actually using it....

Consider yourself warned, my love. Quilting brings out a mad streak in women.