ArtWalk 2018

"Sway" - 17-1/2 x 39" - Sheila Mahanke Barnes ©2018

ArtWalk officially opens tomorrow with receptions, music, and ART at many locations throughout downtown Sandpoint. My work is at a new location, The Cedar Street Bridge, and I have yet to stop by to see how everything looks, just taking it on faith I guess. It is a more awkward location in terms of accessibility since it does not have its own parking lot like the bank where I'd displayed in previous years, and of course, there is street work going on just a block away making it challenging for even the locals to navigate, but there is hope that this will not deter the loyal crowds who always come out for this event.

I don't think I've shown you Sway in its finished state. I think of it as my showcase piece of the four that will be on display. You've seen the others: Leaf Cluster VIII, Float, and Fracture. If you live in the area, I hope you will stop by my location and say hello!

I Get Behind

Magazines I'd stacked on a printer to sort through later

Now that I've proven to myself that I can indeed set small daily goals in order to meet a deadline, I've taken a few days off before having to dive back into steady work towards completing the next quilt. I'm using part of this time to straighten up the studio from this last push, putting away tools, swooping trimmings into the trash, that sort of thing. But in the process, it is clear I've fallen behind on my documentation files big time (so a printing session is soon in order). But before I tackle that, I've started to tackle one of the peripheral piles I left in place when I did my bigger studio cleanup at the beginning of the year. I'm terrible about this stacking of things that basically just need filing, but it's too easy to convince myself to deal with it later.

Still a lot to sort and file once magazines removed

The pile in question is on top of my pigment ink printer, which I haven't used for a long time. I need to clear some clogged jets to get it functioning again, but without an urgent need to print with it, I've put off that project. On a whim, yesterday found me taking a closer look at what I'd piled on top of it, and it is mostly magazines I wanted to pull individual pages or articles from and whole magazines to keep but in need of flags marking the articles of interest. The rest is loose pages already pulled from magazines, mostly quilting designs for reference and quilts that caught my eye that will be pasted in an inspiration scrapbook. Honestly, it would have taken minutes to tend to each of these as they arose. Now I face a good chunk of time to get it under control.

AQS Award winning quilts worth keeping to ahhh over

On the other hand, it has been a pleasure to go through the magazines (to my surprise, the Quilting Arts ones go back to 2015), viewing the quilts anew and affirming why I'd set these things aside. In some cases, it reminds me of tracks I'd taken off on and abandoned even though not done with the exploration, things I think I could happily revisit at this point. In other cases, I can see that I've grown beyond needing the information that once would have been helpful.

Culling, sorting, filing . . . it's a process we do all our lives I guess. But it's easier to face when we don't let it unduly stack up, when we don't let ourselves get behind.

One More Chance

"Float" 13" x 21" - Sheila Mahanke Barnes ©2018

"Sometimes what you're looking for is right in front of you." Michael Bungay Stanier, Great Work Provocation/Box of Crayons

"Float" is done, the last stitch on the sleeve put in last night. Did I say I was going to face rather than bind it? I did think so since I had no more of the border fabric nor anything remotely like it to use as binding. Facing seemed the only choice. Another bit of chance changed my mind.

Click on photo to see quilting detail

I was looking for a suitable backing as well as that facing fabric which might or might not be the same as the backing. In picking up a short stack of fabrics that I'd not wanted to fold in half to fit in my racks, I found that fabric from the "failed" black dye run of last summer. It was there apparently because I'd pinned a note to it saying to try some bleach discharge shibori with it. But now as it sat next to the top I'd soon be layering and quilting, it looked amazingly close in color to the paint of the lattice and leaf clusters. I auditioned it again once "Float" was quilted and was very pleased to see how well it would work and that the dark binding made for a better visual finish.

How very many times this has happened to me, the chance meeting of just what I need with something that is right in front of me.

With this finished, the 4th piece for my ArtWalk display, all that's left before dropping everything off on Tuesday is pricing, filling out the paperwork, cutting dowels to length and attaching business cards. Oh, and attaching Leaf Cluster VIII to the foamcore board I cut today and slipping it into its metal frame. All very doable with a minimum of stress! 

Chance

Results of a "I don't care" printing session last year

Chance: adjective 1. fortuitous; accidental

I'm well on my way to finishing one last piece for ArtWalk, one that has been fun to work on because every step along the way has been a matter of chance, and I often work best when solutions present themselves by chance rather than by me actively seeking them out. The picture above shows some of what happened when I abandoned my carefully planned stamping placements on specific fabrics and just grabbed some odds and ends that I'd put in my paint area for expending paint on brayers and brushes and testing prints. I truly did not care if any of these worked, and so they all mostly did, exciting me more than the prints I'd spent so much time working out. The one in the lower left has been on the design wall for a year, and as I worked on Sway, I thought its colors would work well with the other pieces I'll have in my exhibit. And because it was so small, I trusted I could actually get it done in time.

"Yes. Chance has always been my best assistant." Director Agnès Varda in Faces Places.

Sway played a part in choosing a border fabric. Frankly, I hadn't decided yet how I would approach this little 10" x 18" uninspiring piece of batik I'd stamped over. But when I put Sway up near it to audition binding fabric and moved a small piece of handdyed fabric from a collection auditioning for something else on another part of the wall to a spot in between the two, I suddenly saw how well it would work as borders for what I was thinking of as "Float". Certainly not enough for Sway binding but would it be enough for "Float"? Just barely; I could cut three 2 inch strips from it, one for each long side and the third cut in half for top and bottom. Close, very close.

“Chance favors the connected mind.” Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

From the get go, this piece had a problem. Because I was just stamping with no real intention, it ended up with nothing going on at the bottom. I've spent months wondering what I could put in there that would look like it belonged with the stamped features. I may have solved the border issue but I hadn't solved how to balance out the bottom. That is, until I was taking a quick look through a basket of batiks for a fabric I've used as piping in the past. Again, it was Sway that led me there, the piece I thought I might add piping to the binding of to spark it up a bit. It was total chance that I saw the leaf batik while fanning through and made the connection that the colors and size of the leaves might work on Float, piling up at the bottom and maybe floating alongside the leaf clusters. I spent some very happy dithering while cutting and arranging.

Top border sewn with a partial seam

I'd been doing math in my head, enough to know that the horizontal border strips would not be long enough to span across the quilt with borders sewn on both sides. Visually, if one is not going to miter a border (and again, not nearly enough fabric here for that) then it's better that the top and bottom borders runs all the way across rather than the sides running all the way to the edges. As I kept playing with the strips for best placement of the fabric color changes, a chance placement reminded me of a block technique that staggers the beginning of each side. The top and bottom border strips were just long enough to span the quilt and one side border, so that became my solution.

You work your way around, each border starting flush with the edge of the quilt and catching the end of the preceding border until you are back to the start where you've left a partial seam. Once the last border strip is sewn, the first strip's seam can be completed.

"More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens." Lewis Hyde, in Trickster Makes This World

And there you have it, a small quilt progressing all by chance, and ready for quilting. This is the most color accurate photo.

Of course, I'd been thinking about using the same dark burgundy thread to quilt around the leaf clusters and lattice as I'd used on others printed with this same color of ink. A little dull and boring but that was all I'd come up with except the possibility of a light green like the batik. It was that leaf batik that showed me there were other options, time to try something different, and here are the threads I pulled for consideration

I was leaning toward the golden browns when I realized I was playing safe again. Yes, I said it again - go bold or go home! The yellow/red variegated King Tut thread won out and is really brightening up the quilt as well as tying in with the rust in the border fabric.

I've started quilting the lattice with the burgundy and it is really doing great things to sharpen up the design. I'm holding off on any more quilting on the leaves until that is all done. Perhaps you can see that faint blue of the print on the batik that is echoed in the batik leaves I fused in place. Depending  on how it looks when all other quilting is done, I may add some blue/green quilting to the leaves. It's a decision I think will be ok to make by chance. 

A Different Kind of Struggle

My latest non-textile art haul

Warning: lots of words and musings, quotations and links; one lousy picture.
 
I may be at least temporarily out of my struggling with my preparation of pieces for ArtWalk, there's a bigger struggle going on that keeps teasing me away from work with fiber. I keep buying sketchbooks and pens and paints and stencils and bookbinding supplies and other things that on the surface have nothing to do with my quilting, even as I am not using any of it on a consistent basis. At times I wondered if I'd lost interest in quilting altogether. At other times, I thought these diversions might simply be a way of procrastinating. I worked at rationalizing time spent away from fabric and stitch, doing my best to believe I was learning things that would cross over. Yeah, there was a bit of guilt every time I turned my back on the studio for something else. But even that guilt has mostly dropped away, and if my art quilts benefit from any of this (and I'm sure they do at least a little), more's the better. Because if I am enjoying new explorations, what difference does it make if I can link it to my primary creative venture. Except that I have so many at least partially formed designs and projects on the textile side that I still want to work on, would really like to see completed. The rest that I fill the time with feels frivolous sometimes, even when it is satisfying.

This interest in things not fiber feels a symptom of something bigger. There's an underlying restlessness I've been noticing for over a year, maybe even longer, that unnerves me because I think of it as unfamiliar and a sign that subconsciously I want change, to shake things up, and that is so unlike me. But it may not be as dire as all that. I've always dabble in new things, tried all kinds of creative things. It was only when I decided quilting was how I really wanted to spend my time that I narrowed my focus and mostly eliminated those other things. So much to learn about the craft of quilting, so many things to try, so many variations to explore, so many techniques to master, so many exhibits to get into. I'm not vain enough to think I've come to the end of what I can learn about quilting, especially quilting arts, and I still get a thrill when things come together in a piece that is especially good work. But I do feel competent in most areas and it does feel like I've accomplished much of what I'd hoped to. Perhaps I'm just to a point where I want to once again broaden my focus to include other things. And with the world at my fingertips via the internet, I am bombarded by fascinating and beautiful images, tickling my brain with ideas of the places I could go, the things I could try.

In the midst of my musing, Austin Kleon to the rescue! Nothing like a good quotation to alleviate guilt and help one see all this is just the natural progression of things. In his post "What do you want to Learn?" he talks about mastery, "branding", and how to re-invent yourself. There's a good video link too that he transcribes quite a bit of. But these are what caught my eye:

"When you feel like you’ve learned whatever there is to learn from what you’re doing, it’s time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again." from his book Show Your Work

"Every single person is a learning machine. You want the challenge of trying something new, figuring out how to do it, mastering it, and then starting all over again. You want to Learn, Leap, and Repeat." Whitney Johnson

Well, I've always said I am like a sponge, gathering information from all kinds of sources, making links and finding places to apply it. "Book learning" mostly, although I must admit I've done the same with my explorations of all kinds with fiber and fabric. I am a student at heart. I don't really want to be confined to a narrow path or recognizable "brand" as talked about in the video.

In another post shortly after, Austin approaches this subject again in "Learning for learning's sake." Just the title had me thinking, "Ah - that's me." He starts right out with a new premise, not what do you want to learn, but what's next? Yes, good question, and this may be exactly what my subconscious has been asking. And he immediately follows up with what's been needlessly bothering me, what if this next thing has nothing to do with your primary thing, that "it’s not professional development, it’s a hobby.” Disclaimer here - he's addressing people who make a living at what they do, which I do not. Yet like Austin, I've always bristled at being termed an amateur or hobbyist in spite of the professional manner with which I've always approached my craft and the exhibiting of it. So for arguments sake, lets just say all of us artists are professionals and anything we do outside of our narrow field that does not directly have "value" to that field is just a hobby.

"First off, I’m trying to imagine Thoreau or Leonardo limiting their interests to “professional development.”

Second, I am so tired of hearing “hobbyist” and “amateur” thrown around as pejorative terms. It’s such a lame, macho move. God forbid we ever do anything for pleasure or love."

There. That is what I needed to hear. And this:

"Creative people are curious people, and part of being a creative person is allowing yourself the freedom to let your curiosity lead you down strange, divergent paths. You just cannot predict how what you learn will end up “paying off” later. Who’s to say what is and what isn’t professional development?"

Indeed, I AM a curious person, as was my father who was always pointing things out to me that I'd walked right by or over, and asking questions, always wanting to know more. I have a hard time understanding people who aren't curious and questioning. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that as my physical health improves, my cognitive health is back on track too, restless to keep learning, asking what's next?

And Now I'm Not...

...Not struggling that is. I wish I knew what flips that switch to change me from the bumbling awkward novice feeling to the confident competent no more second guessing almost on autopilot feeling. Maybe it's the realization that I'm running out of time for dithering. Maybe it's taking on a more I don't care attitude. Or just going into nose to the grindstone just get on with it mode. I wish I had more control over it because it is a wonderful feeling to be back in the driver's seat and making decisions with a minimum of fuss. A few more moves of leaves and said to myself, "Good enough." And as I was stitching them on down the middle (with invisible thread and leaving a bit of each end loose), my mind wandered. I'd considered adding piping in the binding but the batik I thought might work was just too much. But now, with nose so close to the quilting threads, it occurred to me that I could run a line of the lime green Oliver Twist thread next to the binding for a similar but more subtle affect. I laid a length of the thread along the binding and not allowing myself to ask too many questions, decided it would give the finishing touch and be a good tie-in to that same thread in the quilting. Again, I noticed myself thinking, "Good enough," almost as a wall against any inner critique wondering if I could have come up with a better solution. Nope. This looks really good. And those leaves look more like they belong, blending  better now that they are properly attached. I quickly cut and sewed a sleeve and hand-stitched it in place with little ado yesterday, so this one is done and I can start on one more piece for my ArtWalk display.