Joe the Blogging Quilter

Top Kill

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:46:13 -0700

I just took this out of the frame yesterday and am binding it now. This quilt started out as a sort of abstract tree I was going to call “Tree of Second Life,” a sort of play on words between quilt history and an internet realm. Then the oil spill happened. Like most people, I suppose, I was pretty upset about it and feeling impotent hearing about it. On my way home from the studio, I remembered that many years ago my son Jules had asked me for a quill pen. I took him straight to the art supply store and bought him a quill and a bottle of archival ink. He used it to make some scrolls of scribbles. (Jules later became a writer and is now starting high school at the School of the Arts in San Francisco.) Anyway, the ink sat on my refrigerator for 10 years. Until that day.

I spread the quilt top out on my porch, opened the ink and threw it across the top, picked up the bottle and threw it again. As you can see, different fabric had different absorption and wicking properties.

I thought the whole thing called for big stitch quilting, so I used a couple spools of Knit CroSheen, one orange and one green, and quilted all kinds of freehand shapes and patterns across it.

Now the quilt is so upsetting to look at that I can’t imagine having it on my wall or my bed. But maybe I’ll get used to it. I know that if I ran across it at a yard sale I would want to know the story. I think I’ll call this quilt “Top Kill.”

Four Patch

Thu, 1 Jul 2010 09:08:38 -0700

I keep looking for ways to cut stuff up and sew it back together that will be both fun to do AND fun to teach. The idea is that I will have to teach this class for the next 10 years or so. And what I am always trying to fin d is the set of instructions that will be both perfectly open-ended and strict enough to be freeing.

They need to be open ended so that students can figure out a personal interpretation and run with it without abandoning it altogether. It is important to me to allow for radical departures from my intent in the classroom. If the goal is to get everyone to a place where they feel confident to improvise and explore a technique to see what it can produce, then if someone starts right out exploring, I feel it is my job to encourage and guide with a light hand.

And my instructions need to be strict enough, limited enough, that someone can simply do exactly what I say and feel safe. Feeling safe, trusting me to steer them right, is the most important part of my mission in the classroom. If a quilter is nervous about doing this thing she has never before tried, afraid that she will make a mistake, it is my wish to make her feel like she can’t go wrong. If she simply follows my simple directions, she can’t go wrong.

Here is a sample for a new class that I hope will fit that description: Fantasy Four Patch. My quilt looks like this, but every student’s should look unique and surprising. I’ll let you know.

Words

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:06:00 -0700

When I was in Lincoln, NE I noticed a Hancock’s Fabrics store in the rear of the shopping center across the street from my hotel. As I passed by I also noticed a sign on a stack of fabric that said “80% Off.” That was pretty much the same as a sign saying “Shoe Sale” would be for my wife.

There was not much I wanted--actually, I rarely buy fabric at all--but I found a nice navy blue bolt and bought the whole thing. At home I decided it would make a good trial piece for some bleach processes I had been considering, spraying, dripping, drawing. It came out pretty much like I hoped it would, so I then took it to the studio and started cutting it up.

The rest of the fabric here is the stuff I like to use from the textile training center in Ghana. I have always avoided learning too much about dyeing or printing processes, because i barely have time in my life to do the sewing and quilting I want and need to do, let alone adding in whole new sectors of work to distract. But the bleaching was easy, and I could do it on my6 porch at home, when I couldn’t do any other quilt work anyway.

The name of the quilt top is “His Words Would Not Stay in the Air.” What made this one so different for me was the fact that I made it while I still have one in the frame. Usually i start a quilt and finish it before I start a new one. Now I have my first UFO.

Presidio Habitat Art

Tue, 25 May 2010 15:34:30 -0700

This year is an especially good one to be living in this national park, because it is the site not only of umpteen foot races, bike races and etc, but also of a large scale outdoor art project called “Creature Comforts,” all about the animals of the Presidio. (info here: http://www.for-site.org/presidioHabitats/commissioned.php) This one is near my house and is an imagined re-staging of the famous race between the hare and the tortoise. Neither the Western Hare nor the Western Pond Turtle live here any more, so it is a form of artistic wishful thinking. But every time I go by this finish line it reinforces the idea in my mind that they could live here again and that maybe there is something I can do to make the Presidio ever more friendly to wildlife.

This is just one of many pieces in the woods around here, some for small birds, some for large, some for foxes and coyotes. You walk around in the 1500 acres of woods here in the middle of San Francisco and come upon some surprising sculpture, some enhanced location or crazy scene. I think these art works will be up all summer. Check the website, then come and visit! Make sure and email me first so we can get together.

At the Pilates Studio

Fri, 14 May 2010 15:07:09 -0700

My wife, Carol LeMaitre, owns and runs Sanchez Street Studios in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. Naturally, she lets me hang quilts on the walls. Most of the people who visit the studio their first time notice these big things on the wall and ask her if she makes them.
“No,” she tells them, “My husband does.”
Most people assume she is joking and don’t know if she is being sarcastic in some oddball way or what.
For me the most rewarding part of this fun project is that people spend a lot of time on their backs on these machines, so they can spend 60 minutes or more each week in this room starting at the quilt and thinking up stories that would explain it. So what ends up happening is that quite often people will explain my quilts to me, what the different components mean, why I did it this way or that. Then they get attached to the quilts and get mad at me for switching them out for new quilts. Its gratifying to get instant feedback like this, and to have somewhere to hang every new quilt I make the moment I take the last stitch.