I Will Never Make a Quilt This Bad Again

...I mean, maybe I'll make one that you think is uglier, but I doubt I will reach such technical depths again.

I used to number my quilts when I started them, instead of when I finished them.  Since this one I just finished is #35 -- when Purple & Blue was #57 -- you can get a sense of how long it was in the hopper.  In fact I started it sometime in 2001.

In fact, I started them in 2001.  They were to be four separate panels, roughly 2 1/2 feet square, each representing one of the four seasons.  The plan [over there to the right] was kind of mathematical, with central strips of eight inches flanked outwards with strips of four inches, two inches, one inch, a half inch, and a quarter inch.  Then there would be a "central" piece one diagonal space from the center, and an around-the-world type cycle around that.

Oh, and this was going to be my big adventure in hand quilting, too.  I had never done any, so it was my big opportunity to learn and practice the ancient and venerable art, etc. etc.

Well.  Progress was brisk in the early going, and within only three years I had fall and winter pieced out.

Occasionally, I did a little hand quilting on them.  But not very often.  The project petered out.  Then, in 2007, I pieced the other two seasons.  And then, nothing.  They've been a perennial "to do" item ever since, but never one I had any particular enthusiasm for.

This September, I realized that I really don't have any interest in hand quilting, nor in tripping over the quilting hoops all the time.  I tossed them in a free box, then turned my attention to the Four Seasons.  "Why on Earth," I thought, "would anyone, including me, want a quartet of panels that had to be hung separately but in a set?"  Not being able to come up with an answer, I went about a highly jerry-rigged process of sewing them together into one single unattractive wall hanging!  Here it is:

You'll note that it already looks a little dated; that's what happens when you spend nine years.  Nor do the color value schemes quite match; they weren't intended to be seen that close together.  I had fun with the wacky spiral quilting, after ripping out the hand quilting.  But it's obviously cobbled together; check out the amazingly un-square bottom edge (it's worse viewed from the back, since the four panels weren't even backed with the same fabric).  What really slays me, though, is the elegant center join:

Well, live and learn.  The point is, it's finished.

Dimensions: 48" x 46" (Not square!)

Batting: Assorted.

Backing: Two different kinds of dark blue.

Begun: 2001, 2004, and 2007

Finished: October, 2010

Intended Use/Display: I have no idea.

Neoplasticism 2.0

Synchronicity, part 1

So last summer Mrs.5000 found this big box of scrap corduroy for a buck at a garage sale and hefted it home a good mile or something so she could give it to me for my birthday. Mrs.5000 understands me.

Meanwhile, in 1921, Piet Mondrian painted one of his famous grids of rectangles and primary colors. (Neoplasticism, I think the genre is called. The de Stijl movement! i iz likes art history.) This particular one is usually called Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

And so eventually the idea of "What shall I do with the corduroy?" rattling around in my head ran up hard against the idea of "you know, of all the painting genres, the de Stijl stuff is the one that would be most susceptable to a treatment in quilt form. From that collision was born a Bee in my Bonnet*, which involved compulsive internet searches for the simpler of Mondrian's work and appraising sorting of my corduroy trove.

Once I found Composition, I transferred its grid onto graph paper, made some very rough color equivalences, and started cutting. And when I say "rough" color equivalences, I mean a not-as-light-as-it-could be grey for white, burgandy for red, golden tan for yellow, and a dark, greenish blue for blue.


Nevertheless, I am very happy with my little "Mondrian Quilt" face. Indeed, I bet its one of the best adaptations of Mondrian in scrap corduroy to have been achieved on the West Coast this year!

Next question: how am I going to quilt this sucker? I guess I'll have to try to be guided by the obvious question: How would Mondrian quilt it?

Also:

The is the 100th State of the Craft post. Huzzah!

Looking for a Sign, part IV

OK, to bring yourself up to date on this "Looking for a Sign" business, you should first read Tuesday's post.

Then, make sure you've read yesterday's post on the Life & Times.

OK? Good.

Having looked at the last itteration ("Symbol #4") in yesterday's post, Fingerstothebone suggested:

You can try closing the bottom so that the 2 pointy ends meet up, and then extending a downward gentle curve to reference, but not copy, the two curls at the top.

So when I did that -- and oh yeah, pared down the upper left "arm" of the figure -- it ended up looking like this (Symbol #5):
And that got me thinking that it might look lighter, and more alphabetic, if I made the upper-left arm and the bottom curl into two separate elements. When I did that, and flipped the whole thing on its vertical axis, it looked like so (Symbol #6):
Then I flipped it vertically (Symbol #7)...
And finally rotated that puppy twenty degrees to the left (Symbol #8).Out of all of the options presented here and in earlier posts, are there any that particularly appeal to you? Please feel free to jump into this democracy-assisted design process!

Looking for a Sign, part II.

It's the first ever post featured both on the Life & Times and State of the Craft! I'm so efficient I can hardly stand myself.

Last year I asked my readers of the Life & Times of Michael5000 blog to suggest a neutral symbol for me to use as the dominant element of a new quilt. I wanted something that appeared to have meaning but that was actually meaningless, or that meant something completely trivial. I wanted a signifier without a signified, for all y'all who have dipped into semiotic theory. "Why?" you might ask. Reasonable question! I've got no answer for it, however.

The readers came back with some fabulous suggestions! But then the suggestions pretty much just laid around the studio floor for a year, until last week. Having put Symbol on my quilting to-do list, though, I clearly needed to start thinking about what the symbol in Symbol would be.



To review: Symbol is going to use a set of neutral batiks that BigSister5000 gave me for Christmas a few years ago. They will to be pieced together too form a very simple background, and then the symbol itself will be appliqued over the top of them, probably in scarlet. If all goes well, it should look attractive and interesting. With me? Good.



OK, so back to the question of the symbol. As I started chasing down the leads that readers had tossed me, I got kind of interested in the concept of the irony mark. I love the irony mark! Although, if people used it, it might reduce the impact of irony. Ironically. But anyway, in terms of this project, it is perhaps both too meaningful, and too graphically simple to be impressive when rendered at four feet tall.

Similar considerations torpedoed the interrobang.*

I flirted briefly with this symbol for something-or-other from mediaeval alchemy. I could have reversed it or something. But I ultimately rejected it for being, maybe, just a tiny bit too figurative. Which is to say, it looks just a little too much like a critter.

Heather's suggestion of letters from the ancient Soyombo alphabet of the Mongolian language -- see why I pose these questions to readers? -- was pretty awesome. I think they are lovely. I was afraid of what the straight lines of the right and top sides would look like at large scale, though. It seemed like they might be too rigid.

Then, I thought I had it! The letter "aum" in the Devanagari alphabet, used in Hindi and several other languages:

It's lovely! It's curvy! It's simple! It's arbitrary! But... as I soon found out... it is the most common graphical symbol of Hinduism out there. My "arbitrary" symbol was just as content-free as a crucifix, star of David, or yin-and-yang symbol.

Back to the drawing board.

Another reader, G, had suggested I look into Maori design, and I was taken by this pendant I had found:

I don't know if that shape conveys meaning in a Maori context or not, but I wasn't taking any chances. I took out the details on the top left to reduce it to a more graphic level, flipped it around the vertical axis, and "cut a hole" to make it look slightly more caligraphic. Here's what I came up with:

Now, here's the question: Have I successfully come up with a completely arbitrary symbol? In other words, have you ever seen this shape in a corporate logo, in religious iconography, in a foreign alphabet, or anyplace else? 'Cause I don't want to make this thing and discover I've just made an elaborate advertisement for the Americaplump MegaAgriCorp, Inc., or whatever.

* Very possibly the first ever use of this sentence in human history.

QuiltStorm2008: The Beginning

I've alluded several times now to a project I'm calling, tongue firmly in cheeck, QuiltStorm2008. Always before, I referred to it as a project I would be taking on sometime in the vague future.

Well, the future is now.

Last weekend, Mrs.5000 and I made our way down to "The Bins," which is formally called something much more diplomatic, "The Portland Goodwill Outlet" or like that. It is where merchandise that can't be sold at a regular Goodwill goes to die. It's great. There's a big, unadorned industrial space with concrete floors and no decoration whatsoever. The stuff on offer is literally heaped in long rows of rolling bins, with next to no organizing principle whatsoever. After a given bin has been literally rummaged through for a few hours, it is rolled back offstage, and a new bin is rolled up to take its place.

No matter what you buy, it's 69 cents a pound, so long as you buy at least fifty pounds of it. Last weekend, I bought fabric.

Six washing machine loads later, I was ready to commence the pressing and folding of, at a rough guess, around 150 yards of salvage fabric. But first, of course, there was some minor disassembly to be done; although I found several yards of whole cloth, most of this haul was in the form of sheets, curtains, futon covers, and clothing. My rule was to avoid anything that would likely attract a buyer -- no matched sets of sheets or wearable clothing allowed. Basically, I was reclaiming waste textiles, in bulk.

This motherlode of cotton and cotton/poly salvage will now join pieces from my existing collection of sub-standard fabric to make up the raw materials for QuiltStorm. The idea is to create a series -- an "edition," as they say in Mrs.5000's bookarts circles -- of very simple, very easy to make, 100% recycled lap blankets. I've prepared about 20 different designs, but they really all just boil down to sewing a lot of strips together. Here, as mocked up on the fabulous MicroSoft quilt design utility "Excel," is a typical example.:

Or maybe this:

Now, you may be wondering "Why? What is the point of all this?" And that's a reasonable question. But I've got answers!

• I've been spending a lot of quilting time lately challenging my precision and my ability to do fairly detailed work on a bunch of labor-intensive projects. It seems like it might be liberating to work very quickly and loosely on projects that have more room for error.
  
• Having a lot of scrappy quilt tops around means I'll be able to experiment with machine quilting technique without it being a stressful, high-stakes business.


• If it turns out that the finished quilts are really cool, I'll have a lot of really cool little quilts on hand.


• And, the recycling aspect of the project really appeals to me. It's theoretically possible that the raw materials I'm using would have found another buyer if they hadn't found me, but I'm fairly certain that 90% of it would have continued to circle the drain for a short while, or maybe a long while, and then wound up in the landfill. The idea of using them for something useful and interesting, instead, makes me feel connected to the practical roots of the Craft.

I've started by cutting out backs for an ambitious number of, um, "StormQuilts." Eighteen, if I count them correctly (20 would be a nicer, rounder number, but I'm sure that salvage fabric will continue to trickle in). Now, I'll just start cutting lots and lots of strips, and sew them back together to make the faces.

One concern I have -- well, "concern" might be overstating the case, but anyway -- is that if these guys are going to be 100% recycled, I'll need to use scrap or salvage batting. I have enough scrap batting and batting-like stuff for about five quilts, but after that I might have to actually go out and buy batting for these things. Does anyone have ideas for alternative salvage batting?