Turn, Turn, Turn

From the original "Friendster" version of SOTC.

--------Turn, turn, turn.DATE: 05/31/2006 11:08:20 PM-----

Helloooooo, Quilt Fans!

Thought I'd pitched it in, didn't you? Thought this was just one more 3-month flash-in-the-pan blog, glorious in its brief prime but doomed to inevitable burnout and failure?

No way. Not "State of the Craft."

But to everything, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, etc., and for many of us quilting is pretty seasonal as well. Other things get pretty distracting in spring and summer, like travel, hiking, outdoor activities, and, unless you are Charlie or Eric, the garden. Also, not everyone wants to have five pounds of thick, insulating blanket on their lap during high summer. So the quilting slows down, and naturally the quilt blogging slows down as well.

For me, the quilting year generally begins at the kickoff of the first Oregon Ducks football game, which this year will be Saturday, September 2 (at home vs. Stanford -- a cakewalk). Then, or maybe a little before, the quiltin' will commence in great earnest. Until then, though, progress will be piecemeal at best.

One small thing I do want to do over the summer is find a new host for this blog. Two reasons. One is that the noise-making ads that Friendster has been using lately make me, and everyone else I know, want to put fist through screen. Secondly, only my registered Friendsters can make comments (and even they often have trouble with it). Not that you aren't special, Friendsters. You are. You TOTALLY are. But comments are half the fun with a blog, and the rest of the (suprisingly robust) readership needs in too.

I'll let you know.

Anyway, there are two things worth mentioning from the last month and a half. In quilting, that is. In life in general, there was a fabulous road trip, documented at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/drhandley/my_photos.

The first thing was the Guild Show. Several of y'all came to it, which was TOTALLY GREAT and YOU ROCK. I was very happy with the whole thing. Both of my entries -- the Oregon Map and the Log Cabin, shown in earlier entries -- were hung very nicely, with neighbors that complemented them well. Response from viewers and other members of the guild was very nice. Rather than feeling like I was "OK but way behind the pack," this time I felt like I was "definitely in the pack." It was good.

I volunteered a half day at the show, and when I arrived was given an identifying pink ribbon to wear. "Hostess," it read. The volunteer coordinator seemed surprised by my hesitation to wear this ribbon, but offered no objections as I cut the "ess" off with my jackknife.

The second thing was completeing the wedding present that I obliquely referred to three posts ago. It is one of two mirror-image pieces that are, in terms of design, fragments of a traditional style called "Around the World" that I will talk about in a future post. (This is called "leaving them wanting more.") One of the two goes to our friends Helen and Keir in the UK, who were married last August -- please note that I met the one-year wedding present deadline. The other goes to Sue and I, as a much later wedding present and wall-hanging for our room.

Because of their pattern and because they will be widely-separated twins, I named them "Partway Around the World #1 and #2." I told Helen and Keir that they could decide whether they wanted theirs to be #1 or #2, but I haven't heard back yet.

Well, that's all for now. But we'll talk soon. In September, if not before.

The Invisible Man

From the original "Friendster" version of SOTC.

--------The Invisible Man DATE: 04/19/2006 10:51:16 AM-----

I went in to Montavilla Sewing yesterday to pick up my machine; I had had to take it in last week after it started having trouble with erratic tension and skipped stitches. As usual in any sewing or quilting establishment where they don't know me, I had to wait five or six minutes before anyone acknowledged my presence -- it takes them that long to realize that I'm not just a husband in tow. Finally, a perky counterperson asked if I needed help

"I'm here to pick up my machine," I said.

"Oh! Well, can you give me your phone number?" she asked.

"Sure," I said, and gave her the number of my work phone, a number that has about 120 extensions.

She tapped on the computer, looked up at me, and brightly said

"Phyllis?"

Well, no.

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All right, I'm going to apologize right up front for cribbing my title from Ralph Ellison. Certainly I don't feel discriminated against in any meaningful sense as a man trying to make his lonely way in a woman's world. By and large, I've felt very welcomed to the craft. But still, I am obviously and conspicuously off-demographic, and people's reactions can get kind of comical sometimes.
A few months ago, I went to a new quilt shop near my neighborhood. The woman minding the store gave me a big, friendly welcome when I came in, and then said "You must be here about the leak!"

I wasn't there about the leak, so I said "nope!" I suppose could have been more helpful by saying something like "No, I'm actually a quilter, here to purchase some quilt-related merchandise!" but for whatever reason I hate spelling that out. So, I just said, "nope."
Clearly suspicious, the woman gave me a much less friendly "can I help you with something, then?" Having already spotted what I was looking for, I said, "no, I'm just looking for some chalk."

At this point, she actually moved as if to block me from going any further, and said -- in a disgusted tone, as if I'd said I was looking for some Night Train -- "Chalk?!? This is a quilting store!"

"Yes," I acknowledged. "And you sell quilter's chalk." I helpfully held up a bottle of the stuff (which is used to make non-permanent guide lines when quilting) to show her.

At this point, she made a dizzying 180 from hostile to fawning. For some reason, that bugged me more than the hostility. The hostility had been a fairly understandable reaction to an unexpected presence in her store. The fawning was just annoying, and has so far kept me from going back.

If I go in any new shop with Sue, she will always have to redirect the storekeeper's attention to me. Absolutely always. She's good at it, though.

I've noticed at guild that people are quick to ask me to show them whatever I'm working on, and that some are quick to tell me what I'm doing wrong -- or at least, what they would do differently. But maybe that happens to all new or young members.

It's a fairly common thing that quilters, on meeting me, rush to reassure me that "oh, I know a lot of men who quilt." I've learned not to probe on this point. If I do, they will then tell me about the one man they know who quilts, then look pained.

When I show up at a quilt show, I'm often told that there are "several quilts in this show by men." Well, if that's true, there must be a bunch of male quilters out there named "Sonya," "Margaret," and "Julie."

What they are really trying to do, I suspect, is reassure themselves that I, the person in front of them, is not a freak. My mom, similarly, used to always talk about how "masculine" my quilts were, until I started teasing her about it. "My son's not a freak!! My son's NOT a freak!!" Although I'm not a big fan of embroidered flowers, chintz prints, and ruffles, I have a hard time seeing anything distinctively testosterone-driven in my work, either.

The most odious indignity that a quiltin' man must suffer, though, is exposure to books and articles about Quilts for the Men in Your Life. These are invariably ghastly. Quilts for Men are always thematic, and the themes are as follows: Cars. Sports. Huntin'. Fishin'. Golf. Ties. Yes, friends, that's the sum total of what men are about. Now, in theory, it would be possible to create a golf-themed quilt that was attractive, interesting, or in excellent taste. But I ain't seen it yet.

Sorry this entry doesn't have pictures.

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COMMENT:AUTHOR: Charlie DATE: 05/14/2006 06:28:10 PM
Michael man, I hear you. You would not believe the looks I get at my pole dancing classes at Bally's.-----

The Challenge Quilt. About Time.

From the original "Friendster" version of SOTC.

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The Challenge Quilt. About Time.
DATE: 04/11/2006 10:49:01 PM
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All right. At long last, I can show you the challenge quilt. Here it is:

And here's the "artist's statement":

Each square of the Quilt Map of Oregon represents an area of 12 miles by 12 miles. The colors are meant to generally represent types of vegetation, and for their exact distribution I drew heavily on land use maps in the Atlas of Oregon . Quilting represents county boundaries. Most major cities, mountains, and lakes are shown, and are accurately placed within a few miles. Those familiar with the state should be able to pick out the Ochoco, Strawberry, Blue, and Wallowa Mountains, as well as familiar features like the Willamette Valley, Mt. Hood, Crater Lake (and Wizard Island!), and the lower Columbia River.

So, there you have it. The reason it took so long is that I had to find a piece of fabric for each of the 600 squares that represented the terrain, and possibly the cities or mountains, in that section of the state. I actually laid the whole thing out on a poster-sized map of the state -- if you know what to look for, you can see that in the very first picture in this blog.

Last night was the big meeting where the guild voted for the best 8 challenge quilts that will be representin' PDX at the national competition in Nashville. It turned out there were about 20 entries. Mine was probably 19th best, which means I achieved both my goals: I wasn't (too) embarassed to have my piece hanging, and I didn't come in last. After the 8 winners were picked, the rest of us were called up to stand by our pieces, and everybody got a polite round of applause. That was nice. The only moment that could have been a drag was when someone who didn't know I was in the competition pointed mine out to me as one of the ones that "doesn't work." But it didn't bug me. I know it doesn't work.

There are two design problems with Quilt Map. One comes from the dark value of the ocean. I was forced to do a dark ocean by the dark blue of the challenge fabric, but that makes the left edge of the piece much more aggressive than the mild greys that represent Washington, Idaho, Nevada, and Cali. I could have countered this if I'd gone with my initial impulse, and shown the other states in saturated colors like purple, rust, etc. But then, there wouldn't have been enough contrast around the state borders, and it would have been hard to recognize the whole as a map of Oregon. That would have been bad, for a map of Oregon.

The other problem is with the quilting. In the quilt world, dense quilting is valued. And for good reason -- it makes a piece look crisp and gives it texture. Sometimes, the texture of dense quilting is enough, even on an otherwise blank piece of white fabric, to make a stunning quilt in and of itself. Loosely quilted pieces, by contrast, look kind of dull and flabby, and tend to sag.

In Quilt Map, I used quilting to show county lines. That's cool cartographically, but on the west side of the state results in a pretty thin quilting pattern. On the east side of the state, it's a disaster. Malheur County is a big sucker, leaving a gap of five or six inches between quilting lines. Not cool. I entertained the idea of also quilting in rivers and highways, maybe in different colors of thread, but the same problem would come up in the eastern half of the state, where rivers and roads are fairly infrequent. Plus, it would have raised all sorts of tricky decisions about WHICH rivers and roads to include. And I was getting exhausted.

So, it ain't going to Nashville, but it will be at the Quilt show on April 28, 29, 30. (see the post titled "Log Cabin," below). See ya there.

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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Eric
DATE: 04/13/2006 10:35:08 AM
I think it's a really great quilt to be honest with you. Aren't you awarded extra points just for the concept?
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Michael
DATE: 04/13/2006 06:24:08 PM
To be fair to myself, the judging was done without people seeing the artist's statement. So, they wouldn't have necessarily had a sense right away of how accurate it is, or why it was so thinly quilted. But on the other hand, the eight pieces that are going to the national show were all really spectacular. The people in the guild are wicked good.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Charlie
DATE: 04/15/2006 04:47:37 PM
I agree with Eric that you are being too hard on yourself. I think it's really cool. But I did find it interesting that you felt yours to be the 19th best. Was there one that you knew no matter what everyone's was better than, or was it a modest mathematical way of expressing it's not in the top 8 but was not the worst?
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Michael
DATE: 04/17/2006 03:54:42 PM
Let's make an analogy recording music. We'll stipulate that a few of my songs are really good, as songs -- good lyrics matched to a good melody, harmony, beat, and arrangement. Would you expect to ever hear them on the radio? Of course not. The reason is, I am shaky on the basic skills (singin', playin' guitar) and also on the more subtle skills (miking instruments, equalizing sound, mixing, and all of the stuff I don't even know about that makes a recording sound radio-ready). Other songs, perhaps even a few that arguably aren't as good in their ideal form (if I may get Platonic on your ass (so to speak)) are going to get airplay. Mine aren't.

Thus it is also with quilting, my friends. The overall idea may be good, arguably more interesting than what some of the others came up with, but the details of the execution mean something too. In fact, they mean a lot. I am not embarassing myself by putting quilts like this in the show, but you could make a reasonable case that I'm really a year or two away from "show-ready."

Yes, there was a clear loser, although it was a perfectly respectable entry. (There were also a few that were eliminated for not meeting size requirements, so I guess I "beat" them too). I felt like I was a pretty clear runner-up loser, but a generous observer could have put me in a lower tier with 3 or 4 others.

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Wedding Presents

From the original "Friendster" version of SOTC.

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Wedding Presents
DATE: 03/26/2006 11:37:56 PM
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I'm sure, gentle reader, that you have been breathlessly anticipating an update on the challenge quilt. Well, I finished it on the Sunday the 12th. On Monday the 13th, I handed it over to a woman from the guild. It was very strange to work on something so intensively for so long, and then to immediately give it to a stranger. But, I guess if I want people to see what I make, I'm going to have to get used to handing pieces over and trusting that they'll come back eventually.

I still can't show you a picture of the challenge quilt, unfortunately. That will have to wait another two weeks, until the Guild meeting on April 10.

With that big project off my plate, I spent a few days going nuts on about four different projects, making bits of incremental progress on all of them instead of focussing on any one piece. It felt good to work on some less fussy quilts, where I could get into a groove and make some fast progress without sweating over every individual stitch.

But eventually, it was time to get serious again. In particular, I've been thinking I really should get started on a wedding present for a good friend who got married, uh, last August. I am a firm believer in the one-year rule, but even at that I've only got four months left on the meter. So, that's what I'm working on now.

Now the problem with this as a blog subject is that once again I'm working on a project that I can't show you a picture of -- since my friends who got married last August might be among you. And I know you, gentle reader. For all of your sophistication and book larnin', you mostly want purty pictures from your quilt blog. It's OK, you can admit it. It's perfectly normal and healthy to want to see pictures of attractive quilts.

So, what I'm going to do is show you some pictures of wedding quilts past. First, though, a note to my friends who were married last August, if you happen to be reading this: what I'm working on for you is not quite to the scale of the pieces I'm describing here. It will be a smaller thing, but hopefully special in a different way. All will become clear.

OK, where were we? Oh, right, wedding quilts. The first one I made was for Mark and Lisa, back in 2000. I don't have a good picture of it, but this one will give you the idea. I designed it with the help of a seventh-grade lad named Ethan (this was back when I was a student teacher) and consequently the wedding symbolism is not as subtle as it might be. But perhaps that is part of the charm. It was my first foray into jewel tones, and with only four fabrics (green, red, blue, black) it is unusual for me -- most of my quilts use at least 10 fabrics, and many use hundreds.

Alas, I did not finish it in time. I flew it out to Huntsville, Alabama for the ceremony, showed it to 'em (see figure B), brought it home, finished it, and shipped it back out to 'Bama, where it has since remained as far as I know. Mark and Lisa seem to like it. I hope so.

Two years later, it was Mary Beth and Kim's turn. I brought them in on the design process, asked them about colors, showed them sample quilts and asked for their opinions on them, and asked them to describe what the perfect wedding quilt for them would look like. After this exhaustive market research, I sat down and came up with a kinda clumsy design in which the wedding symbolism, at least, is a little more subtle. I borrowed it back today so I could get a good photo of it, and I have to say, it's much better than I remembered it. Which is good. A wedding quilt is not where you want to do your crap work.

I don't know if other quilters feel this way, but a wedding gift is kind of a special thing to work on. For one thing, it involves you in actively celebrating your friend's marriage for several months in advance, which is a pretty powerful and joyful experience (note: I have been strongly in favor of the four marriages mentioned here. Making a quilt for a wedding you had big reservations about might suck.) And then, to be completely honest, there is the gloating certainty that your gift is going to make a big splash. Let's face it, a handmade quilt is the atomic bomb of wedding gifts. You know that you are going to wipe the gift-giving floor with those crass bastards who paid thirty bucks for something off the registry at Target.

Or so I had always supposed. Then came 2004, and Marsha and Charlie's wedding. I made an all-flannel piece, my only one to date. It uses only three winter-color fabrics in a simple (although hard to piece) pattern. Wedding symbolism is present but subtle. Not terribly showy, it is nevertheless among my favorites of everything I've made.

Nice quilt, right? I must have rocked the gift-opening, right? No. I had not accounted for Charlie's mom, the quilter. Nor for Charlie's grandma, the quilter. And you know, it's hard to compete with mom and grandma. Poor Marsha and Charlie -- I'm afraid they have a few more carefully handcrafted blankets than they really know what to do with.

Well, that's all I have to say about that for now. A procedural note -- I've changed the subtitle for this blog, which was originally going to be about my adventures in both quilting and home music recording. Turns out I like writing about the one, but not the other. So, we're talking quilts here. Nothing but quilts. Peace.

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Tradition!

From the original "Friendster" version of SOTC.

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Tradition
DATE: 03/09/2006 10:07:39 PM
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So, I've been tracking down Portland quilters under 45 on Friendster and trying to start conversations about, well, being a quilter under 45. Kind of fun. There's even a male or two out there.

One of the people I've met is Cynthia, a designer who has a web page showing some of her quilts. They are great -- very fresh and spontaneous, and miles away from the block patterns that are at the core of the American quilting tradition. Quilts like this are called "art quilts." I'm not always crazy about them. They usually veer toward the frou-frou or cutesy, and are often embellished with embroidery, buttons, beads, and other bric-a-brac. Not my thing. Cynthia's, though, are very excellent. What I love about them is that she has combined the spontineity and painterly possibilities of the art quilt with the discipline and dignity of the traditional quilt. Really. Check it out!

Now, when she looked at my quilts, Cynthia initially characterized them as "traditional," which I have to admit came as a bit of a shock. I've always thought of myself as the edgy young guy pushing the envelope. Examining this idea now for the first time, I have to admit that it is basically a crock. But, before I lay down the pretext altogether, I want to lay a case out here that I am at least not a completely hidebound, musty, cobwebbed traditionalist. Ready? Here goes:

Exhibit A: Two Complex Shapes, a quilt I made at the very end of the 90s. This is probably the most original thing I've ever made; I've literally never seen anything else like it. I was dating a painter at the time, and tried to incorporate some of her ideas about composition in my own medium, on a free-form quilt. I made the basic sketch while one of my students gave an oral presentation, and when sketch and presentation were both finished, I realized I hadn't heard a word he said. I gave him a "C," figuring that a good presentation would have held my attention.

Complex Shapes, like most of my quilts until recently, is very weakly quilted. Because of that, and because it hung for years in my old apartment, it sags and doesn't have the visual impact it might. Sometime later this year, I want to requilt it. It can't hurt it, and it might turn it into a real showpiece.

Exhibit B: Sue's Quilt, a quilt I made for Sue, duh. This one came out of the collision of two kind of wacky ideas I had in 2002. On one hand, I was knocking around with some image software, trying to see how big a non-replicating pattern I could make using squares of 1x1, 2x2, 3x3, and 4x4 units. (Yes, I know that's a little strange). On the other hand, I randomly decided to buy a box of scraps on Ebay from some dude in San Fransisco who makes doll clothing, with the purpose of challenging myself to make a quilt out of whatever happened to be in the box when it arrived.

I ended up using the pattern of squares with the scrap fabrics, and this was the result. It was a real challenge of composition and construction, but I'm happy with the way it turned out. Sue seemed pleased, too -- "continually pleased," she says, popping into the room. This ended up being the first piece I displayed outside of a small town, at the 2005 Northwest Quilters show. It was hardly a showstopper, but it is another one that is essentially unique -- I don't think anyone else has made a quilt quite like it.

Exhibit C: Japanese Garden, one of three "slash quilts" I made in the late 1990s. This one belongs to my dear friend Mary Beth. Breaking a background fabrics with "slashes" of inset strips is not a unique idea with me, but I think I applied it pretty well. I was into Kandinsky at the time, and I think I was trying to cop some of his big compositional lines. I ought to mess with that technique again sometime.

Let me finish by saying two more things about tradition. First, I like to work with geometries of rectangles and triangles, as have many quilters before me. Because of this, I'm forever coming up with an original design (only once have I ever made a quilt from someone else's pattern, and that was for a class, so it doesn't count) only to learn that I've replicated something that people were making back in the 1870s.

Take this one -- I came up with that pattern myself, on graph paper, after Thanksgiving dinner in 2004. I've got witnesses! But somehow, I wasn't the first in the hundreds of years of the quilting tradition to think of it, and I've since seen several quilts with the exact same pattern in books and magazines. But none with such fabulous colors.

Which brings me to my final point. Even within the most cliched and common of the traditional patterns, there is a lot of room for innovation, discovery, and artistry. The Log Cabin from the last post is an example of this; where most quilts in this very traditional pattern take their effect from fabric groups of contrasting value, I juxtiposed fabric groups of almost exactly equal value, but from opposite ends of the color wheel. The quilt works, in my humble opinion, because it has both a traditional structural vocabulary and a warm glow all of its own that comes from its color contrast. "Around the World" is about as traditional a pattern as there is, but all four of my AtW quilts have messed with the conventions somehow, either unraveling the structure or using unorthodox fabric sets -- but that's a post in its own right.

Anyway, time to wrap this up with a spectacular display of banality: Tradition is good! Innovation is good! Growing from the roots of your Tradition toward the flowering of your Innovation is good! And, in a sense, inevitable.

Thank you for your kind attention, gentle reader! You rock!

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Log Cabin

From the original "Friendster" version of SOTC.

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Log Cabin
DATE: 03/02/2006 09:35:22 PM
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We took new pictures tonight of the Log Cabin quilt -- the one I talked about way back in the first post. I needed a new picture to use with the entry form for the Northwest Quilters annual show. It's not a juried show, so it will definitely hang. So, y'all can come out and see it... amid a zillion other fabulous quilts, most far superior!

The Northwest Quilters 32nd Annual Quilt Show will be April 28, 29, and 30 at University Place, 310 SW Lincoln, in Portland. You should check it out. Really!

Photo by Sue. By the way, you can click on any of the photos in this blog for a larger version....

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A Quilt for Baby Ira

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A Quilt for Baby Ira
DATE: 02/25/2006 09:11:54 PM
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From the original "Friendster" version of SOTC.

Three cheers, and all that: our friends James and Mia have a new baby boy, Ira Anton Bak Hazuka, born on Monday the 13th!

I've been thinking about them a lot, and on Monday the 20th, while I was playing hooky from work to take my niece Cady to the zoo, I decided I wanted to make Baby Ira a crib quilt. But, since Cady was in town and because I am still working on the challenge quilt, it couldn't be a big, time-consuming project. I decided I would use a super-simple pattern (a "one-patch," for those of y'all in the know) and minimal quilting, which is best for a baby blanket anyway -- tight quilting makes a blanket stiffer, less snuggly, and less warm. Moreover, I decided to make it a challenge to myself: to see if I could make the whole thing in a single evening!

Answer: I couldn't. Now, if I had just stuck with the original pattern, I think I could have. But when I finished it, it wanted a border, so I added that, and then the border wanted something interesting in the corners (I decided on simple "nine-patches"). So, by the time the face was finished, it was bedtime. So, in the end, it took me an evening to piece it, and another evening to quilt it. Oh, and a few extra hours to bind it. But who's counting?

I think it looks pretty good. If nothing else, it's nice and soft, so hopefully it will be a good night-night for the boy. It felt great to make it. Obviously, it was great fun in a Celebrate-the-Joy sort of way. But, it also felt really good as an exercise in the craft. After all of the slow, tedious detail work I've been doing on the challenge quilt, it felt great to pound out something good, quickly. Making decisions (about the border, backing, and binding) on the fly, I felt confident and competent at every stage of the process. I even felt competent with the machine quilting, which is a big first for me.

A little detail I'm proud of is that I quilted Ira's name and birthday into the border. It's the first time I've used a technique called free-motion quilting. I took a class in it a few years ago, but there was a problem with my machine and until I got it repaired in October (thank you, Montavilla Sewing!) it couldn't handle free-motion. I think it came out pretty well, for a first-time effort.

I should include a quick shout-out to Cady for keeping me company during the quilting and for telling me, correctly, to get rid of the pink square! At ten, she has already made two quilts herself (with grandma's help), so maybe she'll be the next generation.

Anyway, I had a great time making Ira's baby quilt, and I hope he finds it cozy, warm, and comfortable. Many well-wishes and much love to Mia, James, and their new baby boy!

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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: larissa
DATE: 02/26/2006 05:09:14 PM
michael! you are so talented. congrats to your friends and new life!
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: mia
DATE: 02/26/2006 06:18:52 PM
michael, i was boasting about your quilt to everyone i know. thanks. you are the great uncle to Ira. can't wait to see Ira talking and have a decent conversation with you. you are the best.
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