I’m writing this sad at heart. If I can’t pull the money together for the studio, I’m going to lose it to property tax at the end of August.
This has been a fairly desperate time for everyone, and I know that. When people can’t pay for groceries, you can’t really ask them to pay for art.
But if there is no money for art, there is no art. Art only happens when we make space for it. It doesn’t really matter what things are worth at this point. It’s a matter of paying a bill any way I can.
If my art has made you smile, if you take joy in my colors, if I’ve taught you something you wanted to know, or if I’ve helped in any way, I need your help now.
So far, I’ve put up a Patreon Page, put a number of my sewing machines on sale on eBay, and I’m putting my quilts on sale on Etsy at 40% off. If there’s a favorite piece you’d like, let me know, and we’ll make it happen.
Artists’ lives are full of insecurities. We create no matter what. But we can’t really create security. That comes from community. I’ve worked hard to make artist community available to people who need it. And now I need that too.
I have all my quilts at 40%off. A world of color and light created in fabric and thread. Don’t you have an empty drab wall? The promo code for your discount is TAXSALE.
I’m building a community of artists and art lovers where they can explore fiber art, contemporary quilting, textiles in eye candy, technique, and studio savvy. Explore videos, tutorials, expert techniques, and endless eye candy. You can support me and that community on Patreon.
If you wish to purchase a machine, let us know. We have a 770 Bernina, and a 99 Singer available immediately. Other parts machines too. Contact me for more information.
Many of you have probably had classes with me. God bless you for that! I love my students for their enthusiasm, their creativity, their generosity and their company. We’ve all been on this journey together. I’ve watched us reach for stars, and sometimes catch them too. We grow with our art, by our art, and through our art.
But time catches up. I don’t really teach at guilds anymore. The travel is too hard. That doesn’t mean I’m not growing through my art. I’m still finding new things to do and new ways to do them. ‘And I always want to share them with you.
There’s another downside to not being able to travel. I’m in danger of losing my studio. Because I’m not teaching on the road, I don’t have a steady source of income. I understand it. We’re in a tight economy, and there isn’t always money for art.
So it seems we need to find new ways to do that. I do have a blog. I share on Facebook and Instagram, but I want to give you access to more. I want a place where you can get class booklets that are currently unavailable. Or look up a technique and see it demonstrated step by step. I’ll offer small projects that make a big difference in your skill level. I’ll feed you lots and lots of eye candy. I want to welcome you to where I live, in my studio.
If you’re unfamiliar with Patreon, it’s a platform where you can support me and I can share with you. You become my patron in whatever level is comfortable for you. There is a free tier as well. It’s a small and more regular way to keep art going and to be part of that art.
I’m currently working on a book called In The Studio, which is about the process of creating fiber art. Not the cleaned-up version. I want to show the zigzag process of design and creation. I’ll be offering this book live as I write it so you can see it first.
As a community, quilters have supported me in ways that still stun me. And when I come to you with a need, you’ve all responded so kindly. I would not have become the artist I am without your kindness, care, and support.
So what would you like to see? I need to know. I’m offering books and articles that have become unavailable, project and technique articles and videos, early access to In The Studio, my current book project, live question-and-answer sessions, mentoring, and quilt points where you can purchase a quilt with your Patreon contribution.
I want to honor that support by starting a quilt point program. Every dollar you send me through the Patreon Soar tier goes toward any quilt you wish to purchase. In love with a special quilt? Tell me, and I’ll hold it for you.
Are you interested? What can I offer you? Will you join me?
This has been a rough week of a lot of medical appointments. Nothing bad. Just exhausting and demoralizing.
I’ve stitched the rocket octopuses. I started with a background that reminded me of confetti yarn, bright bits of color on a soft background. So my octs had to be bright where the background was softer. I’m thinking of calling them the Octettes.
But now we’re at the fun point. We get to create the design.
This is the first pin-up. I do several pin-ups with each piece. The first pin-up is just the background and the creatures. With that pin-up, I’ll know my colors, my path and where the creatures interact with each other and the viewer.
The second pin-up is after I add the elemental bits. Usually these are sheer unless they’re rocks. Water, rock, air currents, sunlight. It’s also where I add small elements that help establish my visual path. I’m thinking gold and orange fish.
The third pin-up is my final design. After I do the third pin-up, I’m ready to stitch. And my options are in stone.
So now I can try it all out. Different backgrounds, different octs.
If it’s just one or two possibilities, I pin it up and shoot photos. Here I had a bunch of choices so I photoed the elements and put them into photoshop. It’s a cheap thrill, but it’s much less aerobic.
Here are the ones I like best. I really like the ones swimming in opposite directions. The ones weaving tentacles work best on the larger pieces of fabric. I’m still not sure.
I’ve done this before in a blog called Pin Up Girls: Family Planning for Octopuses. There I was trying out a number of different quilts. This is just one. But it is a good way of looking at options, without having to pin everything up physically.
This has been a week of downtime. Don and I have both had the flu, and we took off studio time. I’ve progressed on 3 octopus quilts, taking them from the pin-up into sewn-down reality. But those two states don’t look very different. So I don’t have much show and tell this week.
Years ago, a mentor of mine told me that when you are young, you pick up everything like you’re in a candy shop. What defines us in the end is not what we take up, but what we put down.
Don wearing my crocheted wing. Don is a good sport.
I have a rotating hobby selection. I tat. I crochet. I play ukulele. I garden. I tweak recipes. I’m rarely on one thing or another for very long. I do cycle back to hobbies when I need something fresh.
crocheted Cthulu head mask
All of these things are artistic. They’re fun. They fill up time. None of them is art.
I believe in art. I believe everyone is an artist. I believe it to be inherent to being human. Art is how we make sense out of our experiences. It reaches way past media. We work it out in music, in painting, in sculpture, in fiber, or in writing. We retell our stories. Within the retelling, we craft our world into something we can live with. We recraft ourselves. If one path closes, another opens to carry this on. I balance between writing and my art. In purpose, they are essentially the same.
Hobbies are about filling time. We entertain ourselves, we learn, we grow. They are a pleasure if we’ve chosen well. Distraction at worst. I am never all that good at my hobbies. I never engage enough to become good at them. But they bring me joy, entertain me, and get me through bad spots. I think everyone should have a bevy of hobbies as a coping mechanism. I keep telling Don, yarn is cheaper than therapy. Hobbies may not be necessary. But they do spread oil on the gears.
Art isn’t optional. It’s a day-to-day struggle to understand what’s going on.
I cant say I understand my art. I sometimes do in time. I know an image gets in my head and I have to work with it. Once I have, something in me settles. I’ve changed myself by engaging with the image.
But before that, I crammed in all kinds of art experiences. I did batik, clay sculpture. I sewed everything I wore except my shoes and my bras. I made stained glass. At some point, Mary Annis gave me a quilt she rescued from our trash can. I’ve quilted ever since.
That was it. What defined me after that was what I put down. Nothing mattered like quilting.
When did my quilting turn into my art? Like most things, it’s hard to see the source. I really don’t know.
At some point, I started taking my quilt to my therapy appointments.I think that probably defines it.
What do the octopuses mean? I think I’m talking about the ability to multitask, think in different ways, and move like smoke and ocum, all of which I desperately wish I could do.
Is it my work? Is it my vocation?
Everything eventually turns into work. There’s the day you have to bind something. The day 6 small quilts are due, and none of them finished. It may be fun. It may not. But you need to get it done.
Also, if you’re going to live off your art, it inevitably becomes work. There’s a lot of perspiration and much less inspiration. You are producing a product. Often, that’s smaller, less exciting pieces. They are worthy. They pay for bread and butter. It’s what you love, but it also has to get done.
Why should people buy art? Because it changes the buyer, too. It makes you laugh, or hope, or cry, or giggle. It opens your heart and your mind. It also supports artists, so they can continue to create the things that change them, change you, and change the world.
So the lines aren’t that strictly drawn. My hobbies are my entertainment. My art, I do for my soul. I love it all, but at some point, you just need to get things done. Work may be a four letter word. But it’s not the worst of them.
So don’t tell me I have a nice hobby. Welcome to my art.
I have a very hard time when things finish. I’m an INFP for those who know Myers-Briggs. I’m happier with things left open, possibilities, choices, options. That moment when something is finished is joyous, but it’s also an end, a loss, as well as a win.
This could be an excuse for the large pile of unbacked and unbound quilts sitting by my machine.
.I have a friend I just heard is dying. One of those good and bad things about getting older is that we sometimes have thirty-year-old friendships. It’s like the world shuts a window that was a bright and different view.
I don’t know how to say goodbye to a friend from that long ago. He brought me wonderful art books helped me write and publish my first fiction writing, and took me to my first country dance. Wonderful gifts. I sent chocolate Haagen-Dazs, soup, and M&Ms. We bring whatever bits we have.
I hate watching things end. Even in art.
There’s an energy to art that might be its largest purpose. There is a connection between you and your art that wizzes around the room, even in the duller processes. I do believe art is alive. It has an energy of its own, and it communicates what should happen next. It is not your child. It’s a partner in co-creation. While you are making it, it’s remaking you.
There is a finish line, a moment where the last stitch is stitched. The energy stops swirling. There is an end. It’s wonderful, but something is lost.
But at that separation, something else happens. The connection between the art and the artist is cut like an umbilical cord. But art finds its own place. In someone else’s world or heart, it goes on to do other things for other folk. Art soothes people, riles them, teaches them, inspires them, but most of all, it changes them. If art is really good, it lives past you. Nothing really ends. It moves into the next space. Other challenges. Other purposes.
I’ve peppered this post with photos of the quilt I’m currently finishing. We’re stippling today. Almost done. It’s a good thing I have another quilt waiting in the wings.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a series of fish in the waters. This is an important symbol for me. It explores surviving strange waters, rising out of the depths, swimming with the current, and swimming against the current. It’s about flowing water and changes. It really checks all my boxes. It also serves as a connection with my father, whose religion was bass fishing. Since going fishing made better people than going to church, I respect it deeply, even if I won’t eat fish. I live in water.
So I noodle at the fish-in-the-water image often. If you’ve been following the blog, you know I made one quilt I loved, and I wanted to see whether I could recreate the energy. Not the fish or the river, but the energy of the piece.
Epic fail. I made a very nice other piece with similar hand dye, a fish I drew 5 times before I was pleased, and similar oil paint stick rubbing for the forest in the background. I hated the first fish I embroidered. I stitched a more active catfish, that was better.
Then I took a break and went to find the studio floor. Again. Everything flutters to the floor except the things that go clunk.
There it was, the best background for the embroidered fish I rejected. The fabric made a vortex, so I did too, out of stitching a swirl of sheers.
I didn’t learn anything technical from the exercise. But I did confirm what I already knew. It does me no good to recreate something. Another piece will need different components and approaches. I didn’t need to be making arbitrary rules for myself. I needed to listen to each piece to give it what it needs. If I thought I was in control, that was delusional.
Maybe this is a right-brain, left-brain thing. I’ve been struggling to organize both in the house and the studio. That’s a very left side of the brain thing to do. It’s foreign thinking, but it’s less grim than Swedish Death Cleaning. You know what? No one ever did teach me this. Certainly not my mother.But that shouldn’t stop me. If you don’t know how, you can learn.
So cleaning does turn into art. Eventually.
As Don says, “I’m a man. I can change. If I have to. I guess.”
I can too. If I have to, I guess.
Of course, I hung the quilt up and noticed that the wonderful spiral stitching in the center is unnoticeable 3 feet away. Small flowers and thick thread to the rescue. Of course, the pond has floating flowers.
The change isn’t a technique or a new technology, really. The change is learning to listen better.
The octopuses’ garden series is working up. I finished up with the MAP kids, got enough rest to face the studio, and discovered that we had to find it to face it. Prep for a class leaves endless clutter and many nice neat piles sprawled everywhere.
It will be a while before we find the table. Then we can search for the floor.
But in that process I’ve started the next step for the octopuses.
Why do I need all those fish? The octopuses are all well and good, but they’re not going to be dynamic without something building a path. So we are making fish. The fish are what will make the octopus quilts move.
I mean a lot of fish. Ive got somewhat close to 50 fish drawn for four quilts. Will I use them all? Maybe.
This is about fabric scarcity. A year ago, we could get almost any fabric. This December, I had to beg a dye house for my order of pdf cotton. They had 50 yards in-house that they were portioning out to their clients.
I hate that. I hate depression economics and carefully crafted source shutdowns. I hate the idea of saving rubber bands and string. We’re there. All of a sudden, hand-dye is precious, and I need to be careful to use up the little bits.
Today I went through felt, hand-dye, and stabilizer scraps. It was a good thing I was cleaning up and sorting. There are some scraps I keep good account of. Anything brown, gray or stony ends up as rocks in another quilt.
But here I was scrounging for backgrounds for fish. Normally, I dye fabric especially for the larger embroideries. This last year, normal has fled out the windows.
I’m not going to talk about why. It’s incomprehensible anyway. Why was Joann’s so reckless as to go defunct? I suspect greed and stupidity dancing arm in arm off to court. Joanns is gone. Our place to run out for everything sewing is gone.
Walmart used to have a decent fabric section. Now it has an isle of highly unappealing cuts made from mostly poly blends. I’m deeply underwhelmed. I suppose you could use it for Halloween costumes.
Thank God there are quilt shops. But so much is catch as catch can on the internet. Do you need needles? Sheers? Felt? Not always at the quilt shop.
So all of a sudden, all of my hand-dye is limited. And precious. And I’m digging scraps out of piles to embroider on.
If I sound like I’m whining, I am. I hate scrapping for fabric. I’ve spent the day digging through fabric scraps, trying to make it work out. I’m not open to discussion about this. This is just how I feel.
The real question is, do I really want to do my art? No matter what?
I don’t understand making an arranged shortage of anything. I don’t get it. It’s stupid with a funny hat on it.
But I’m dammed if I won’t do what I can with what I have.
So, how do we find the fabric that is out there? I’m not sure.
This is a brave new world I don’t like very much. Women don’t count. Art doesn’t count. Sewing doesn’t count to the point where it’s not even treated as an industry anymore. Everything plastic glitters golden.
When the quilt world started, men really didn’t notice. It was something women did for each other. Men considered it pin money. Quilt shops flourished from the early 70s to the 80s before men inserted themselves into the industry in a “professional” way. Things changed. Fabric was a big business. They waded in and took over. Now they drop it like a stone.
So if it’s not an industry anymore, what do we do now? We need to figure it out. And since the male fabric industry has no interest in our needs, we need to figure it out together. We’ve always known how to find fabric for each other.
We need to support any fabric store we can. If we need them to be here for us, we have to be here for them now.
We need to find new ways to find fabric.
And I’m finding scraps to embroider fish on, because it’s what my pieces need.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of working with the MAP kids at the Peoria Art Guild. We worked on layered collages in fabric with everything from wild prints, hand dye, shees and an old slip someone had donated. The slip made a great fabric for bones.
We had bones and roses, space opera, a lazy jellyfish, a pond with a butterfly and koi, ducks in a pond and a frame for a tiger head that needed more research. The kids were magnificent. They dug in and created wonder.
Don did the photos for these. When I looked at them this morning, I was struck with their hands. Their hands were as individual as the works they were creating. Next week, we’ll stitch and embellish. I’ll get more formal photos. But the energy there in their hands was magical. And I love the creative energy of piles of fabrics waiting to be put into place.
As artists, we create through our hands. Our hands are our first tools, trained from birth to trace, to touch, to mold our world into beauty, order, pleasure, and good sense. It knows no age. We are born with that as we are born with hands. But hands or no, art is our birthright. If we are human, art is part of the genome. It’s what we’re born to do, Art is how we tell our stories, and how we mold our lives.
The MAP program is a free mentoring project for 17-year-olds that exposes them to all kinds of art. I’m privileged to have done this for 3 seasons. I am amazed. I am awed.
The Peoria Art Guild is by the river, free, open, and fun. You need to go there! It’s at 203 Harrison St. Peoria, IL, 61602
Between the cooking of birds and a small blizzard, we’ve had a pause in the world.. Don spent yesterday napping, I believe. I don’t know because I binged watched most of the extended Hobbit with Tolkein, my cat, and started a new sweater. Not what we normally do.
This was not a year for travel. Time and space have not cooperated. But it doesn’t mean that I felt people were distant. How did I manage to make friendships that have lasted 30 years, 40 years? How did that happen?
When we all could travel easier, many of us made friendsgiving, the day after thanksgiving. Now our bodies just aren’t cooperating. But strangely I felt everyone there. Don and I are only kids. We’re both, thankfully considering our parents, orphens. But we have family, rich and strong and very much loved. Thank you all.
Speaking of parents, my father fished as a religion. It was where he found peace, rest, calm and joy. I’ve never wanted to catch a fish in my life, but he took me in his small row boat, and immersed me in that world. Part of me has never left. When I stitch fish, I’m revisiting it. I offer it to you.
I spent the week batching luna moths for my cranes. I’m not sure whether they sit on the coast or not, but they’d be in the adjascent swamp land.
I love batch embroidery. It’s coloring in the zone. I use it for most of the small to medium elements in my quilts. So much can be done with small fish, flowers, frogs, birds, lizards, and anything else you can think of. I always make too many. It’s sort of like too much bacon. How could that happen? And of course, I can always think of a use for another fish or strip of bacon. Many pieces need a left over elements, just to round it out.
Batching elements helps me build a body of things to incorporate into a quilt to make it more love, to make it move, to make it flow.
It may be too much. This is the first pin up. They always shift by the time I get the water in and make adjustments. I think it needs rocks to ground it.
