One week to Paris, and accepting reality

I’ve written before about how sometimes my work seems to make decisions for me. That’s usually a relatively slow process; it often comes after progress on a given piece has ground to a halt, and I’ve turned my attention towards something else. The muse needs some space to come and visit, I suppose.

With this piece, there’s been little downtime, relatively speaking. Between the afternoon the fabric arrived at my doorstep and today, we’re at almost 16 weeks exactly. I knew what I wanted to make, but January had other plans; then in a mad rush, I completed both the top and back in I believe less than two weeks. I basted it all together and hauled it to the coast for my ritual mid-February retreat. While there I put just enough stitches in it to know that my original quilt stitch design idea wouldn’t work; I ripped those out, and when I got back, I set it aside. There it had its first real rest for one full month, mid-Feb to mid-March, while my social calendar kept me out of the studio and out of any real workflow at all. At which point, I began to panic, and set about spending as much time as I could quilting — long hours, and not my preference for how to do this work. It’s bad for my hands, and my back — but sacrifices sometimes must be made!

I’m one week to the day from wheels up on the runway. The yellow field is fully quilted, but the quilt design choices for the sashing remain undecided, as does the treatment of the stars. I’ve run out of the quilting thread in the color I’ve been using. I’m not sure yet what I want to use for the aforementioned, as-yet-unquilted areas. The binding fabric has yet to be found: I am being outrageously picky, having decided exactly what I want, without knowing whether such thing exists. (Do you do this, too?)

As such, in the last few days, I’ve spent over three hours traveling to and from five different locations (with calls and web visits to some others), trying to source these last bits. Each time, no dice. Places I’ve relied on historically for these precise needs are coming up short; sold out of one thing, nothing calling to me at all from the shelves, or promising restocks of a specific item only by late May, etc. There’s not real time to wait on shipping for things I can’t get locally — this weekend being the last days to do any real work before my Tuesday flight.

Sometimes, the decisions get made for you externally, instead of internally.

The dingy afternoon light in the studio, and a close-but-not-close-enough to finished quilt.

In this case, that decision is: the quilt won’t go with me to Paris. It will stay here, waiting for its remaining materials, its final design decisions, and its last stitches. While I’ll be sad not to carry it with me to my friend, I would be sadder to slap something on it, against my instincts and desires. I would be sadder to rush at breakneck speed through decisions I don’t feel good about, or haven’t had time to vet, to consider — all essentially to try to avoid the cost of international shipping. I would be sad to send it off without photographing it properly, for my own records (as I have done too often, with too many quilts).

There is no rush. While I would have preferred to carry it with me over the Atlantic, I do not prefer to feel anger and frustration and stress and anxiety while making a gift for one of my dearly beloveds. It will be here when I return. As will, hopefully, some of its final necessary materials.

Which brings me to the last studio bit I have to share for this past week: my contribution to Sydney Shadeck-Triola’s protest quilt, an artwork called “An Inch for Each of the Dead.” At 30,000 (the death toll over a month ago, when Sydney first put out the call for collaboration) the final work would have come to approximately 50 inches wide by 50 feet long. As the number of lives lost continues to grow, so will the size of the work. I find the visualization of large numbers exceedingly compelling — numbers mean so little to us. Physical representations — even small ones — often tell a different story. A much more emotionally resonant one.

As you likely already know, reading this — if you are a quilter, a quilt lover, or just a personal friend of mine — quilts have a long and storied history as revolutionary protest art. So too, are large community-collaboration projects an important part of this history. If you’re interested, there is much to learn and read (and revel in) about the use of quilts in agitating towards liberation; from the underground railroad, to the AIDS epidemic, to opposition to war. I see many people in my textile community stepping into this space in this moment, onto the path our quilting ancestors walked before us. I am honored to have been able to contribute to this piece.

This is my block, all 100 one inch pieces of it. It contains, obviously, my most beloved vermillion; it contains silk dyed with cochineal; it contains one piece of my beloved acid yellow linen. It contains many tiny pieces of floral fabrics in the colors of the Palestinian flag — black and white, green and red; and it contains a few blocks of a deep indigo blue. From the river to the sea.

Two golden weeks to Paris

A mid-week post, as I failed my task here last Friday. But I don’t wish to let a whole two week’s time slip away without capturing some part of it — everything always moving too fast. That said, I have no regrets about how I spent my time last weekend. Every moment felt needed.

Those moments included buckets of rain and also the clear, scrubbed-gold sunshine that only ever seems to accompany towering, slate-blue storm clouds on the horizon. I sat up late into the night in the woods of Sauvie Island, in the ring of deep heat put off by a long-burning bonfire, surrounded by friends, celebrating spring, and a birthday. I sang out loud with others and leaned into the silliness of it. I slept in, I made buttermilk biscuits, I indulged in a mid-day, couch-puddle-movie-session with my favorite people. I napped. I put on my running shoes and tenderly explored re-invigorating an old form of self-care. I semi-organized the piles and piles of yarn scattered around my house; I knit, and knit some more; I started something new, I finished something old, I plugged away at WIPs. I am on the hunt for the wool yarn in the perfect shade between purple and pink. A hot lilac; a cool cherry blossom. Do you know where to find it? Can you tell me?

And, I sat under the golden ring of stars and I put in stitches. Not enough — not nearly enough! — but some. And it continues to be transformed, through the magic of handquilting, the way only handquilting can. It’s been too long since I’ve had a quilting needle in my hand; my callouses are slowly returning. I watch this piece transmute slowly and I find myself stopped often, to run my hands over it, or to stand back and see it more fully, in its metamorphosis. Quilting, truly, is a great love of my life.

And yet I am living in a sort of low-grade panic about getting this done. Will I finish it in time? I get on a plane two weeks from today. If I do finish, will it even fit in my suitcase? How will there be time to photograph it before I leave? Could I really send it away without capturing it with professional photography, when I love it so?

I chose a dense quilting pattern for the golden field, I have not yet chosen the pattern I’ll used to finish the lilac border. I have not yet decided how to quilt the stars. I do not yet know what I will use to bind it. Who will I beg to photograph it for me? This one doesn’t have time to be shipped across the country, to Brittany, and back again. And I no longer have a studio wall big enough for making do, as I did a few years ago.

And still, despite the deep pleasure of quilting, and these consistent pressures running through my brain, I have not been prioritizing these many necessary hours. I have not been choosing, as I should, to have this piece in my lap every available moment. I am, as I said above, knitting every moment; I am daydreaming constantly about Monochrome Neon Clown™, and I am hunting for apparel fabrics in eye-searing colors. The MNC wants to go to Paris in the springtime; wants to match this quilt that will, hopefully, pray for us, accompany her…

So all the slowest handcrafts find themselves in a race against time. Two weeks to go!

Yellow

Outside of innumerable sweaters, historically I’ve not made many of my own clothes. When it comes to the sewing machine I much prefer the complications of quilt shapes (flat) to those of tailoring to the body (so many curves, and so many ways for things to go wrong).

But recently this fact is shifting. The list of color obsessions begun last year has both held true and expanded; and their pull has only gotten stronger, their hooks in deeper. It no longer feels like enough to put these colors into quilt tops, to leave them at the end of the studio day there on the wall. I have been finding myself staring into my closet in the mornings, at my options — black, and black, and black — and feeling immeasurable discontent.

The perfect in-between yellow-green.

Forsythia in the springtime.

I loved this color combination so much it stopped me in my tracks.

The last piece of the M&M linen I fell in love with years ago. In the evening studio light.

I had originally planned today to write about vermillion — about how what began as an obsession with a scrap of fabric became a love affair with a color, and then with the symbolisms of such a color, and the feelings of wearing such a color. My love affair with vermillion illuminated facets of my life I would have thought it impossible for such a seeming inconsequential thing — a perception of certain wavelengths of light? — to have an effect on. I wish to document, more fully, more extensively, the experience of this catalyst.

But the intricacies of misogyny, aging, confidence, sociotropy — these things, it turns out, may take me more time to expand upon in any intelligible way. So in lieu of that more complicated ball of string, the marker I am placing in time this week is instead this simple photo essay: Yellow.

A sweater for wearing with the neon yellow plaid skirt. Obviously.

Yellow is the world I have been living in recently; yellow is first up in the outfit planning total-wardrobe overhaul I am playfully (and also seriously) dubbing: Monochrome Neon Clown. Here’s to the end of what amounts to 25 years of neutral colored clothing. Here’s to the daffodils.

Here’s to change, life’s only constant.

On mending

Spring arrived in Portland this week, not only via the equinox but also the weather. We had four days straight of 70+ degrees leading into the first day of the new season. Bright blue skies and sunshine. The flowers were out on parade, as was people’s bare skin.

I must admit, for the first time in my life I feel unready. Deeply unready. Rather than rejoicing in the warmer weather, I felt a deep somatic resistance. I am not ready for spring. I’m not ready for summer. I want more hibernation weekends, I want time on the couch with cups of tea, a lap full of knitting and the all day long sound of rain. I want nowhere to be. I want more long, dreary days when being in my studio — with no window, and no real hint to the weather outside — for seven to ten hours at a stretch doesn’t feel like a trade-off for anything else.

This year began by standing still, with weeks of covid isolation and the icing-in; that was followed by an intensity in my studio work that drove much quick and effective decision making, and an exciting pace. But alongside that work fervor came a social calendar intensity the likes of which I don’t know if I’ve had since my early twenties. For weeks on end the date book held family visits, concerts, organizing work, studio visits, critique group, dinners with friends, my solo trip, something like four other birthday parties, and on and on. I remember looking at my planner in the first week of February and telling a friend: “I have no free time until after March 17th.” Friends, it’s after March 17th,… but those little squares just keep filling up.

The studio feels ground to a halt. A dozen things in their so-close-to-finished states are haunting me from every corner of my highly distracted mind. In the meantime the days keep ticking away between now and my flight to France, and the quilt remains unquilted, other baby gifts remain unmade, and don’t get me started on the clothes I’m hoping to sew myself between now and then. But when?

Hence, I think, the distinct, bodily felt NO to the beautiful spring days, and the ubiquitous feeling of the world around me waking up. All I want — what I feel like I need — is more time to rest. I want another February.

So in a quiet bit of protest, or perhaps in an attempt to force into being a slowness which I feel unable to experience, today I want to talk about mending. A deeply slow subject.

I do a lot of mending. I mend my own clothes continuously; I mend things for friends, neighbors, coworkers. I have mended things for perfect strangers, seeing their beautiful, tattered Irish sweaters and approaching them to ask for the privilege. I have tried to teach a few people to mend, though I am firm believer that there is no “right way” and that we all land on our preferred methods by trial and error, by doing again and again. I am not a particularly skilled mender and my mends are not typically beautiful in the way of the many examples you may have seen on your tiny phone screens. In fact, I find the actual act of mending tedious, extremely time consuming and often deeply frustrating; I usually put it off far too long and I have been known to relegate things to the mending pile only to forget they exist for a number of years. It is not a task I revel in, despite my insistence to others that I will do it for them.

But I hate that our clothes lead shortened lives because of things like a moth hole, or a weakened seam. I hate that an object that was made by someone’s hands, somewhere in this world — and all clothing is made by hand, we all know this by now, yes? — would go into the growing mountains of our refuse earlier than is necessary. And I find mended things beautiful, even if my own work tends to fall short of my visions; I often prefer an item in its repaired state. Despite grumbling through all the time that it takes me, I am almost always elated at the transformation of a garment, once the mend is finished. I just adore the visibly loved nature of a mended piece of clothing. Mending rejects the consumerist mindset that we must always have something new. A patch, a darn, a reinforced seam — these things say, quietly: I loved this too much to let it die. Mending loved things for my loved ones is a way I can demonstrate my own care and attention — an act of devotion that I believe is no small thing, in our attention-poor, waste-rich world.

And so right now I am the keeper of two hole-y, well-loved sweaters belonging to two different friends. Spring is here and I warned the boys that they won’t see these sweaters again until next fall, when I hope to present them in their new forms. One is practically more hole than sweater, and I’m eager to see how it changes over the next few months. It’s taken me a bit to source the yarns I wanted to use for these; I sent more than a few of my first internet purchases back from whence they came. With my own mends I tend to love the creative constrictions of making do, but I had nothing in my stash that could really rise to these particular tasks and, these being for others and not myself, I have hopes of them turning out just so.

This work, for me, is very, very slow (though don’t let me discourage you from your own mends, as it doesn’t need to be! My preferred method for knits is Swiss darning, or duplicate stitch, rather than weaving into the open spaces, felting, or patches — but all of those are options and all of them are faster than duplicate stitch.) On the green sweater, for places where the holes are large I am knitting whole new pieces to try to fill and replicate these holes, and then sewing those down, or “darning them in”, as needed. For the purple one, I will duplicate stitch everything; including, I think, most of the back of the left arm, where there is no actual “hole” yet but everything is about as threadbare as it can be and still be called intact. As is typical with worn things, I imagine that as I work over the most egregious of the damaged places on each sweater, I will discover myriad other places where, as the saying goes, a stitch in time will save nine.

I have about four billion competing high-priority items and an even longer wishlist of ideas, so this slow work will undoubtedly go even slower, being picked up occasionally, on the couch at night, in maybe only fifteen or twenty minute increments. But at this moment, rather than be agitated by that slowness, I am finding a real comfort in it. This quiet, gradual work feels like the one place where I can live inside the gentle, plodding pace I am craving. Bit by bit, stitch by stitch, these sweaters will become something new; renewed, resurrected, and imbued, as I believe all our textile works are, with the devotional care inherent in our time, and our attention.

Silence and sense-making

Last time I showed up to this digital space — a month ago now — I hit the publish button from the new annual ritual of my solo weekend away. There was still no wifi in my cabin, but rather than miss posting I settled nicely into a deep mustard chair in the lounge of the main lodge, with a fire burning next to me and a sweet version of Gymnopédie playing quietly over the speakers. The hotel workers passed through occasionally, talking affably with each other. I thought: next week I’ll write more about this trip but for now, I am here, with this quilt for my friend with me — ready for quilting stitches, and to have this ritual of mine become a part of what it holds, as well.

I was on a roll, for a wee bit there — posting every week, four weeks in a row! I was loving my rhythm. Being mindful throughout each week about what I wanted to record, what felt important to me to capture. Signing in to tell people I had posted, and then promptly deleting my Instagram app (I love deleting Instagram), and reveling in the extra mental space. I felt deeply connected to my practice, and my documenting of my practice.

And then, after I returned home, I found I could not show up here. That Monday I read Michelle Tea’s piece Bearing Witness; I read it at 9am, at my desk, at work, while the tears rolled down my face and I felt: writing about luxuriating in a cabin alone at the beach could not be more tone-deaf, more myopic. Instead, the only thing I wanted to do was ask you to read that piece, too. The week after, all I could think about was Aaron Bushnell. And then, an email from a longtime faraway friend, chastising my husband for the use of the word genocide.

It can feel impossible to know how to move through a world where we can’t all agree on what seems the most basic and fundamental things. Where the killing of babies, the elderly, the infirm, whole families, can result in arguments around semantics. It makes the wordsmithing of writing a weekly blog about a small, self-indulgent, artistic quilt practice feel ugly.

I think often these days about the Vietnam war, about the mass mobilizations against that meaningless slaughter. I can’t stop thinking about this campaign: the call for greater mass mobilization.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Vietnam War protest billboards; December 1969

This sentiment, I cannot get out of my mind. If you want it.

Outlets are required. Outlets for everything. Outlets for our rage and our sorrow and our terror and also our joy and our love and our creative impulses, our loneliness, our connectedness. For a while in my city there were many and frequent outlets for the rage at the injustices and horrors perpetrated against Palestinians; having those outlets made showing up here easier. But after the end-of-year holidays, there was a real vacuum, a lag. A lack of organizing, and direction, and for a while I think a large wave that was the lack of hope. An outlet for textile work is not as high on my hierarchy of needs as an outlet for the despair over unspeakable atrocities.

But meetings are convening for political organizers here in the state of OR to launch our version of the Listen to Michigan campaign. A slew of smart, caring, hardworking, dedicated people are going to help push for a political protest vote; a continuation of the work that has already been done in many other states. Our northern neighbor Washington just ran this same campaign, backed by the largest labor union in the state; now it’s our turn. This work has tangible, measurable needs, and hands-on work through which to channel our hopes for an end to the bombing and the killing. I’ve also committed to sending a quilt block to an enormous community-quilt protest project. This work is an outlet.

And so I’m back here this week. To resume the ritual. To mark the passage of time. I am still not yet ready to write about my time away. I need to digest that experience (though I do have some exciting fabric finds that I need to document here.) And so I plan to return next week, and keep myself accountable to my art practice — while also striving to stay accountable to my global citizen practice.

If you feel inclined to share with me other resources — your outlets, your researched ways of trying to make any small positive impact during this time — I welcome it.

War is over! If we want it.

Crown, ring, portal, passage

When I knew I would go to Paris this year, I also knew I would take a quilt. Shortly after the moment I knew I would take a quilt, I also knew what form I wanted that quilt to take.

My dear Parisian friend is pregnant. I won’t extrapolate much on this particular life-altering event in her life because, well, it’s her life, and her privacy. But the word pregnancy alone is culturally significant enough — without any details of the particular life in question — for us to share a general understanding of the significance of the shift this word describes.

I am making this quilt, specifically, for my friend. When other friends have been pregnant I have made other quilts, ostensibly for their babies. (Even though gifts for infants — especially handmade ones — are always really tokens of love for their mothers.) But this quilt is not for my friend’s future child, not even in name. This quilt is for her.

The quilt back; all bedsheets and pillowcases.

Years ago when I asked her her favorite color she announced without hesitation in her signature singsong lilt: Marigold. (As a person with a somewhat acerbic nickname because of her color specificity I must own up, immediately, to the fact that this fabric color is most certainly not marigold. However, I thought a little color compromise to help this quilt come into being wouldn’t be the end of the world.) As I stated previously, I found this fabric when I was searching for something else; but the moment it came across my screen, I knew it was for her. I also already knew that I would be making a ring of stars. It was only when I began to plot out on graph paper exactly how I would place them that I began to see the significance of the choice, and the reason that this idea — which I had long held onto, but never made — felt so immediately right for this circumstance.

This quilt, this circle of stars, is a crown, a ring, a portal, a passage. An acknowledgment of the fiery door through which she is passing, and the change she will undergo. In color, in material, in design, in all of my choices — I hope that it also embodies buoyancy, brightness, a sparkling energy, a newness. But it is the enormity of this passage that is the central theme of this piece. I want to wrap her in light, in gold, in flowers, in a crown of radiance. I want to acknowledge her radical transformation.

There was a moment during the finishing of that top where I grieved a bit; I didn’t feel it had arrived where I wanted it to, and I worried that I had failed it. But when I took it down and held it in my arms — when the rigid, deathly “flatness” of an ironed-into-submission and not-yet-quilted-top, which is so wholly stultifying to my experience of quilts, was abated by touching it, folding it, and seeing it in bright natural sunlight — I experienced a deep relief. It has a long way to go before it becomes complete, but I believe it will become what I set out to make, in some way.

Sometimes they tell me what to do

I am thrilled to report that the current of intensity running through the studio remains. I am working fast, and I find myself involved, invested, enjoying all parts of it. Every moment that I am not there my mind is pushing ideas around, my hands itching to return and push them around physically as well. Ideas are jostling together and competing for the front of the line, and my total attention.

Last week I finished the Paris-bound, yellow ring of stars, took it down off the wall, and set immediately to cobbling together a back full of mismatching florals. When that had come together, I folded them both up, and the wall was free again.

I thought I would go back to Acid Vat, immediately; it’s really only one long day, or perhaps a weekend, away from being ready for a back itself. I also have two other brand new experiments that have bubbled up out of the returning studio energy: a large golden HST piece I’ve ruminated on for the last five years or so, and my first foray into Ohio stars (seen below on the right). Each of these are at the stage of requiring little to no real decision making, but instead long stretches of batch-tasking blocks so that a critical mass might be reached to influence design decisions. Sometimes that batch-tasking work feels tedious and dull, but in my current state I’ve been deeply enjoying putting my head down for hours only to look up in the evening to find a satisfying pile of pieced and ironed triangles. A version of flow state.

But none of those three predictable choices won the jostling war. Instead, to my honest shock and surprise, the blocks of the red “Sister” quilt — a project I had all but decided to fully abandon — were what I reached for, immediately and without hesitation.

I have had the experience a few shocking, fortunate times in my life of being “gifted” the answer to some quilt problem that was vexing me.

What I mean is, sometimes I simply wake up in the morning and know what to do. I know the “answer” to the frustrating, stalled-out feeling of rearranging quilt pieces over and over and over again and finding no relief, never seeing them sing. The few times this has happened — when I have opened my eyes in the morning with a clear vision, a knowing — it doesn’t feel like a hunch, or an idea. It feels like The Answer. When it happens, I know. I feel an unshakeable certainty. And indeed, it’s always been right. It’s always worked. It’s always, also, been made up of an option I haven’t tried, imagined, or played with yet. It’s never been the case that I’ve worked out “three choices,” say, over the course of hours or days or weeks, and then one day I “pick one.” Each time, the vision has been clear and full, and unambiguous, and it has involved some element that I have had yet to imagine. It also almost always inevitably comes after my frustration at a certain seemingly unsolvable issue has been so great that I have given up: put the intractable thing away, out of sight, often for some substantial amount of time and usually without giving it a conscious thought again during that hiatus.

I have referred to this phenomenon as my brain “giving me the answer,” like a gift. It never feels as though it comes “from me,” the me who is present in conversation with myself consistently, throughout all parts of all days. These answers feel as though they arrive from someone else, unbidden and wildly generous. Each time it happens I am overwhelmed with a sense of unimaginable luck, an incredible prosperity. It is a great joy, an electrifying feeling.

This quilt top began as an idea in September of 2022 and then languished throughout the following year, feeling too painful to work on, and not urgent as its blue counterpart (a monumentally painful process in its own right). Last November after I put the final seam in the blue Sister I pulled the red one back out, and rearranged the blocks again and again, and disliked everything about it, and thought: You can give up, if you want to. You can choose to not make this piece. You can leave it behind. And I put it in a drawer. But last week the beloved experience described above — the knowing, the gift of the answer — was there, one morning, when I woke up.

And away we go.

Into February

February already. My studio is a wild mess. Three quilt tops actively in the works all at the same time, with more waiting in the wings — and only not out in front of my hungry eyes due to lack of available surface area and wall space. It’s a hurricane of fabric yardage in here and I feel at the center of it, in the eye, calm, but with the energy swirling around me. It’s a deeply pleasant feeling.

The focus of the moment is a quilt for one of my dearest friends. We met more than a decade ago in California, but she's lived in Paris for many years now and my opportunities to see her beautiful face have been few and far between. I plan to go visit her there in April for the first time, and it's my hope to carry this quilt with me when I go. A relatively constrained timeline for a quilt (though as last summer’s commission taught me, far from impossible) and so finishing this top has been the main objective since I've been back in the studio. It's been an interesting attempt at balance, this one; trying to both (always) make something that sings to me but also, in this case, not overwhelm the piece with the weird or the difficult, the too loud or too brash — trying to keep the recipient's taste in mind. In the end it will only contain three different fabrics pieced into the top; a difficult concession for my current color-craving brain, but it has grown on me the longer I live with it on the wall. Learning not to gild the lily, and all that. The symbolism, the focus and the feeling that I want to be held in this piece is of foremost importance to me, and I think the simplicity helps telegraph those things.

The basic pattern idea for this top — a circle of stars, set in gold — has been in my head since a few years ago when I made a star quilt for my cousin's new baby. When I knew I would make a quilt for K, it immediately resurfaced as the obvious plan; likewise when I quite accidentally stumbled upon this fabric (while hunting for something unrelated), I knew it was the undeniable choice for her. I am obviously also continuing to scratch my own acid yellow itch, and it’s been a pleasure running a field of this through the machine, as I know it will also be a deep pleasure to sit for hours with it in my lap as I quilt it. I plan to take it with me next month on the newly minted ritual of my solo birthday trip; and I am already looking forward to spending that time alone with it, imbuing it, one stitch at a time, with all that I hope to bring across the ocean with me and wrap around my friend as she enters into a new chapter of her life.

The studio light (or lack thereof) makes capturing this color nearly impossible. An almost neon yellow with the slightest green undertone. It feels alive and dynamic under sunlight, but slightly dingy on my warehouse studio wall.

A self-drafted curve! Miracles upon miracle. Also: yellow and blue in abundance.

While in the studio and on public transit and walking my dog, I've been listening to master craftsman and furniture maker Peter Korn’s book, Why We Make Things and Why It Matters. During some of the very first moments when this book entered my brain through my ears, I felt tears spring into my eyes. I felt an intense, emotional appreciation for the direct, approachable articulation of what I believe any maker finds both inherent, immutable, and also largely ineffable about the process of their work. Because I am listening (and not physically reading; also usually while moving about) I have had less opportunity to capture the many quotes of Peter’s that I want to keep near at hand. But in writing now about this quilt that I am making for my friend, it feels impossible not to reference some of what this book has been affirming to me, gently through my earbuds, as I cut, piece, sew, iron, and envision this object into being.

I will suggest that a craft object can be a potent source of meaning and identity for both maker and respondent.

Inescapably, we are beings for whom objects have spiritual weight. […] The physical details of the [craft object] speak to a more ancient materialism, deep in the human psyche. This is the belief that objects have mana: that the miraculous power to provide spiritual sustenance resides in the object itself, not in the achievement of ownership.

— Peter Korn

Yes, yes, and yes. Listening to this quiet, calming book while making what I hope to be a potent talisman for one of my life’s deep loves — I am reminded that I likely have to explain myself and my work far less than I often find myself trying, embarrassed, to do. Some of us — if not most or outright all, when given the proper unobstructed breathing room — do have an inherent connection to our material objects, and an innate social emotional understanding of what it means to make, and to share: the communication, Peter calls it, that is the interpersonal and shared experience of “thinking with things.”¹

If you want to hear more on this philosophy and perspective (and I wholeheartedly recommend it) you can hear Peter himself speaking more about his book here. [A note that this video is not captioned, and has quite a bit a mouth noise, if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing.]

Lastly, a lovely thing happened to me yesterday morning, unrelated to these quilt and craft musings except in that everything is related to these aforementioned things. My studio is in an industrial part of town, with no nearby amenities outside of — miraculously — Portland’s best bagel shop. I've written here before about my bagel shop routine; it’s been a treasured part of my time in this neighborhood. Yesterday morning, as I walked in, I was greeted with "Hi Elizabeth, what can we get for you today?" Y'all, I'm a regular.

I haven't had this experience since I lived in New York from ages 18-22, and worked at a little retail shop in the village all those four years. I used to go to the deli next door and order the same thing every time (what that was, I can no longer remember). They didn't know my name there — that's not how bodega orders work — but at some point during my tenure the cashier began to just see me walk in and say, "The usual?" with an eyebrow raised, and have me rung up before I even got to the counter. The feeling of belonging, of place, that accompanies this small sort of ritual is hard to overstate. I remember clearly the first time it happened. I remember too, when I quit that job, and I knew I would never step foot in that deli again: it was a real loss I felt. A small quiet loss, but a one named and known. I lost my place, as it were. 

So now here, too, in this strange corner of a town I've somehow lived in for decade (!?!) — I have that again. A sense of being a small known part of this larger whole. I'm not able to describe what that feels like; only, that I am intimately aware of the good fortune of the timing, that this external sense of belonging comes also as I feel, too, in more consistent, comfortable, recognition of myself.

An overcast afternoon image of the current studio madness, and the three quilts-in-progress. Out of sight: innumerable piles of fabrics strewn across every flat surface. (Stars abound!)

¹ Peter references Sarah Kuhn’s book (which I have not read) and this phrase, throughout his work.

Fits and non-starts

Despite being the end of the month, my year has yet to really get off the ground.

Unfortunately for yours truly, I caught Covid on New Year’s Eve and was feeling poor by the 2nd. I stayed sick, and alone in quarantine (first house-sitting an empty place, then at home while my husband stayed with friends) for two full weeks. No other people, no day job, no studio work, no real output at all. Just me, my pajamas, a bed, a couch, endless cups of tea, my dog, and sleep. Then predictions came rolling in for a nasty winter storm, and my husband came home just in time for the power to go out, snow and ice to blanket everything, and the city to shut down for days on end. We wore masks and stayed as far apart as we could; not far, in an 800 square foot house. We slept in different rooms, ate our meals in different rooms. Did crossword puzzles by calling clues back and forth to each other from the kitchen table to the living room couch. He never caught it, and eventually (17 days after exposure) I started testing negative, though even now I still feel and sound rather cruddy. The day I tested negative, the extreme ice began, and buildings and businesses across the city closed. Streets, sidewalks — our yard, porch, stairs — were all impassible. To say that by the end of last week I was feeling a bit cabin-feverish would be a wild understatement.

My neighborhood, but thankfully not my house.

But there is much positive to focus on. Despite temperatures in the teens (extremely low for the PNW climate, where buildings are not constructed with this possibility in mind) my pipes did not freeze or burst, unlike many of my neighbors’. We only lost power for one day during this week-long storm, unlike many folks who didn’t have heat or electricity for four days straight or more and whose inside temperature bottomed out in the 30s. We kept warm under our choice of many, many quilts to reach for. No trees or sizable branches came down on my home, or even all that nearby — a real anomaly, considering nearly 700 large trees have been reported down, and approximately 30 in our beloved nearby park. The scene above is only a short walk from my front door. So, gratitude.

I am also aware, keenly, that even without power or heat or the ability to move about freely, I am not suffering all of those things while also being bombed for over 100 days.

Quilts on quilts. The newly finished commission (R) atop the barn-raising quilt from this post, exactly a year ago.

My convalescence and my frustrations at being cooped up also spurred me to finish two separate long-overdue projects I had on-hand, at home. One, a tedious but worthwhile sweater-mending task for a friend, the other a queen-sized quilt I have been working on as part of trade for more than a year. Considering the task that is hand-quilting a 90 x 93” quilt in rows 1—1.5” apart, it was a behemoth that had been hanging over me, and I felt elated to finish it. Sweater-mending, too, is a beast of a time commitment, and something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. It’s my hope to muse on that a bit more here, in the future. As is typical for me, the completion of these two undertakings felt like the opening of a heavy door into sunlight, and as if my creative practice has permission to go out and run.

And so in spite (or because?) of my inability to get into my studio during all this time, my brain has been on fire with ideas and the deep desire to get to work. It’s not always like this for me; sometimes I show up grudgingly to my work even though it’s ostensibly the thing I want to do most in the world. (Apparently that’s the state I was in all last summer.) But just before the year ended I had put a lot of irons in the fire, and thankfully I find myself eager and anxious to return to all of them:

In December I bought and cut the fabric I needed to pursue an HST idea that’s at least 5 years old. Just before the year turned over I started a top for a friend who will welcome a new baby this year; then those design choices inspired a darker, more improvisational version. Though Acid Vat has been through seemingly endless waffling, since I took it off the wall last I have been unable to get one of those choices out of my mind’s eye and so it seems, hallelujah, the decision’s been made. Lastly, I decided to finally make a bed-sized quilt for myself, this year — something I have somehow, in a decade of this craft, never done. (It will be log cabin, of course.) And I still have the red “Sister” to finish, as seen on the design wall here, a whole year ago.

That puts us at six quilt tops actively in the works, with two more in the quilting/finishing stage. (We’re not counting projects that are temporarily abandoned, out of sight and mind.) So with the warmer weather this week, the thaw and the melting of the ice, I hope to spend many long hours in the studio, pushing many of these further forward. Here’s hoping for sunlight and a plethora of textile photos for next week, and more to record than the “weeks that weren’t."

But today, we have the ICJ ruling, and a hearing in US federal court of the lawsuit filed by CCR against the US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Today is a being called an International Day of Action, and so I plan to be in the streets. I hope to see you there.

On 2023

I didn't plan to take essentially the entire summer "off" — out of the studio, away from my work, spending every minute possible outdoors and in cold water whenever possible. But that is how it shook out. I wrote last time about resistance — my resistance to work, and my attempts at granting myself the space to resist. To reset, to cold plunge, to be with loved ones, to let summer warm my heart.

And then fall arrived, and I felt renewed. Ready. And I sat down here and I started a few ideas, and began to re-engage. With making art, and trying to write about making art. 

And then Oct. 7th happened, and everything afterwards. And showing back up on the internet to write about quilt making felt meaningless. Egoistic, impossible. 

Let me state simply and unequivocally: Free Palestine. If you arrive here via some other internet presence of mine over the many years and iterations of so-called social media, I hope that comes as no surprise whatsoever. Palestinian Liberation and Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty (and so much more) are all parts of the same whole, and they do not stand in isolation. I am not a historian nor a geopolitical expert and I won't use my time here attempting to educate anyone; by now there are nearly infinite articles by brilliant people on the history and the making of this current moment, including by many people of Jewish heritage. I urge you not to listen to the American War Machine propaganda. This conflict is not an intractable, inevitable religious war but a manufactured political one born from colonization and state power. People are not their governments, and the struggle against state violence, occupation, internment, displacement, and colonization is not a complicated issue. I wish safety, prosperity and peace to all peoples; those things begin with decolonization, autonomy, freedom and solidarity. Interestingly — ironically? — it was an American Jewish poet who helped spark the Zionist movement who wrote: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”

So then the fall, too, passed this space by. I have grown, fortunately for me, into an understanding of time as cyclical, seasonal, and spiraling. Whenever possible I try to let this wash over me like a freeing realization. As I age, as time seems to speed up, I also feel more able to remove myself from the forced perspective of "time as an arrow." This helps me — sometimes, though not always — to keep from feeling lost, awash in the idea that nothing ever improves, for anyone, that nothing ever gets better.

This, then, is the familiar place I find myself in over and over and over again. How to fully engage with, turn towards, and live my own quiet small life in the face of permanent humanitarian crises both around the world and at home. This, the question I think so many artists — and non-artists — struggle with. How to go about our days, how to find meaning in our meaning-making, when everything seems inconsequential and even wholly self-absorbed during times of global grief? When "my" government takes my money and transforms it into the missiles that destroy the hospitals and kill children.

I do not have the answers. But I feel a desire to show back up here. 

So what have I done, in all this time? Since I last recorded here in July, I dove head first into renewing my knitting habit, and started an outrageous colorwork project that I've already ripped back too many times to count and who may never see the finish line. I went and stood in the room that once held my studio and now holds the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and I got to bask in the presence of the work of Marie Watt. I went south to camp in the golden fields of Oregon August, to the joint bachelor party of two new friends, and we stayed up nearly til dawn and walked in the woods at night to hear the waterfall. I read MariNaomi's I Thought You Loved Me, and wrote to Mari personally, thanking them for writing it, and they generously wrote me back. I went to northern Michigan, one of my favorite places in the world, and I swam in the lake over and over even when it was too cold to swim. I ate food that I still daydream about and I treated myself to seeing Kelly at Little Beauty Kitchen because I have been a fan of her for a long long time, and it was everything I hoped it would be and more, and if you have the chance to have your skin touched by her, you should not pass it up.

In September went to New York, alone, for three days and I stayed with friends and I saw live music and I bought an armload of books and I walked and walked and walked and I ate at least one bagel every day. I went out late, alone, dancing, and I revealed my broken heart to someone at 3am and then I sat with a friend on her birthday and we talked about grief and loss and she sent me to the American Folk Art Museum where I saw quilts that made me weep, sitting alone there on the bench in the quiet rooms. It was the most glorious three straight days of my year.

In October I made myself an outrageous costume for the first time in my life, spending far too much money and time and being handsomely rewarded by the looks and comments people gave me at the parties, and on the train, and eventually walking around downtown during the workday that was Halloween proper. I went to the beach for a weekend with a loved one and kept a fire going in the fireplace all day long through the rainy coastal day. In October, too, I finally completed sewing together the top of my most profoundly personal project of the last year.

In November I put a new quilt top up on the wall only to take it down again. I returned to Acid Vat only to take it down again, too. Loved ones came over in the evenings to listen and share new music with each other. We went to central Oregon with friends and we sat in scalding hot tubs in the freezing cold nights and we walked in the woods and we cooked and ate.

In December my crit group came back to my studio for the first time since last summer and we too talked and ate and laughed and also acknowledged the deep necessity of learning to live with the anger and disappointment that accompanies growing up. I learned to make candles from a new friend; on the solstice I gave them away to old friends. And on the 31st I stood in a circle with a group of people I admire with my whole heart, and we threw into the fire the things we had written down that we have decided not to take with us into 2024. 

Throughout all of this, we protested. We called and wrote and went to our representatives offices and we stood on bridges and in roadways. We sat in each other's living rooms and talked and cried and sometimes didn't say anything at all. And there were other things in there, too, these past months. Hard things, bad nights, piss-poor days. But these are the things I'd like to remember. These are the things I'd like to record.

Accepting resistance

I'm trying a new thing today, writing here. Whereas I would typically skip trying to write about last week, because I have been in my studio not at all, because the design wall is empty, because I am feeling deep in a lull, and full of resistance — instead I want to make a note of the lull itself, feel more ease in my aversions. Take short notes, make a record of what I would typically view as unworthy of record.

Life is busy, which is like saying the air contains oxygen. My little chosen family faces hurdles, shifts and changes, struggles; each of us struggling alone and together, we pack boxes and cars and we apply for jobs and we keep trying to keep things clean, nothing is ever clean, we tend pets and we practice saying no or we give in and say yes and we apologize over and over to each other for our foul moods. And sometimes, we sit outside as the evening cools down and eat takeout, or an egg salad sandwich, and we drink a beer and stop struggling — or we try to, just a bit, for an hour or so. 

This summer has not proven to be full of work, full of quilt-making, full of productivity, as I'd hoped. I have been battling myself, unable to sit down (or sit with) even the pieces I feel ostensibly excited about bringing forward. I'm doing my best to accept the resistance, rather than resist the resistance. I listened to two artists talk about just this idea. How can there be less resistance to the resistance. “It is my resistance to the resistance that causes my suffering.” I am begrudgingly trying to extend myself this same grace. I have not been in my studio in what seems like weeks.

Instead I've been sitting in a cafe corner, reading and writing; I've been putting fresh sheets on the bed only to crawl into at 2:30 in the afternoon, backdoor open so the dog can come and go. I've been listening to an abysmal audio quality recording of Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger, while I knit, or while I walk; I’ve been texting everyone to recommend Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Anger. I watch an old tv show about drug cartels. I listen actively to the quiet. I eat an enormous, beautiful, oily square of focaccia for lunch, and nothing else.

I've feverishly picked up knitting again, after a few year's hiatus from what used to be a constant companion. But I am finding it agitating, as I attempt to navigate working only from stash, a practice I have always loathed with yarn (though not with fabric) as I try to bend my desires into some distorted shape of themselves producible through the material already on-hand. I routinely consider de-stashing; then I imagine the labor involved, and am discouraged. My stash exists primarily as a result of gleaned odds and ends from my time in the yarn industry, and as such is even more complicated to cobble together — very few SQs ("sweater quantities") of any one thing, despite many huge, overflowing bins of wool.

My nails are a chipped bubblegum pink. For a few months now I have not been carefully tending my manicure on a weekly basis, as I mostly did for the last two years, a strange new habit of color riot and my explorations in self-presentation, and self-preservation. I picked up four May Sarton books from the library; am currently reading A Journal of a Solitude and The House by the Sea. I'm carrying around Mary Ruefle's My Private Property like a security blanket. I am reading about the gift economy, thanks to Grace Rother. I am daydreaming of moving away, away, away. I spend too much time on zillow.com.

Friday morning I woke to the news that Sarah Ryhanen of Saipua, and World's End Farm, has been diagnosed with breast cancer. I don't know Sarah, though I have admired her from afar via the internet for more than a decade, since the early days of her blog, since before the farm, before her lionhearted world-building, before even The Castle. I have often promised myself that when the money and time exist (ha!) I would treat myself to her residency, up there in Esperance. I've never done that; I've never so much as applied, to any residency. I wonder, sometimes, where did that time and money go instead. Then on Sunday, speaking with a new friend, I learned for the first time of their terminal diagnosis, and short life-expectancy. All the signs in my universe now seem to be a sort of push; not quiet whispers but fully illuminated, flashing marquees. Clarify, clarify, clarify.

I've been talking with someone frequently about prioritizing our own needs. (Harriet Lerner has been talking about this in my ears, as well.) Do you find it difficult, to know what you need? Looking back on my life — statistically, now half over — I realize that I have spent it, thus far, wholly unable to prioritize my needs. As a larger symptom of that very question, it seems I also often struggle to even identify my needs — typically an important first step, when assessing priorities. It seems, in this moment, perhaps I need to not drive my work forward in a march, with a whip. My attentions are elsewhere; the chariot won’t go. It seems I might need, in fact, to sit at the side of the road a bit. Clarify, clarify, clarify — my resistance to the resistance causes my suffering.

These may sound like two different mantras, but they are feeling more like two sides of the same coin.

Defending oneself

In 2022 I returned to garment making after several years of swearing it off. I had never found the joy in garment sewing — with clothing, I am motivated solely by the end result (rather than the process) and I am too inexperienced of a seamstress to accurately predict whether an experiment will be successful in advance. Garment fitting is a set of skills I have never developed. I’m also an obnoxious perfectionist and tend to hold myself to unreasonably high standards of execution, as well as a miser with a low quality sewing machine, and until recently, no serger. Combine these factors and I had a long run of garment sewing from 2014 through about 2019 that was plagued by disappointments and a lot of unworn homemade clothing.

But in 2022 I found myself needing an enormous amount of personal, energetic protection. It felt intuitive, obvious, and undeniable that clothing myself could play a role in trying to stay present in my body while enduring a level of stress previously unimaginable to me. During that time I also shaved my head, in grief and in mourning. I imagined the act to be a singular event, like rending one’s clothes: marking a moment with an act of destruction. But instead, I have kept it shorn. And I began to dress myself differently.

It’s been a little over a year since I began to focus on making clothing again. And this time, unlike all my previous attempts — driven predominantly by a desire to make neutral, unassuming garments — I have found myself drawn to things that feel loud. Particular. At times perhaps even aggressive. Rather than try to disappear into loose, androgynous garments in black, I desire to take up a space. And a lot of it.

Last year I knit a vermillion sweater — the first injection of a color into my wardrobe in well over a decade, though already nearly a year into my obsession with that very particular hue. Then I became fixated on the idea of a vermillion gown, with tiers of gathers, and large balloon sleeves; a sort of priestess garment, a ceremonial robe. And so I made it. That summer, I made it specifically to walk into work and quit my job. And since then, I have continued to feel a desire to dress myself with my own work, of my own hand, for difficult and hard passages in life. To create a special kind of barrier between myself and the world, with an imbued significance both personal and private.

I don’t have photos of that red gown to share today, or the vermillion and neon pink colorblocked one I made after that, or the even more voluminous toile, originally in natural muslin, that I have since overdyed with indigo and begun to hand-embroider “tattoos” all over. In fact I’m sharing this particular plaid monstrosity here today because life has been hectic, I’ve been away from my studio for weeks, wholly unable to concentrate on quilts, and not photographing anything at all. There is no studio work to speak of. But when I first made this gown, in December of 2022 in preparation for a deeply uncomfortable conversation, I took these pictures with the intention of writing here about defending oneself through cloth.

In the end, that uncomfortable conversation didn’t happen, though I arrived dressed for the part. And similar to that uncomfortable reality unspooling in its own time, through the background of the last six months, this dress remains seemingly impossible for me to capture, either in words or in photos. Nothing about how I feel when I wear this dress feels encapsulated in these images. I also find, when I’m wearing it, my visual experience of seeing it is not nearly so harsh, dramatic, or brash as it feels in photos. When I am wearing this dress I find it extremely beautiful; when I look at images of it I find it appalling. I wear it often. Over a black sweater and tights in the winter (as pictured); with bare arms and black tennis shoes in the heat. It is entirely linen and very, very heavy; the circumference of the bottom tier is over ten feet. I step on it when I use the stairs. I pile it in my lap when I sit so as not to drag it all along the floor. I wore it through so many airports through the end of last year and the beginning of this one that I’ve lost count; I was stopped by strangers and admired for it in every single one.

We’ve been through the ringer, this dress and I. I was deeply dissatisfied with it at first; I made the bodice twice, cutting off the first attempt from the wholly completed garment (after several wears) and re-attaching a second one, in a different configurations of plaids, only to decide I preferred the first attempt, and repeat the surgery. I had arrived at the idea of this gown after seeing the below image advertised by (yes, you guessed it) the inimitable M&M. I became obsessed with the neon yellow. I spent months debating a purchase. In the end, I bought about $400 worth of the entire collection. I added another black plaid. I absolutely hated the orange one, and I should have listened to my gut there; I am still considering disassembling the entire dress yet again, to replace those pieces with something else.

Image by Merchant & Mills

Perhaps, in its fourth, or fiftieth iteration, this gown will feel exactly right. Or perhaps it never will, and it won’t ever matter, and we will spend a long, long time together, this dress and I, garnering garish attention in airports, in quiet corporate offices, and on the sidewalks of Portland.

There are a few more very loud, very impractical bees-in-my-garment-making-bonnet at the moment. It’s hard to know what will or won’t actually emerge from the soup of my brain. Just like this gown is not what I’d hoped or expected, likely the next one won’t be, either. And, just like this one, I hope to find I can love these handmade armaments regardless, love them fiercely, even as I find them imperfect, even as I find them visually — and sometimes physically — agitating. I have hope that whatever emerges next is the same. A litany of lessons, a struggle in self-expression, and also self-protection; in taking up space, holding one’s own, and disregarding everyone else’s opinions, but never my own.

oh! Dress is based on Vivian Shao Chen’s Orchards Dress Pattern, with some obvious modifications, should you wish to make your own.

What to leave out

Weeks ago, someone I love was talking with me about this blog. We were discussing what (and who) and how, and why, things are catalogued here — the differences in writing when you know it won’t be read (journaling), versus when you know it will, and when you know who will read it versus when you’re never really sure who all may. We revisited that same conversation today and so I find myself here, in the trappings of a meta cycle — publicly musing on the layers of publicly processing, which by its very nature hobbles one’s transparency, despite the clear desire to (publicly) share oneself.

It has always seemed a nearly impossible part of writing, to me: the balancing act in the public nature of it. Writing is not only what one chooses to say, but perhaps even more largely, everything one chooses not to.

The first thing I ever wanted to be was a writer. I remember clearly both things — the intense identification with the calling, and the clarity of the moment when I knew I could not be one. An unbearable realization occurred to me: what I wanted to say, and who might (surely would) read it. I was very, very young then, but my feelings about the subject haven’t changed much. Some day I may overcome that obstacle, but I am honest with myself that it seems unlikely. Vulnerability — and perhaps most honestly, comfort in revealing myself to not be how others expect, or want me to be — has never come easy to me. I have spent my life defining myself by what others want me to be. It is not easy to unlearn.

This space is not meant to be a container for all parts of my life; it’s meant to be a container for my work. But to pretend that my work is untouched by my life is absurd, if not somewhat obscene.

What the balance is between those two things in practice, I don’t yet know.

I’ve disappointed my own expectations post-commission, and rather than uninterruptedly completing something start-to-finish I have instead returned to this piece, already nearly a year into its own iterations. I find that I go through distinct phases with this piece, working on it intensely for long stretches — days or weeks — before finding it utterly unbearable, and feeling unable to look at it again for months. I relegate it to a drawer. Then the cycle begins again.

It feels important and necessary to document it, and simultaneously I am not ready to write about it. When I don’t write here each week, I find myself disappointed. So much of what I’m working on (and through) isn’t captured, as I try to parse the time I have away from my 9-5 into competing demands; all of life on one side, and art on the other. Choosing to spend time documenting instead of making is often a very hard choice to make. The weight of this work for the last few weeks has wrung me out a bit, and I have no desire to try to write about the process. Today, in fact, I am agitated, dissatisfied, and my mood is foul. Today, I am finding myself here somewhat spitefully.

It’s hard enough to discuss grief processing even in a general, unfocused way: a quilt for heartbreak, for loss, a quilt as representation of absence. And the details, honestly, even I have a hard time looking at directly; articulating them conscientiously, meaningfully, does not feel possible. Loss is universal; grief is isolation.

It’s been a week or two now of this quilt on my wall, this quilt I have been making physically since last September, but in many ways so much longer. It felt, at first, encouraging to find myself motivated to bring it back out. But I am finding it time to take a break again. Nothing about how this work appears on the wall right now is set; there are so many things it needs. I won’t know for certain what those things are until I put things together, put them up, look for a long time, and then perhaps take them down and back apart again. I am trying not to rush. I am trying to remember that grief will not be rushed. Not after a year, not in a lifetime.

It exhausts me.

Blank slate and rose season

The commission is shipped, photographed, shipped again, and has arrived at its forever home. The studio wall was blank, I had a reprieve from my Saturday courses for the Memorial Day weekend, and I spent more than 8 hours there, alone, lost in thought and cups of tea.

Despite the struggle to arrive here on the digital page with consistency, I have found that I do miss blogging. I did love it, ten years ago, when it was a more regular and ongoing part of my life. I feel a twinge of sadness that all that writing is lost now, but really it doesn’t matter. In truth my own consistency or inconsistency doesn’t really matter. It would be hard to articulate what it is, exactly, specifically, about this process that I value; all I know is that I do. In reviewing how little I’ve recorded since starting this process at the beginning of the year (now that the year is at its halfway point!) I feel a renewed call to record more. To be less precious. To post ugly photos, and unpolished thoughts. The light has returned to the PNW — the photo part, at least, should ostensibly be easy. (Easier.)

It does seem to be a permanent fact, however, that the colors I fall for the hardest are also the seemingly most impossible to capture on camera. Reds are notoriously difficult in photos — my beloved vermillion perhaps the greatest offender. My newest obsession is no different.

Often, I can pinpoint my interest in a color to a moment, and object, an experience. With acid yellow, it was Sarah Ryhanen of Saipua who sent me tumbling down this particular rabbit hole. In the Fall of 2022 Sarah started showing sneak peeks of a linen bathrobe being designed for the farm shop, and she shared that the linen was from the one and only Merchant & Mills. I had to have some. The timing was fortuitous because I had also been absolutely salivating over another (neon) yellow M&M’s fabric, and been unable to convince myself not to make a large international purchase.

That was October. I don’t know when this grid idea lodged in my brain, but it has been with me a hot minute already. Instagram tells me it was February when I first started sketching with these colors. And I was clearly committed to the idea by my birthday trip in the middle of that month, because I brought home not one but two lilac-toned cuts from the antique mall I stumbled into on my way home.

After the success of rapid fire decision making with the commission piece, it’s my hope to treat this one much the same way. The only knowns in this moment are the palette and the existence of this grid; anything can change, adapt, grow, or be added. Two weeks ago I thought I knew where it was going. Today, all I know is that we’re no longer headed in that particular direction. Could we have another quilt top complete in 6 weeks? We’re all about to find out.

And last but certainly not least — and in the spirit of shameless documentation — it’s rose season here in Portland. Roses are a great love of mine, and I make it a point to overindulge during this time of the year. Currently I have six rosebushes, and I have been bringing in a fresh handful every few days for the last few weeks. It fills me with joy when I see them, even (or perhaps especially) amidst my dirty dishes and my pile of ignored mail. I keep one on my bedside book-crate, I keep bunches of them on my kitchen table, or on my living room altar. I take them with me in whatever empty drink container is at hand when visiting friends. I stop and put my face deep into the cups of them on every corner, big spiders be damned.

I am deeply grateful to roses, to their very existence; for the simple magic of being made to feel such happiness just by experiencing them. I feel grateful to myself for allowing — nay, insisting — that such a small thing be such a source of big joy. Even amidst the endless stressors of life, large and small, unceasing — for the time being, at least, there are roses.

Slowly, with great haste

My favorite quilt book, hands down, is Unconventional and Unexpected, Quilts Below the Radar 1950-2000. Likely if you’re reading here, you know it already, but if you don’t — run don’t walk. The works in that book are wild and unruly, colorful, and largely rich in wonkiness. Unexpected truly is the word for them. They surprise and delight.

This book may have contained the first quilts I ever laid eyes on where the surprising dichotomy (which I have since come to seek out) happened inside my brain. They were, I felt, ugly — or at the very least, they were surely not conventionally beautiful — and I loved them. These were not quiet, conservative, careful, muted conversations in cloth like so much of what I had seen and loved in quilting up to that moment. These were not subtle, not conventional. I believe there are only two two-color quilts in the whole book (both red and whites). These quilts made no safe choices. In fact (again, dichotomy) I found that many of the colors, the fabrics, and shapes on their own offended my aesthetic senses; but as a whole, seen in total, each offending choice harmonized to become infinitely more than the sum of their parts. I found them fascinating, and alive-feeling. Truly works of art in their own right; not merely home decor, which is how I thought of quilts (especially my own) up until that moment.

Quilting has been a journey for me, through the difficult, unforgiving landscape of my perfectionist, planning tendencies towards the wilder shores of… well, the unexpected. It has taken me years of internal (and external) dialogue to recognize that the quilts I love most in the world, those that make me gasp and want to look and look and look, are exactly these types of quilts. Quilts that could not have been planned. Quilts that are so clearly,… stumbled upon. Discovered, uncovered, born through trying, and experimentation, not premeditation. (There’s a life metaphor in there too, certainly. I’ll let us wade through that independently.)

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After finally embarking upon, and then wholly committing to, this new way of working (beginning without knowing where I’m going), I knew that I would take on this most recent commission that way. But it still terrified me. With such an incredibly condensed timeline, there would be no time for massive changes of heart. There would not even be time for slight hesitation.

I’ve been making quilts for over a decade, and am only feeling within the last 2 years that I have begun to step into the pool of my own work. I am learning how to swim. I know how to make nice quilts; but I am only just beginning to learn how to make quilts that are my own. Could I really make something that would satisfy my wild quilt heart in two months?

The process was a blur. Make and make and make, only stopping to consider once a critical mass of material was reached. The final design, the layout, the sashing, the border — all arrived as solutions to the problem of what next, as opposed to steps upon any sort of predetermined path. There were points at which I was deeply disinterested, even disappointed, in some of the choices I had made; and moments of doubt. What path could take me somewhere I wanted to go, given where I found myself at that moment? I spent my fair share of time with the seam ripper. But indecision was not an option, and iteration as always proved the key to un-stuck-ness. Over and over again, I was surprised that trying something I assumed surely would not work — but would hopefully give me other ideas? — turned out to be the choice I made.

Today makes 4 weeks and 1 day since I completed the top, and last wrote about it here. In the interim I made the back, basted it, hand quilted it, bound it, washed it, and shipped it. This feels nearly unbelievable to me, despite being the one who did it. Also during that time I lost my “studio Saturdays” to a professional development course (requirement of the day job) that runs 8am-5pm, every Saturday until June 3rd(!!); not to mention other life nonsense ranging from myriad personal crises to emergency abdominal surgery for the dog. As such the blog (among other things) has suffered. I feel no shame! In truth I’ve been able to show up here today because I am home sick from said day job with a fever, sore throat and a cough, and no intention of getting dressed. It feels truly indulgent to take this moment to breathe. And to record. Here this object is, that was made in great haste during this long silence.

Because in the end, we arrived. Is it the quilt I set out to make? Not in the slightest. Are there things about it I would likely change, and change again, had it lived on the design wall for six months instead of one? Undoubtedly. Did she come into her own, a successful riot of color, whimsy and personality? I think so. I like her a great deal. In fact, I adore her. She was commissioned as a gift between friends of 20 years, and what an honor a gift like that is to make. As I said last month when I finished the top: it feels powerful and joyful to me, two feelings I hope the recipient is wrapped in when she receives it.

I was truly saddened by packing her into a box only 24 hours after pulling her out of the dryer (the moment I feel the quilt is truly “done”). I would have liked to spend more time with her. I tried to take a great slew of photos to remember her by. But I am ecstatic to have been “on time,” and for her to arrive at her forever home. And deeply excited about taking what she has taught me into what comes next.

At full tilt

Since February I’ve been intending to take the approach of writing a little here nearly every day throughout the week, rather than leaving the “gather your thoughts and write a blog post” to-do item as one large, looming thing. This week for the first time, we’re trying it out.

After posting last week I had my semi-routine experience I call “7am Studio Saturday.” Those are typically ten hour days for me; it works out nicely that I’m driven to studio by a loved one who starts their Saturday workday by 7am, and am picked up by another loved one around 5pm when their day ends. My current studio space is in a large warehouse in an industrial part of town — sleepy and uninhabited in the early weekend hours. When I arrive, I have the building to myself. I have small routines and rituals; after letting myself into the building, I go first straight to the communal kitchen, where I fill and start the kettle, then to my studio where I first put down my things, turn on all my lights, and start up both my space heaters. I gather my preferred mug and my tea bag and I go back through the quiet, dark, cavernous building to the now-roiling kettle, pour tea, and make the trek back again.

On these mornings I have woken up only perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes before piling into the car, so I am not wholly alert yet. I have someone’s discarded, free-craigslist-find couch in the studio — ostensibly for company, but primarily for my spoiled dog — and it’s become part of my ritual to sit here warming my hands on my cuppa for the first minutes of my morning, observing whatever might be on the design wall, and thinking about goals for the day, if I have them. Sometimes I journal during this early first hour, as well. After I begin working I am usually too engaged to lift my head and realize the time; the best bagel shop in town is only a few blocks away but does sell out early, and I have to remind myself to stop what I’m doing and go for breakfast before it gets too late.

I love the intense quiet, and alone-ness, of this time. Having lived alone for only a brief 9 months of my life, keeping this studio space — having a place that is only mine, and whose purpose is to please no one but me — has been a revelation of sorts. An unreasonably expensive one, whose cost may necessitate the end the experience soon, but an important one I have cherished nonetheless.

Last Saturday I put my nose to the grindstone and I finished the entire border for the ongoing commission. The choice to frame the piece in HSTs was an enormous additional work commitment for a piece that is already coming down to the absolute wire, but I am so happy with my decision. The border really brings the quilt into its own; it feels now both solid and framed, but also explosive — when I look at it on the wall it feels as though it is ever-expanding outward, like the Big Bang. To me it feels powerful, and joyful, and I hope that the recipient feels those same things when she sees it, or wraps herself or her loved ones in it.

I’ll have to save extended musings on this for another time but in looking at this piece it occurred to me that it will make the 3rd or 4th quilt I’ve made in the last two years that feels like this — joyful. Exuberant. Quilts I made before this time period did not have that component, and it interests me to realize this about works that were made during what was some of the darkest and most difficult experiences of my life. I have a working theory about this; perhaps I’ll revisit it in more detail in the future.

The week, I have tomorrow to finish sewing together a back for this quilt, as it absolutely must get basted before the end of Sunday night. I realized that I need to get it in the mail to my photographer a month from now; quilting and binding a 72x72” work in a month will be no small feat. But it’s moved along smoothly thus far, and I have hope I continue with the momentum. I’m also just outright incredibly curious: is this really possible for me? Can I — will I — make a quilt in essentially 2 months, start to finish?

And if so,… could I do it again?

The constraint of efficiency

In my last post (I seem to be stuck on a two-week pace now) I wrote about taking on a new commission with a very abbreviated timeline. As a result, I’ve been pushing myself to make without hesitation; to believe that I can, and will, find my way to something that sings, without long bouts of contemplation (and second guessing). It’s never my preference to craft under a deadline (knitting, sewing, quilting or otherwise) but I’m always interested in using a constriction of some kind as an avenue for learning something. And a June deadline for a finished quilt certainly counts as a constriction!

I selected a palette from my existing fabric stash (the largest one I’ve ever had, thanks to the last two years of “fuck it, if I want it, I buy it” attitude) — and decided to start with sawtooth stars, as I said. I’ve been nostalgic for simple stars for a while, but I made this decision based on other strictly logical considerations, too: HSTs are a nearly infinitely adaptable base, and can be made very efficiently 8 at a time. And here you have the additional constrictions: No new fabrics; HST batching (normally, I never “batch-make” anything, having too strong a preference for variation); and most importantly, making blocks rapidly, trusting that once they exist they will tell me what to do with them.

I set out to make 25 stars (13” finished block), with a 5x5 grid in mind. That would bring us to 65” square for the top — my new go-to, favorite quilt size (more on that later). I powered through cutting and sewing and cutting again my 8-at-a-time HSTs in a matter of days, and began to make stars. Carefully and uniformly at first, then with more and more playfulness. By the time I had 18 of them, I felt I could start arranging them on the wall, which I did. And did, and did, and did.

It did not take me long to determine that the straightforward field of stars approach was not going to be it. While I love this style of quilt — and am determined to make many in my lifetime — my original palette lacked certain elements that I had failed to predict the broader applications of, in this style of arrangement. There was a “dinginess” to the overall effect; I lacked highlights, or any moments of brightness to move the eye around effectively. Frankly, at this stage, my choices bored me. I always need something,.. unexpected.

It was at this point that I added just a few touches of yellow — a single sunny triangle, and a few more in shiny gold silk. This helped, certainly, but I was still not excited. Nothing was pushing against each other the way I like best in quilt compositions.

I decided to consider sashing. It’s not historically been a part of my design considerations but I see it used to great effect often, and am trying to learn to use it well myself. I took all my stars down off the wall and instead tacked up large pieces of yardage as backdrop, to arrange the pieces over, thereby creating the option to look at different arrangements and different possible sashing widths or orientations.

The lilac, somehow, was my first go to. I have always ranked purple as one of my most hated of all colors, but suddenly there are shades of a specific light, dusty purple that I simply need to press into my life, find myself seeking out. (I blame acid yellow.) One of the many things I came home with from my birthday trip was what may have been a twin-sized lilac top sheet, though I can’t really be sure. (It may just be wide yardage that was hemmed? We’ll never know.) I pinned it up on the wall and put the blocks atop it. I loved the outcome, but I didn’t want to commit to the first thing I tried. I also was afraid of a giant sea of lilac — too twee? So I repeated the exercise with the vermillion gingham purchased on the same trip; and ooh, I liked that, too. And then, instead of having two options to choose between, suddenly I had a relationship to work out.

The lilac erased the dingy, “flat” feeling. The brightness of the lilac pushes against these neutral tones in a confusing way for the eye — because, I imagine, the tonal quality of these fabrics is nearly the same, but the brightness and vibrancy is different? I find this visual confusion pleasurable (in my developing aesthetic, I consider it important). Together they sort of hum, in your visual field, not creating an obvious foreground or background, but instead a sort of impression of float. By contrast you can see how this differs from the gingham quadrants, where the star blocks sit firmly visually “atop” the gingham background. (I find a similar effect — the foreground/background confusion — in the lilac tones of this quilt, which I love.)

After sewing the top together last weekend and putting it back on the wall, it also told me that “enough” is never enough. I went home that night with the question of “what else” still on the brain, drew out a black and white version on graph paper, and decided it needed a border. A brief experiment on the wall (above) a few days later proved the theory. So tomorrow is 7am studio Saturday, and we’ll see if we can’t make that a reality in one fell (ten hour) swoop.

All in all my goal is to have the first quilting stitches chewing into it by the time the calendar turns over to May. This will be an unheard of pace; from initial conversation of the commission to finished quilt top in 5 weeks. If you had asked me if it were possible (for me, personally) I would’ve said no. But I have in fact been deeply enjoying the breakneck speed, and the quick commitments. I have a secret goal to try to repeat this exercise as soon as this piece is down off the wall; I think Acid Vat (which you can see hiding in the shadowy corner above) would greatly benefit from this same treatment. Here’s to a new container — in this case, speed? — within which to learn something.

Loose ends and re-beginnings

Showing up every week has proven harder than I initially imagined, but I am still grateful to sit down here when I can. Last week I even started writing early — the day after I last hit “publish” — in an attempt to '“get ahead” of it in some way. But life remains hectic and full, and in these past two weeks seemingly fuller and not without some health bumps, as I imagine the changing weather foists on everyone. Spring has me feeling motivated: I have been mending holes, approaching the finishing touches on a sweater I started knitting for Kai nearly 2 years ago, and putting quilting stitches in a baby quilt begun when my friend got pregnant but whose daughter is now likely nearly two (older?). I even deep cleaned our kitchen pantry — though this was spurred on by a fear of a moth infestation — and let me tell you, if you haven’t done that in a bit (or ever) — you should do it. It’s a glorious feeling, a clean kitchen pantry, and it has inspired much satisfying cooking.

But in truth outside of these attempts at loose-end-tying I can hardly remember the last two weeks. On March 18th I spent a full 10 hours in the studio; I hadn’t had the little ritual I call “7am Studio Saturday” in a few weeks, and it felt good to be there. But it was also hard — the pieces I’m working on now are very personal. I’m grateful to be making them, and still, they are hard. I had set an intention to at least touch on the ghost piece that weekend; to cut some fabric, sew a few pieces together, and test my idea of how I think that work wants to be. I also told myself, “Acid Vat is available to me today!” and that I would pivot from the hard work of these heavy pieces to play with neon yellow as often and for as long as I wanted.

In the end I did neither of those things. I distracted myself on my phone periodically, I sat and let tears come a few times, and I walked my dog in the sunshine for about 30 minutes. But the overwhelming majority of those ten hours, I put my head down and I made a large group of blocks for that big blue piece that I shared photos of in the last post. I did not experiment with the ghost piece. But I know that time is coming.

Since then, unfortunately, I’ve had very little opportunity to be in the studio at all. And a few days later I took on another commission — one I am excited about, and also intimidated by the timeline of — and so after that 10 hour Saturday, the personal projects are officially backburnered for the foreseeable future. It will be very interesting to see how this new assignment plays out; I’m determined to work within a certain set of parameters for myself but also determined not to decide on the outcome from the onset. I’ve started by making some sawtooth stars, a block I’ve had a hankering to return to for the last year or so. Whether this remains the course, or I veer off, time will tell.

In the interim since I wrote last I’ve also started the process of looking for a new studio space; I’m on the waitlist for some studio buildings and also in a slow email correspondence with (surprise) a local church. I’m actually most interested in the church option, though it seems the least likely to pan out. While I’ve been deeply grateful — for a long and myriad list of reasons — to have my current space, it leaves a lot to be desired, including natural light, cleanliness, and dependable wifi. And with the rent raised on March 1st to a staggering $600/month, I just can’t justify that financial bleed anymore.

I’m also trying to revive the small crit group that Brittany Wilder started in the studio space we shared pre-pandemic, in the former YU. Five of us are scheduled to meet again in 2 weeks, for the first time in over three years. (Our group was just getting off the ground in February of 2020.) We want to come back together to talk to each other about our work. It feels like a deeply meaningful re-beginning.

Here’s hoping that all this energy stays. Here’s hoping everyone else is feeling it, too.

There is no behind

Time is moving fast, though maybe it always feels that way. I missed the last 2 weeks of showing up here, but I’m determined not to always write about my failure to write. I want to practice acknowledging gaps (though they don’t always need to be acknowledged), and moving on.

Life has been hectic, and it seems we have emerged from the slow heavy flatness of winter into spring at a full sprint. The clocks changed, my day job became unimaginably hectic overnight, the calendar is suddenly full. All at once I am too busy, and feeling chronically behind, and yet also all at once I feel momentum. I lean forward downhill and let my feet carry me. There is an energy in me, in my days. The months-long physical ramifications of my neurological stress event last year are finally gone. I hesitate to wave my hand and pronounce the depression of my last many, many grueling seasons over, but I harbor a nascent hope. The narcotic power of sunshine surely helps. (As do vitamin D and B-12, sunshine lamps, the right drugs, and generous support from loved ones.)

In my newfound energy, things are getting done. For the last many months I have been working on and off on a large commission piece, and last weekend I finally completed the top. At approximately 92” x 94”, said top took up the entire design wall in my studio, and so for months on end I have not been able to effectively stand back and observe my other ideas. The night the final seam of the commission piece pulled it all together, I stood looking at that blank white wall feeling somewhat like a kid on xmas — I couldn’t wait to go home to bed, so that the morning would arrive and I could play.

Last month I referenced a body of work I’m currently developing, with each piece operating both as its own container and also as a part of the whole. Right now there are seven known family members in this collection, but they may end up a larger — or smaller — group (my new rule being: fret not, not knowing thy destination).

It’s my memory that I began preparing — collecting, documenting, purchasing, washing, ironing, cutting — the fabric for these last September. I filled my enormous worktable with piles and piles of cut fabric; I made a few tentative blocks. For quite some time after I had done so, I felt a regret, a resistance — I didn’t know if I could make this work, or if I should make it. I didn’t know what it meant to devote myself to this idea, when it seemed probable that forgetting, that putting away, the seed of this work was the “right” thing to do. Not to give it air, and light, but to stifle it in the dark, and hope it would die.

So I took my time. I threw myself fully into other projects, joyful experiments in learning new things without the burden of embodying such personal experiences. Happy work; lighter, freer, and confidence-building. Months went by, and I ignored the piles on my table, shoving them out of the way when I needed the space.

And then the commission piece came down last weekend, and was folded neatly. The back came together in a few quick seams, joined the top in an orderly pile, and the wall was empty. And I was filled with an urgency — a desire — to return to this body of work.

These two, above, are the furthest developed of the family; I think of them as the focal point of the overall concept. I have been calling these pieces The Sisters. They are independent and yet wholly dependent on each other — they are made of the same materials in differing combination. They are two separate bodies, and yet they inform and speak to each other, influence and reference each other; they can both injure and protect each other.

Now that I can finally stand back and take them in, there are ways in which both works are currently failing my initial conception, as well as places where they have created their own unexpected successes. The blue piece is neither dark or cold enough for my liking yet; the red one too soft and gentle, not yet chaotic and unbound. Both will change; neither will likely end up where I anticipate. The plan is that they will both be much, much larger than you see here.

There is a third piece, a ghost piece, that will also be made in the style of these first two; I have not started her yet, but she rolls around in my thoughts these last many months. I first made a sketch of her in a notebook on 10/17, five months ago to the day. In truth I am most afraid of this third piece, as it asks things of me that make me deeply uncomfortable. But unlike last fall, I know that feeling is telling me that I must make the work; and I will.

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PS. The yellow is an unrelated work; a joy-piece. Its name in my head is “The Vat of Acid Episode,” and it exists (at this moment) solely to delight me with color play. This is the piece I referenced in my vintage-fabric-buying binge, and recently on social media, looking for that perfect, elusive, barely-there-dirty lilac. When I need a reprieve from processing the heaviness of The Sisters, I have this bright bit of joy to dip into.

Deep winter

Well two days late and a week behind, I’m finally back here this morning.

I had intended to write last week from the privacy of a three night retreat at the coast, but it turned out the wifi I was assured of was not, in fact, an amenity in my cabin. In the end I was relieved by the disconnect, but it did mean dropping out of this habit unintentionally and only a month in. I’m pleasantly surprised to say: I missed it. This week, it feels less like an obligation and more of a personal treat. There’s been a lot on my mind that I’d like to record here, this time around.

Last week was my thirty seventh birthday. As mentioned above, as a gift to myself I sent myself away. I booked a stay on the coast of southern WA, and drove out of town mid-week with a car packed with everything I thought I might want to reach for. Clothing that felt powerful, and comforting, and warm; foods that felt nourishing but also like a fanciful splurge; a quilt to quilt, yarn to knit; candles to burn, cards to pull; oils and lotions for winter skin; three kinds of tea, a loaf of homemade bread, honey and cream; a journal, a sketchbook, and books, books, books, and more books.

I’m neither an all-out, please-center-me-in-attention birthday celebrator nor someone who finds it a difficult “holiday,” as I recognize some do. Throughout the years I’ve used it as an excuse to have a dinner party, or do something pricier than normal, but I’ve also been comfortable mostly treating it like any other day, and politely thanking people for their well-wishes. While my own aging surprises me (as it seems it does each of us?) it does not bother nor upset me, and I feel no raging resistance to the closing chapters of my twenties, or thirties. For a long time now, the two-choice equation has seemed to me exceedingly simple: age or die. This prevents me from feeling the same disgust at aging that the world seems to insist that we feel.

However, this year, this week in mid-February also held some complicated emotional landmines, unrelated to my own birthday, and which I won’t go into. But I wanted to feel both held and removed, and focused on myself during this particular span of a few days; I wanted to pass through the dates on the calendar in a particular way, as gently and lovingly to myself as I could. And so I went away, alone, for the first time in my life. From 2/15/2023 to 2/18/2023, I chose not to share my time with anyone.

Each morning I got up before the sun, and made a cup of tea in the dark, eschewing electric light. I opened my curtains and got back into bed with my steaming mug, and I lit a candle, or three, and I watched the day ease in. I read poems. I journaled. I took sauna each day and I stood under the shower head afterward like an addict of the cold — breathing, breathing. I walked on the beach, and in the dunes. I laid down on the soft mossy loam beneath the coastal pines and I watched the trees in silence for long periods of time. I ate pink grapefruit, quartered and salted, in my steaming, sun-filled shower with the juice running down. I read and read and read. I slept. I ate. I thanked my objects out loud, by name, for their generous service: my teapot, my mug, my coat, my slippers, my hot water plumbing.

It was an experience meaningful in ways that can’t be put into words. But I will take a moment here to encourage you, if you have never taken time away from the obligations of your life alone — especially if you are a woman, a wife, a mother, a person upon whom the obligations of others’ care consistently rests — go. Go away. Even for one night. Turn your cellphone off. Ask no one what they would like to do, or what they need. And give yourself, even if only for 24 hours, anything you want, whenever you want it. Be a deeply considerate, kind, gentle, loving, attentive, devoted, and loyal best friend, caretaker, or romantic partner — to yourself.

From Maxine Kumin’s Always Beginning: “And I suppose a tribute to friendship is a good way to close out this month’s entries, a tribute to enduring relationships in general, to the loyalty that underlies them. Going on, is, after all, the ultimate pleasure of our lives.”

And with that, we now return to the portion of the record relevant to life’s fiber arts department. For on my way home that Saturday I stopped in a well-loved quirky Oregon coastal town and after failing to find a café within which to sit and read, I wandered into an antique mall. I had no real agenda but am always on the lookout for old quilts to ogle, or good Irish knitwear to inspect. Instead, I found an entire booth packed to the brim with vintage fabrics.

I spent a full ninety minutes in that booth.

I pulled out and assessed nearly every individual fabric you see in this photo. The pile of my considerations is there in the front, stacked haphazardly on a stool in a leaning tower. The cuts are all different lengths, and listed in atypical measurements; “7 feet!” boasted several, including that red gingham at the top of my stack. So then the mental tabulation: what is 7 feet in yards, and what does that make the price-per-yard? Another squirrelly thing about vintage or secondhand textiles is that you can’t be certain about the fiber content, and I am very particular. Luckily, I am also confident that I have a better-than-average hand for assessing this, as I imagine most textile people do; still, you can’t be entirely sure.

In the end I only took home six (only! six!) cuts, but I harbor regrets about some things I left behind. Prices were significantly cheaper than new fabric (by rough calculations, about half) but that doesn’t change the fact that prices in general are currently so high, and wages so low. In combination with this three night retreat I didn’t really have the money for (but so desperately needed), and the fact that I have, truly, an ungodly fabric stash already, getting out of there at $45 had a guilty little sting to it. That said, I am very satisfied with my choices.

The six things I couldn’t leave without boiled down to:

• Two cuts in pale purple, for a quilt idea I’ve just started. One is a pale lilac brushed flannel, and perfect — the other is a brighter, more saturated hue, but a straightforward quilting cotton and if nothing else will be just right for the back of said piece. You can see them both at the very bottom of that stack on the stool, above.

• Another straightforward quilting cotton in what a loved one of mine comically refers to as “hospital green”

• A thin, relatively sheer pale blue lawn printed with large scale pink and white florals; not colors I gravitate towards at all, generally, but so nostalgic and sweet I couldn’t leave it behind

• That red gingham, which was the real roll of the dice. The shade of vermillion is absolutely perfect; a hard color to find, and a color with which I am wholly infatuated. But it was the priciest of the bunch, at $14 for the cut, and I did not feel confident about the fiber content. It was absolutely stiff, and unpleasant to the touch. But I pulled a few fibers from the cut edge and snapped them (had I had a lighter in my pocket I would’ve done a burn test right in the store) and I felt confident the threads were not poly. I decided I had a lot of hope about how it would wash up; it had obviously never seen hot water, and likely been folded this way covered in its original sizing for decades, so I took the risk. I’m pleased to report I am still confident that it is entirely a natural fiber, and it has softened considerably, though what exactly it is I may never know. It passes the burn test quite pleasurably.

• And finally, my absolute favorite find; a two+ yard cut of a sheer, drape-y, highlighter-yellow, large-scale floral print made up of peach and buttery roses and spring green leaves. This almost certainly has some poly content, or is maybe entirely so. But it’s so uglybeautiful and so loud and so just right in its weirdness, that I am madly in love with it anyway.

One less-than-pleasant reality of these last two weeks is that I have barely seen the inside of my studio. Between last week’s trip away and this week’s record-setting snowstorm, February is sliding out from under me without much access to my workspace. I feel itchy about it; my ideas overrun me and I have a real drive now for some long working hours. I need to get a commission finally sewn together and off the design wall so that the two current “burning desire” pieces can finally take over, and I have some decisions to make about processes. Hopefully next week, some photos of actual sewing.

If you’ve made it this far, I applaud your endurance. There is a final thing that for posterity/archive I wish to record for myself before the month changes over, and so I’ll sign off with this list of current interests and obsessions: topics I intend to mull over and work through in the coming season. Thanks for reading. I hope you are feeling the the approaching gateway into Spring in your bones, the way I am.

• Colors

  • Vermillion (eternally); approaching 2 years of obsession with unwavering interest. Three current ideas featuring vermillion; the twins, plus the erasure piece. The combination of vermillion and pink (nearly all tones and varieties).

  • Acid yellow. Not warm, not natural feeling. Searing, in between yellow and green; neon, electric, aggressive and unforgiving. Not played with nicely. Ambiguous and difficult to describe.

  • Pale, dirty lilac. Not of the bright, candied variety but of a warm grey/pink undertone, muddy. Pale. (Though the bright stuff may have its hooks in me too; considering knitting a mohair sweater in this color.)

  • Soft, dirty blue green. Between pale teal and sage, a soft cold green, a lamb’s ear color.

  • Obviously the combinations of these. The acid yellow and lilac combination has been muscling other projects out of the way to get to the fore but the recent realization of the lilac and vermillion combination possibilities is also percolating; deep navy as the binding agent.

  • Recognition of the in-between-ness. The defiance of categorization. Visual confusion, or uncertainty. People see vermillion as orange, not red; acid yellow they call “green”. The blue/green, when at its best, defies either category. The color lilac I love most is often misclassified as pink.

• Blocks / design interests

  • Continuation of log cabin variations (all pieces of the family of grief work)

  • One-patch and nine-patch variations

  • Needle-turn appliqué

  • An burgeoning interest in a medallion quilt

  • Ohio or sawtooth star variation (as a gift idea; bluegreen)