Shintangle Studio

Greenwood Public Library 2019 Quilts and Book Bag

I will, eventually, get around to showing you what’s been happening in my studio over the past while, but in the meantime, here’s the big reveal of the 2019 raffle quilts and book bag made by the faithful Greenwood Public Library quilters to raise funds for the library.

We decided to go a bit modern this year. We chose a traditional pattern (the name of which I’ve forgotten but we keep archives; I can find out) and recoloured it to produce a clean, crisp, modern look with lots of graphic impact. We’re particularly happy with the black and off-white and grey backgrounds and borders, which make the intense pure colours pop. Here’s the main prize, a queen-size quilt. The back of this one is a subtle, small-scale floral in grey.

Many thanks, as usual, to Miriam March of Whispering Pines Quilt Studio near Rock Creek, who did a superb job of quilting this quilt on her long-arm machine. And even more thanks to Miriam for having donated her time and expertise: the money we save on the quilting is money that goes directly into library programs and materials.

We chose a swirly pattern that I’ve often asked Miriam to use: I love it. The swirls and curves complement the sharp angles of the quilt beautifully, and equally beautifully echo the circles in the outermost border.

Second prize is a lap quilt (again, I can find out what the pattern is called, if you wish) quilted by Myrna Charlton, and third prize is a book bag, which will be stuffed with brand-new books. The bag is the product of the design skills of Ann Mudrie and Gerri Hollett and the sewing expertise of Ann Mudrie. First, the front of the quilt. Note the scrappy binding; we’re proud of that.

And then, the back of the quilt and the other side of the book bag.

Don’t you just love that back? Some of us think it’s even better than the front. As you can see, both the book bag and the lap quilt were made with fabric left over from the main prize quilt. We’ve learned from experience that it’s a lot easier to display and photograph the three pieces together if the fabrics are at least related, if not actually the same. In this case, we had enough scraps left that we didn’t have to raid our own stashes to fill in any gaps. At least that’s my memory of how things went. It’s more than a month since we had our work bee to sew down the binding so the details are a little hazy.

Now then: quilt raffle tickets are available now! As always, single tickets are $2 apiece or you can purchase three tickets for $5. If you’d like to purchase tickets, please get in touch with the library at 250 445-6111 or [email protected]. Or if you’re among my friends and family and you’d like tickets, let me know and I’ll make sure you get them. We have had winners from all over the place in past years and we’ve always managed to unite winners with their quilts or bag; we promise the same will be true this year.

We think this is the 16th year that we’ve gotten together to raise funds for the library this way. And why do we do this, year after year after year? Partly it’s for the run of spending time together through the long months of late winter and early spring, but mainly it’s because this raffle is one of the main fund-raisers for the library each year. You may be interested to know that libraries in BC have been seriously underfunded for the past decade. According to a recent newspaper article by Cari Lynn Gawletz, library director of the Grand Forks public library, the BC government funded BC libraries to the tune of $17.7 million in 2008. In 2009, that funding dropped to $14 million per year and it’s been frozen there ever since. The current government is in the consultation stage of deciding on its 2020 budget, and the BC Libraries Association and related groups are mounting a campaign to lobby the province for $20 million for 2020. That doesn’t seem like a lot to ask, given where we were a dozen years ago. And let me tell you, libraries are stretched so thin they’re squeaking. I don’t know how we do it, actually, offering wonderful existing and new programs, purchasing superb materials for loan to patrons, and keeping our physical facilities from crumbling into dust. But as the chair of a library board, I can tell you that the worry about funding is relentless. Like writing grant applications, fund-raising is a fact of life for every library in the province, and our quilt and book bag raffle has proven to be one of our best tactics for bringing in some funds.

So remember: when you buy a ticket or three, you’re not only getting a chance to win one of these beauties but you’re doing your part to keep our library’s doors open and the lights on. In a tiny community of about 650 people, the library is hugely important. We want to make sure we do our best to have as much of a positive impact on Greenwood as we possibly can. Thanks in advance for helping us out.

Backlit

I walk a lot. Partly that’s the result of having dogs, but in the times in my life when I’ve been dog-less I’ve still walked and walked and walked. Cities, forests, suburbs, seashores, country roads: I’ve walked wherever I’ve been. It’s a great way to get some exercise and fresh air and it’s a bonus to my mental health and it’s a way to stay connected to what’s around me. I’m glad that after sixty years (gulp) I can still do it, and hope I’ll be like my Mum at 84: still walking and loving it.

If you’re a long-time reader of this space, you’ll have been for a few walks with me on our land. Today’s offering is another. I timed it as precisely as I possibly could because I wanted to take my camera to record as much as possible of that magical moment when the promise of foliage finally begins to be fulfilled. I love that time when the bud (whether it’s a leaf or a needle (which is really another leaf)) just begins to break open and reveal the bursting life inside. I went out one morning early this month and was thrilled to see that I was going to get an extra treat. You know how the brand-new leaves in spring have that amazing range of incredibly fresh, tender colours? Mostly a clear, forest-stream green or perhaps a green tinged with copper or red or yellow? Not only was I seeing all of that, but the sun was directly in front of me as I left the house and walked up the hill into the forest, meaning that the foliage right in front of me was more often than not backlit. Well. Those glorious clear greens were exponentially enhanced by the sun illuminating them from behind. Have a look.

In order: fresh tips of fir, two of snowberry (I think), ceanothus (a tough, leathery-leaved bush that smells heavenly, a bit like eucalyptus, when warmed by the sun), something I can’t identify, a pretty little fern (it’s rare to find ferns on our place, which is mostly dry), two small plants I can’t identify, two shots of the first unfurling of false Solomon’s seal, and a leaf emerging from the bud on a soopallalie (the buds are so leathery that it’s hard to believe they’ll produce such a gorgeous translucent green leaf).

Of course, not every shot was backlit. Below are, in order: the first intimations of bloom on the Oregon grape, pussy toes foliage, kinnikinnick (I love the pinky coppery edges on the fresh leaves), prince’s pine, a fabulous little feathery bloom that I don’t recognize, first foliage of a columbine (what a great shape those leaves are), a closeup of kinnikinnick so you can see how the leaves unfurl in a cluster like a rose (how beautiful, those new greens against the dark and bleached remnants of kinnikinnick leaves of years past), pliant and tender young larch needles on a branch at the base of a large tree, the stunning magentas of red osier dogwood bark setting off its new leaves to perfection, a beautiful medley of young moss and old lichen, and two high-drama shots, one of lichen on a twig lying on a richly-coloured bed of fallen needles and the other of a spotlit Oregon grape and its shadow.

Such glories to be found in the woods at this time of year! They just take some hunting for since none is particularly obvious at first glance.

And here are a few extras: 

a gracefully-curved, bleached-out branch glowing against the shadowy earth behind it,

a bit of stone wall that I discovered on this walk (it’s a bit off the path and I was astonished to find it; my dear husband thinks perhaps his step-kids built it decades ago),

a beautiful, lustrous bulb that blooms in front of the house briefly each year, 

the intricate geometry of last year’s yarrow blossoms,

a happy dog,

and another happy, somewhat manic dog (that’s a bit of hoof paring in her mouth, a favourite chew toy).

In the couple of weeks since I took these photos, everything has changed, of course, but that’s the glory of spring, right? So fleeting, so riotously profligate with new life. How lucky we are to be able to watch it happen.

Next time, you’ll get studio news.

 

 

 

 

Exploring Texture and Pattern

So far in 2019 all you’ve seen from me are photos of dogs and walks in the woods. "But Anne," some of you have asked, "what’s going on in your studio? What are you making?" I have indeed been busy in my studio, a nice change from 2018 when I seemed to pour all of my brain and inspiration into the Fibre Art Network newsletter. I’m determined that 2019 will be different.

What I want to show you today, however, isn’t even a studio project, but the products of an online course I signed up for way back in October. I’m always on the lookout for ways to make art in the winter that don’t involve my studio, because it’s at times quite a hassle to think ahead far enough to get a fire going in the studio wood stove and set the heating pad to warming up my sewing machine, then wait a couple of hours until machine and studio are warm enough for working. Also, because my lighting setup in the studio isn’t great, I don’t work out there after dark, which in winter means I’m done by 5 pm or so. I wanted something to cover these times when it doesn’t make sense for me to be in the studio. (It’s this kind of thinking that has led to an art desk in the house absolutely crammed with art supplies, most of which I’ve barely touched.)

I can’t remember where I saw this course advertised, perhaps in a SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) newsletter, but when I looked at the details I thought, “yes, I want to do this.” And so I signed up for “Exploring Texture and Pattern with Sue Stone.” Sue is a British artist best known for amazing portraits in stitch, particularly a series of self-portraits she created from photographs of herself, one per year from early childhood to the present day. Want to have a look at her work? Have a look here. I love the look of hand stitching on others’ textile art, whether quilts or other things, and I wanted a bit of guidance and some structure for experimentation.

And that’s what this course gave me in spades. I have to say that Sue Stone and her sons Joe and Sam have done a great job setting up this class. The skills are simple and so the emphasis is more on design and experimentation than on technique, which suits me down to the ground. The course consists of four modules, each of which has four or so lessons, and each lesson involves making a sample, or multiple samples, stitching using a grid system that’s slightly different for each lesson. One of the things I love about this course is that students are encouraged not to invest in expensive threads or fabrics but to use whatever happens to be lying around. Another plus is that each lesson is delivered online as a video but then revisited in a pdf which can be downloaded and stored forever for future reference. Also, each lesson includes a separate pdf of student work for inspiration. Yet another plus is that if one is willing to join Facebook, the Stones have set up a private group for students of the course so that we can see and comment on one another’s work.

I know, Facebook. I swore faithfully, for years and years, that I would never have an FB account. But “never” is a long time, and this is the one time since I first became aware of FB that I had any desire to sign up. In fact, even after I started this course I dithered literally for months before I finally caved and joined the group. I love this part of the course and I have to admit that it’s gone a long way toward keeping my interest high and keeping me working so that I would have samples to post to the rest of the group. Until now, and that’s why I’m writing about this stitch-y journey here.

Let me show you what I’ve produced thus far.

The first module is about running stitch, and I spent a lot of time making multiple samples for every lesson in this module, fascinated by the differences that arise from using different stitch lengths and spaces between stitches, different threads, different colour combinations, different values relative to the value of the fabric base. A person could spend a whole year just on this one stitch alone and not exhaust the possibilities. Here are my samples from the first lesson, an introduction to running stitch.

I know, running stitch. Yawn. How interesting could it be? But look at this first sample and how different the four areas of the grid appear because I’ve changed threads and stitch intervals.

Top left is a variegated 40 wt sewing machine thread, top right is crochet cotton, bottom left is tapestry yarn, and bottom right is Coats Craft & Button thread.

Top left Mettler 40 wt waxed quilting thread, top right perlé cotton Finca #5, bottom left cotton Japanese sashiko yarn, bottom right fine crochet cotton.

Top left tapestry yarn, top right wool yarn, bottom left 30 wt sewing thread, bottom right mercerized cotton yarn.

That was the first lesson, which was just about running stitch. While it’s not necessary to produce more than one sample per lesson, I was so astonished at the variety of effects I got as I went along that I produced three. I could see some applications for some samples in textile art, such as using those close lime green lines in the bottom left of the first sample to represent water, for instance, or how the white yarn on the beige linen on one hand and the thick grey dots on the other created pure texture, one subtle, the other not. Each area of the grid is just two inches square. When I first started I thought that two inches of anything wouldn't enough to tell much about the effect, and I thought I should size up the grid to a quadrant of 3” squares. I’m glad I didn’t, though, because the two inches square seemed to give just enough of a sense of the stitch to be useful and also not be so large that I ran out of enthusiasm before I finished. 

The second lesson was about mixing yarns in the needle, meaning threading two different yarns through the eye of a single needle.

Top left button and craft thread (red) and a fine crochet cotton (ivory), top right Mettler 40 wt quilting thread (red) and Güterman polyester sewing thread (teal), bottom left crochet cotton (red) and rough lace weight wool yarn (charcoal), bottom right crochet cotton (red) and thinner crochet cotton (ivory).

Top left 30 wt sewing thread (lime green and forest green), darning wool in yellow and lavender, bottom left darning wool (yellow) and perlé cotton (green), bottom right yellow darning wool (yellow) and variegated bouclé knitting yarn (blue).

Top left very fine silk thread (brown) and 30 wt sewing thread (yellow), top right tapestry yarn in tobacco and light blue, bottom left split yarns of tapestry yarn and mercerized crochet cotton, both in tobacco, bottom right fuzzy mixed fibre knitting yarn (brown/blue/lavender) and split mercerized crochet cotton.

Things were a little wilder with this second set of samples because I widened my definition of “thread” to include yarns that it would never have occurred to me to use for hand sewing. And this is where the Facebook group comes in. I made a rule for myself (I’m really good at making rules for myself) that I wouldn’t look at other students’ work for a particular lesson until after I’d made my own samples. I wanted to see what I could come up with on my own, rather than riding on others’ inspiration. After I’d finished the first lesson, I took a look at the FB group’s samples for that lesson and was astonished at how other people had interpreted the directions. Wildness! Crazy yarns! People who didn’t stay inside the lines! People doing more than one kind of stitching within a single sample area! Sheer anarchy!

On I went to lesson three, which changed the grid from a quadrant of 2” squares to a grid of 3x3 2” squares separated by a quarter inch of blank space. Unlike the first two lessons, which were about stitching only parallel lines (back and forth, horizontally), lesson three added the element of changes in direction in the stitching.

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Left column is button and craft thread (red), centre column is one strand of button and craft thread (red) and a strand of Mettler quilting thread (navy), right column is a double strand of Mettler quilting thread. I can see an elementary mistake with my grasp of quarter circle geometry in this one, but who cares, right? I like the overall effect.

Both colours here are darning wool, which by this point I was becoming very fond of working with because of the rich colour and the solidity and boldness of the stitched mark on the fabric.

Darning wool again.

I have to say I love all three of these samples. The lesson dictated that the design should be symmetrical and use three different threads/yarns in three columns, and I mostly stuck to that mandate (though the second sample uses only two colours). But I put my own spin on the idea of “symmetrical” by shifting the line of symmetry 45 degrees to the left in the last two samples. Imagine them tilted 45 degrees to the right so they’re both a diamond shape, and you’ll see what I mean.

The last sample I did for this lesson sticks closely to the three columns/three different threads idea, though again all of these are darning yarns. This one is the least successful of the bunch in my view, but it was still worth doing, just to try out the idea.

By this point, I was really hitting my groove. I was stitching away, making and photographing samples and getting them posted to the FB page pretty regularly.

But I wasn’t happy with how much of a line-toeing, scaredy-cat rule follower I was being, especially when I saw the free-spirited, no-holds-barred approach others were taking to these exercises. The FB group was full of photographs of people using the most unlikely things as thread and some pretty interesting fabric for the base as well. I’d been very pleased with myself for having in my stash scraps of exactly the light, neutral linen that Sue Stone recommends, the result of many happy encounters with the scrap bin at Maiwa Supply) (don’t try to find this bin at the Granville Island store anymore; it’s been moved to Maiwa East). But other people were using antique linens, wool felt, hand-dyed cotton and silk, all sorts of interesting things for their fabrics. And silk and string and mohair and I don’t know what all for stitching, include some yarns so hairy and textured and loopy that the stitches themselves disappeared. People were fearless! I happened to mention, after my posting my lesson 3 samples to the FB group, that I wished I had more courage to step over the lines.

And I got a response from Sandra Barrett in Fernie, who suggested we metaphorically hold hands and plunge into breaking some rules. I agreed, and with lesson 4, which was about layering stitches over each other, I started.

The tobacco yarn is 6 strand knitting cotton and the other yarn is also a knitting yarn, a sock yarn, so probably a mix of wool and nylon (the ball band has disappeared), but it’s variegated (ivory, coppery tones through orange to brown, and mint) so it looks as if I used more different yarns than I did. You can faintly see the grid lines in pencil under the stitching. I started with the tobacco yarn and kept the blank spaces between squares empty with that yarn. Then I lost my head completely and went wild with the second yarn. The grid has vanished. I really like this sample; to me, it looks like a little bit of abstract art.

Encouraged, I kept on.

With this one, I honoured the spaces between the squares in the grid, as you can see. I used two yarns again (black is sashiko yarn from Japan and red is perlé cotton). And I stitched very simply, just parallel lines of running stitch in smooth arcs, five lines close together and then two further apart. I just love this one. So much drama and movement! To me it looks like streamers blowing on the wind as seen through a window.

I never did make a sample for this lesson the way we were supposed to, with each grid tidily filled with stitches in two yarns, going in different directions. One day maybe I’ll go back and to that.

And this was the end of the first module. Are you as amazed as I am at the variety of effects achievable with just this one simple stitch? I’m knocked out all over again looking at these photos. And you’d think, wouldn’t you, that after finishing this lesson I’d be super-charged and moving into the second module. I certainly started with lots of enthusiasm, but I soon hit a wall.

The first lesson in Module 2 is about backstitch, which looks very similar to running stitch but instead of leaving open space between the stitches, doubles over on itself to fill those gaps. As a result, the stitching is much more dimensional than running stitch, rising above the surface of the fabric to create much more texture. I read through the lesson, got my sample fabric marked into the grids suggested for this linen and then began, as instructed, to stitch over the grid lines to create very small open areas inside the grid which would be filled with simple shapes of my own choosing.

I know what shape I want to use, I’m eager to get there, but first, blast it, I have to stitch all those &*!@#*))&%^ grid lines. And it’s taking me f-o-r-e-v-e-r. I didn’t mark the intermediate lines, just the outlines of each 2” grid; the others I’m gauging by eye. But oh my goodness, backstitch is a slow stitch, kind of a two-steps-forward, one-step-back scenario. It’s taken me two episodes of stitching to get even this far and I’m utterly sick of it. (yes, each of those little boxes at the bottom is half an inch square, which is why I’ve gone to a larger box in the upper half of the grid.)

Hence this blog post. I figured that if I showed you where I’m stuck, and explained why, I’d feel like such a wuss that I’d gather myself together and finish the grid and the shapes and MOVE ON TO THE NEXT LESSON. I don’t know how long I have to finish this course--maybe a year, maybe ten months--but I’ve already been six months at it and am nowhere near halfway through. Perhaps this lesson is one of those tasks meant to separate the sheep from the goats. Or perhaps it just seems that way to me. In any case, the cohort of folks I was posting with on the Facebook group has long since moved on to later lessons and I’m left here languishing in the weeds. I can, however, get out of the weeds and back into the swim of things with just a little application and a tweak to my attitude, or so I’m telling myself. When I finish the course, if I’m asked for feedback, I will explain that this was a very difficult point for me and a place where I got stuck for months.

I don’t want to end on a note of discouragement, however. Let me show you another great part of this course, the keeping of records. As a person who spend most of her twenties in grad school, the taking of notes has become second nature, so I was happy to be told to find a notebook and use it to record not only my designs and the threads and yarns I used but also my own sense of which samples were successful and why and where I might find a place to apply these stitch and thread and fabric combinations in my own textile art. Together with the actual samples, these notes are a treasure trove of possibilities.

And this was another great idea, making up a grid for a particular lesson and photocopying it so I could use a pencil to try out ideas for stitching before committing time and effort to needle and thread.

And finally, I thoroughly enjoy all the great resources that Joe and Sam send out in (usually) weekly newsletters. For the most part, these are links to articles on the TextileArtist.org site, which Joe and Sam run. If you’re at all interested in textile art, this is a place you could spend a lot of time and see some thoroughly amazing work. I highly recommend it.

Still with me? This was a long post, and not an easy one to write because of my own sense of failure at being stuck. I’d love to know whether any of you are interested in hand stitching and apply it to your own work. If you are, or even if you’re just curious, I highly recommend “Exploring Texture and Pattern."

Tabasco

At the end of my last post, I mentioned the sad passing of Sass, our lovely and hilarious and ultra-smart Australian Shepherd, last November. And I tempered that fact with a teaser about a new family member. This time, I have the happy task of introducing you to the newest member of our homestead family, another Aussie who came to live with us a couple of days into the new year.

Meet Tabasco.

This was taken the day after we fetched her home. At this point, she was ten weeks old. I just love her magnificent white shirtfront in all its feathery glory. As she’s grown, it’s diminished in proportion to the rest of her. 

We had an anxious time, that first week, because the day after this was taken, Tabby got sick. Really sick, so sick that we (and the vet) thought there was a good chance that we would lose her. We have no idea what the cause was, but she became very nauseated, didn’t want to eat, vomited over and over, and was losing weight and obviously feeling awful. Our fear, and the vet’s, was parvovirus (we have the kind of vet you can call on a Saturday morning at home for advice, bless her). But we got Tabby into the clinic first thing after the weekend, and a quick blood test (amazing technology) ruled out parvo in 15 minutes. We can only assume that during one of the brief times when we took our eyes off her she ate something that disagreed with her. The vet gave Tabs an anti-nauseant injection, suggested we invest in some Pedialyte (electrolyte solution often used for babies with the same symptoms), and hope for the best. A day later, we were beginning to believe we’d saved her, and by the end of the week she was pretty much back to her bouncy puppy self. But it was a worry, as you can imagine.

The next consideration was introducing her to Django, who had been missing Sass but was not at all prepared for a new puppy in his world. Here’s a moment of relative calm, one of the first moments together.

Did Django take to her? Right, like a cat takes to water. For the first two months, he pretty much abandoned the house, refusing to come inside even to sleep on cold nights. (Good thing he has a cozy doghouse on the porch.) Tabby was in his face constantly, jumping on him, chewing on him, trying to get him to play. We figure that Django is something like ten years old now, and has achieved a level of dignity that was affronted by this new riot in the house. As dh kept saying, it’s a good thing that adult dogs are inherently programmed not to harm puppies because she tested the very limits of his endurance. There was a lot of barking, snarling, growling, teeth-baring, and quick exits from the house, but not even a nip from Django. He did his very best.

Things gradually improved. Here’s a rare moment of calm as my dear husband tries to dole out attention equally while sitting on the front step of my studio in the winter sun. Tabasco is actually sitting quietly as dh’s attention is turned to scratching Django’s head.

It all blew up again a second later, but it was a start.

It didn’t take long for dh to teach Tabasco that the horses are strictly off-limits. Look at the different in size between horses and puppy. I love this shot; note that all four paws are off the ground.

As for Winston, things were even more harrowing for him than for Django, poor old cat. He’s seventeen this spring, and really ought not to have had to tolerate a puppy in his great old age. Tabasco fell deeply and instantly in love with Winston from the very start (we think she thought he was another puppy, being about her size). After being knocked over several times and having his ears chewed on a lot, Winston took refuge on my armchair, where he stayed for the next three months, getting down only to eat and to answer nature’s call. I got really good at balancing my lunch and a book over his sleeping form on my lap. 

I don’t remember what’s happening in this photo but rest assured that the ski boot wasn’t involved. I wouldn't have allowed that.

After a while, though, Winston gathered some courage or some bluster and took up his old habit of dominating the dog bed at times. Tabby saw this as an open invitation to join him.

Here’s an early attempt that ended in failure. Tabby has just settled, and Winston is gathering himself to stalk away.

But Tabasco kept trying. Below, she’s just crept, one paw at a time, into the dog bed, pretending Winston wasn’t there, and is turning to see what the cat’s reaction will be.

A little juggling for position ensued. Then, success!

Here’s a different occasion, in which Tabby crept in from the right, again one paw at a time, until she could stretch out behind Winston. Another win! Though it looks as though Winston is about to bail out. That’s a pretty cross face.

Grandchildren are also excellent companions. Our grandson, eight years old, is dwarfed by Tabasco looming over him. It’s a strange optical illusion, because she’s still pretty much a puppy in this photo and he’s a regular-sized eight year old.

In the absence of grandchildren, Django, or Winston, Tabby has a range of toys to amuse herself with. Not the store-bought kind (or only two, one of which is awol and the other completely trashed by overuse), but the homesteading kind. She has a collection of four holey old lumberjack socks and three or four ancient leather work gloves. She likes to know where her treasures are. Notice the splinters of wood on the floor; kindling is another good toy, so satisfying to chew.

She does play with these items by herself, but really prefers me or dh on the other end tugging. Below, she looks alarmingly pug-like, with her eyes bugging out with excitement.

We didn’t really want Tabby to develop into a champion fetcher, because Sass became obsessed with fetching, but Tabs appears to have taught herself how to do it. Retrieval in process below. Again, wild eyes. These are the occasions that lead me to say, “bad craziness.” This is not a quiet game. And it’s a small house. Imagine what it sounded like, the few times she had a squashed empty gallon plastic milk jug to play with.

And my goodness, what a little thief she’s been! Socks and gloves, in particular, take some hunting for if we’ve made the mistake of putting them down anywhere she can reach them. Boots, slippers, and shoes are close seconds. Dh’s crocs, in particular, are a favourite and it’s amazing how much abuse they can stand. Dh uses his crocs as slippers and also wears them outdoors, even in the snow, so they are often somewhere Tabby can find them. Dh’s feet are somewhat huge, so the crocs are too, and Tabby constantly smacks herself in the face with them as she tries to shake the life out of them. Not that that stops her.

But her saving grace is that she rarely chews anything to pieces. The one time she did was pretty expensive and could have been dangerous. I inadvertently let the “toothbrush” end of the power cord to my Macbook dangle off the kitchen table and that was the end of that cord. $100 and a trip to Vancouver later (to see my Mum, but a replacement was no closer than two hours away in Kelowna or Penticton), we were thankful that the transformer for the cord is right at the plug end and thus unreachable for a dog. Otherwise we might have had a bad electrocution event on our hands. Puppies require a lot of vigilance. I think we’re still tired from the first two months of having her with us.

But oh, what a joy she is. And just look at what she’s grown into! Dh took these portraits a couple of weeks ago.

There, isn’t that something to brighten your day? She brightens all of our days (well, the humans’ days, anyway).

A Walk in the Turning Season

It has been half a year since I posted here.

The reasons are many:

• my volunteer position as the newsletter coordinator for the Fibre Art Network, a position that ate up quite a lot of my time in 2018, became a team effort; that was a great move, but a move that required a lot of time for bringing the team members up to speed on their jobs
• at exactly the same time, the staff at the Greenwood Public Library, of which I am board chair, both retired and their successors began their jobs; that too, required a lot of my time 
• I encountered a glitch with Marsedit, the blog editing program I use to compose posts offline, and suddenly I couldn’t get some photos uploaded to the blog
• changes in our animal family meant some sad news that I didn’t want to have to tell you, plus some happy news that has also meant a big time commitment
• inertia: don’t you find this? that if you get out of a routine, it’s really difficult to get back into it again? particularly if you’re embarrassed about it?

But I miss this space and I’m determined to get stuck back into a routine that’s brought me a lot of joy and a lot of lovely connections to you lovely readers over the past five years. Rather than start from scratch for this first post of the new year, I’m going to publish the last one I composed, back in November, minus the dozen or so photos that appear to be corrupted. And with subsequent posts I’ll try to fill in with the significant happenings of the intervening six months as best I can.

 

So here we go. 

Way back in November, we awoke to a grey, foggy morning and I just had to bring my camera along on my morning walk with the dogs. I’ve always loved fog because of the way the familiar world becomes something mysterious when much of it is hidden by cloud. We don’t often get it here, so I seized my chance.

It wasn’t just fog but what’s known in the UK as “freezing fog,” very common in the north of the British Isles. It was this stand of frost-outlined wild mustard that made me go back to the house for my camera. I love the way the frost outlines the plant's basic architecture.

Here’s the deck of firewood logs in the barnyard; my dear husband calls it “the woodpile in kit form."

The larch needles had pretty much all fallen, turning the bare dirt a warm gold.

Pearlized St. John’s wort mingles with deep red, late season Oregon grape foliage.

Into the trees, onto the skid trail. I love that sinuous trunk on the right.

The moisture brought forth an explosion of fungus, pushing up through the soil and pine needles.

A branch wearing lichen like a shawl.

Prince’s pine.

She may be elderly, but she’s still keen: Sass bustles down the path.

Strawberry foliage.

St. John’s wort. I love the way the colours change from the top to the bottom of each plant.

Kinnikinnick or wintergreen, I can’t quite figure out which. (Dh says it’s kinnikinnick; I’ll have to look up the differences in the field guide.)

Snowberry.

Sigh. So beautiful. And I’m so lucky, to be out on our land every day, watching the changes, catching sight of grouse, and chickadees, and the red-tailed hawk resident in the field, hearing the tonks and chuckles of the ravens, noting all the deer tracks at the pond and the mice, squirrel, and rabbit tracks in the woods, and so on.

As a final note for this post from this moment in April, six months after these photos were taken and this post composed, I’ll let you know that this was one of the very last walks that Sass was able to take. For most of a year she had been increasingly crippled by arthritis and rarely felt enthusiastic enough about the idea of a walk to join us. A month later, it was clear that pain and immobility, and blindness and deafness, had robbed her of most of her quality of life and we made the hard decision to let her go. I couldn’t bear to write about it at the time. In fact, I still can’t; maybe later. But be aware, dear reader, that this dear dog had just about a perfect life and that she was as well-loved as it’s possible for a dog to be.

I’m sorry to have ended on such a sad note; my next post will reveal a new source of great joy.

A Workshop with Pat Pauly

First off, if you bought raffle tickets for the Greenwood Public Library quilts and book bag and haven’t had a call from the library, you didn’t win. Not this year. But as always I’m deeply grateful for your support. Within the month we will begin tossing around ideas for the 2019 quilts and bag.

I apologize for the gap since the last blog post; in the meantime I’ve driven (alone) the seven and a half hours over three mountain passes between Greenwood and High River, just south of Calgary, had five hair-straight-back days  of meetings and mini-workshops and artist presentations and field trips, then driven myself home again. I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself for undertaking this adventure, and I’m enjoying the lovely feeling of reconnecting with many of my friends in fibre and making new ones as well. The occasion was the annual conference (formerly retreat) of the Fibre Art Network, the organization of 100+ women across western Canada who represent some of the best that’s happening in textile/fibre/quilt art these days across the four western provinces. This is the outfit for which I wrangle the newsletter, ten times a year. For me, the best result of the conference is that my attempt to spread out the considerable work of producing the newsletter among more than just one person has been successful: we are now a team of three! My thanks to Robin Fischer, the new submissions coordinator, and to Linda Van Gastel, who has undertaken the task of learning Adobe InDesign so that she can take over design and layout. It’s a new day, I feel, for the FAN newsletter.

Just for fun, here’s the front page of the summer issue, which shows the workspace within the InDesign program. Looks a bit complicated, doesn’t it? If you’re adept at Photoshop, this arrangement of panels and buttons and so on will be familiar. To the rest of us (including me when I started), it was baffling. But I’ve learned enough now that I can enjoy working in this program. Yay!

But all this FAN business has meant that blogging has taken a back seat, yet again, something that’s happened all too often in 2018. I’m hoping that with the help I’ll be getting, the newsletter will no longer mean having to put my own art and blogging on hold so often and for so long. Today I had several hours in my studio,  the longest stretch of uninterrupted art-making time I’ve had for months. It felt great.

And it reminded me that one of the things that I’ve yet to tell you about is another great art-making moment from early summer, a workshop that I took in Oliver with Pat Pauly, a very accomplished art quilter from Rochester NY. When one of my FAN compatriots contacted several of us who live in or near the Okanagan to assess interest in taking this class, I jumped on it, even though I’d never heard of Pat. I signed up that same day and it’s a good thing I did, because the class was full within 24 hours of being announced. And with good reason! Pat’s artistic resume is impressive; have a look here if you’d like to see all that she’s accomplished. But it wasn’t so much her credentials that thrilled me when I looked at her website as her art. These are art quilts with a punch and verve and energy that I’d love to achieve in my own work.

We actually took two classes from Pat, one on each of the two days we were with her. In the first class (“The Play’s the Thing: Improv Sketches”), she taught us some of her favourite techniques for building a quilt. Pat is an improvisational piecer, meaning that she grabs a piece of fabric, or two, and wielding her rotary cutter like a pen or a brush, boldly cuts an idiosyncratic (and rarely straight) line directly through the fabric(s), not measuring, not even using a straight edge. Then she sews those two bits of fabric together and does it again, and again, both with the same fabrics and adding in new ones. This is my preferred way of working too, so I had few inhibitions to overcome at this early stage of the day. 

Nor was lack of choices of fabrics a problem for me. Pat had recommended that we bring a small bag of fabric. I brought 12 medium-sized bags of fabric, so didn’t sell myself short. The difficulty, other than trying to find things like pins, a pen, and my rotary cutter amidst all those pieces of fabric, was being bold and fast about selecting fabrics to use. See the mess? And one of my rotary cutters, the brand-new one, of course, went awol at the end of the first day and never reappeared. Never have I been so thankful to have brought too much: I’d snagged a backup cutter as I flew out the studio door to drive to Oliver the day before the workshop started and therefore I didn’t have to lose a minute to going out and buying a new one. Check out Alison’s darling little featherweight Singer in the background. Still producing a perfect straight stitch every time. And that Pfaff on the right was my Mum’s until she gave it to me; it’s a terrific machine for a class because it’s simple and portable.

We began with exercises, small compositions that Pat calls “sketches.” She says she uses these constantly in her own practice, allowing them to suggest to her shapes and combinations that might translate well into a larger piece. The first assignment she gave us was to take two contrasting fabrics and begin slicing, sewing and repeating to produce a small composition. Here’s my offering.

I know, isn’t that green fabric horrible? This sketch combines a purple wave-printed commercial fabric and a green hand-dyed piece from my earliest days of learning to dye fabric, which I also stamped with paint on a stamp I carved in a Maiwa workshop. I would not call the result beautiful. But it is interesting, and there is some relationship between the two fabrics, and my cutting and sewing produced some rather attractive shapes, I think. Someone in the class pointed out how the two sides of the composition mirror one another, which is not only NOT what I’d intended to do but also something I hadn’t noticed until it was pointed out to me.

Here’s another attempt, not as successful in terms of composition.

Without intending to, I made a non-functional coffee pot. I must say, though, that I enjoy the way the curved lines in the white and beige print shift direction.

Another assignment was to create an off-kilter block, something I really enjoyed.

To me, these fabrics work fabulously together (that gradated green and blue circle and half-circle print was just about my all-time favourite hoarded scrap; good for me for finally bringing it out to play). I love this little piece; the colours, the mix of size of the motifs, the strange angles. It’s all wonderful.

And on we went to making a larger sketch with the view to cutting it apart and sewing it together in a new way. I had a bit of serendipity right at the start and pulled a few fabrics that I thought worked really well together. And I put into practice the techniques Pat covered that first morning: sewing and slicing and resewing and repeating was one. Another was inserting skinny strips as accents. A third was assessing how the recut sections worked together to create new shapes, and then making new design decisions to take advantage of the new shapes that crossed seam lines. 

Pat spent a little while showing us how to use a simple viewfinder to isolate shapes and combinations to build on.

Here’s the result of my first hour or so of work. Don’t you love these fabrics together? That bit of turquoise and red dots and white lines has been in my “favourite scraps” bin for a few years. It was perfect, as was the orange sea anemone print, another long-term dweller in the “favourites” bin. My library quilting friends will recognize a fabric we dubbed “brushstrokes” when we used it in a raffle quilt years ago; what a scrumptious visual texture that fabric has.

I have to admit, I thought this composition was GORGEOUS! I loved the way the light and dark blues played off the rich reds and oranges, and the discordant, brash combinations of red, orange, and pink on the one hand, and blues and turquoises on the other. Oh, I was so happy with this piece. When Pat got to my design wall as she made her rounds she said, “This is easy for you."

Oh, the pride I felt! Then she said, “Cut it up.” 

SERIOUSLY?? Yup, she meant it. “You’re not going to move forward unless you let go of it, cut it up, and see what else it can be,” she explained. Oh the anguish that replaced the pride! It took me more than half an hour to buck up and grab my cutter again and start slashing this piece apart. It still kind of hurts, thinking about it.

Pat had us review our pieces through the viewfinder and cut accordingly, turning our pieces into a four-patch composition, each square being about eight inches across. This is what I got at the end of that process.

One of the things Pat told us to aim for was shapes that cross and therefore blur the rigidly geometrical seam lines between the squares. See those three shapes next to each other above the horizontal seam (in the photo above), all in that red-with-circles fabric? That’s one place where I achieved that goal. When I got home, I felt that there wasn’t enough happening in this piece with only four patches. So I reorganized and sewed some of the leftover bits and created a couple more squares. Here’s the final composition. There’s a lot going on here, particularly since the piece is only about 24 by 16 inches. I’d love to see it blown way up to something like six feet by four. Now that would be a composition with presence.

On day two, we began a new class called “Take Two.” The idea behind the class is to choose just two fabrics and, using the techniques and design principles we’d covered the previous day, create a new design.

The first step, of course, was to assess the fabrics we’d brought with us and choose two to work with.

Well. Despite that mountain of fabric, I realized that very little of the yardage I had brought would work for this project. Pat agreed. But she did like a weird Jane Sassaman fabric I’d brought with me (Jane has produced some wonderfully weird fabrics over the years and she’s my favourite fabric designer), and the scale of the motif was large enough to work well for this assignment. The design is called “Dandy Dancers,” and it’s from Jane’s “Prairie Chic” collection. Have a peek here if you’d like to see the yardage (meterage?) uncut, and note the ruler at the bottom of the photo to get an idea of the scale of the motif. Thank you to Poppins Quilt Shoppe of Penticton for bringing it to sell at the most recent Rumplestiltskein quilt show in Rock Creek. I wish I’d bought more than a metre . . .

Okay, so I had one fabric. But nothing else I had would work with it. Fortunately, Pat had brought with her many, many yards (she’s American, remember, so they weren’t metres) of her own richly-coloured and -patterned fabric, painted and stamped and screen-printed with thickened dyes. One of these pieces, a bold and eye-popping smear of yellow, orange, and red, looked amazing beside the pale lavender of my Sassaman fabric. So I bought it, and haven’t regretted for a minute paying more than twice as much for it as I’ve ever paid for a yard of fabric. It was perfect.

And now I have to apologize. This was a two-day workshop. I’m a blogger. And yet I remembered to bring my camera along only one half day. So I have no photo of Pat’s uncut fabric. Nor of any stage in the process of making this piece, including the last parts after I’d got it home and up on my design wall. I can’t believe it. 

But I can tell you what happened and show you the finished quilt top. When I got my work-in-progress home, I realized that I had light values (the Sassaman fabric and the yellows in Pat’s piece) and medium values (the oranges and reds in Pat’s piece), but I had no darks. And the composition looked unbalanced to me as a result. So I decided to go rogue: I introduced a third fabric to my design, a deep dark green. And here’s how the piece ended up.

This pic is of the quilt top tacked to my dear husband’s shop doors.

And here it is again, this time pinned to a sheet on my design wall.

I’m having a terrible time with photography recently, as you can tell. The shop doors worked well for photographing my entries for the National Juried Show of the Canadian Quilting Association, but I think the reason for that success is that all the snow on the ground in mid-January bounced the light around evenly. Without snow on the ground, the eaves of the shop cast the top of the quilt into shadow. Therefore, there’s nothing to be gained from shooting the pics on the shop doors rather than in my studio, which is where the one immediately above and the ones below were taken. You can dimly see a second quilt underneath the first: my design wall is so small that I have to double up like this if the piece underneath is in many pieces and can’t be moved. Sometimes I’ve had as many as four layers pinned up one on top of the other. I’d so love a new studio with more design wall real estate!

As you may remember from previous less-than-perfect photos taken in my studio, the light from the upper windows to the right bounces off the floor and creates a light patch on the bottom right corner of whatever I’m photographing. Oh well. Here’s another shot, one where you can get a better sense of the scale of the piece because of the surrounding furniture and the window and my sewing machine.

And I thought you might like a few detail shots, which give a better idea of how I constructed the piece because you can see the seam lines.

Sigh. These pics just don’t do the piece justice. I have to say, I love it. I love the curved and angled lines of the central image, the pop of Pat’s fabric and the wild craziness of Jane’s (my dh calls this “the blue fried egg fabric.”) I like the balance of shapes and the way the various seam lines lead the eye through the composition. I wish now I’d had a darker green fabric, or one with more visual texture than the solid I used. But as a first attempt at this kind of composition, I’m pretty happy with it.

The next step, in my view, is to learn to make fabrics like Pat’s. These are not fabrics that one can buy in a store. They are works of art in their own right. I’ve come home thinking that my current fabric collection is all wrong, and I’ve been doing some deck-clearing in order to make space for the kinds of fabrics I’ll need to make the kind of work I aspire to now. Before I left for High River, I had all of this ready to go out the door.

Last weekend I got together with my pals from the Greenwood Public Library raffle quilt production crew and we had a grand share-out. I snatched back only a few of these offerings, suddenly stricken with second thoughts. We weighed the fabrics; other than the ones that went to a charity, my friends relieved me of the burden of more than 40 pounds of fabric. I did some research and then some math when I got home: a yard/metre of fabric apparently weighs an average of about 5.5 ounces. That means that I gave away something in excess of 116 metres of fabric. Wahoo! My kind friends insisted on paying me (totally unnecessary but very generous) for their acquisitions, but the real gain in my books was to have these no-longer-loved fabrics out of my studio and into the hands of those who will use and enjoy them.

Just a couple of other things about Pat’s class before I sign off. This woman is a treasure, a huge inspiration. From her energy and good humour to her critical eye and direct manner when she sees something that isn’t working, she is the kind of teacher who both prods and encourages, who challenges and reassures, not an easy balance to achieve.

And her eye for colour and design is finely honed. I mean, just look at this pile of fabric on her table. Fireworks! I want to reach right into the photo and start sewing!

The other thing about Pat is that she is an artist. Not a quilter, but an artist, even thought her medium is quilts. On the evening of the first day of the workshop, Pat gave an artist presentation that completely knocked my socks off. She showed (get this) 400 slides in an hour and a half. And she talked easily and smoothly through the whole thing, knowing exactly where she was without looking at the images projected behind her. And the slides were an thrilling mix of her own work and its inspirations and the work of others, including exhibits in major American galleries that she herself has curated. It was the most astounding performance you can imagine. Fortunately, the room was packed with workshop participants and interested parties from the community and we were all enthralled. Wow. (Oh, and all those yards of hand-dyed and painted and printed fabric Pat brought with her? If I remember correctly, everything (or nearly everything) we hadn’t already bought in the class was scooped up by the audience after the slide show).

So if you’re a quilter or other artist in textiles and you’re looking for a kick-start workshop with a fabulous instructor, look for a Pat Pauly class near you. You won’t regret it. And thanks, by the way, to Karen Cummings, for getting to know Pat so well that Pat came to visit her in Hedley, which is why she was in the vicinity, and to Janet Bednarczyk, who organized the entire workshop. Both Karen and Janet are members of FAN, which is how I know them; see how much I get from belonging to this organization?

Summer Evening on the Seawall

Last time, I showed you some of the quilts from the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild show I attended with my Mum when I was in North Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. This time I want to show you the other thing we did for fun: a walk on the seawall and then a picnic on the shingle beach at Ambleside. This is a photo-heavy post because the light was spectacular and because I was just so thrilled to be back beside the ocean. As I often tell my dear husband, where we live would be perfect if the intervening 500 km between home and the ocean could be more or less eliminated. No, I’m not hoping for a cataclysmic sinking of the western half the the province into the sea, just missing the ocean.

 

I love this adventure playground, particularly the three seagulls (not real) perched on the top.

And here’s another piece of wooden sculpture I particularly like, which crosses the outflow of a small creek into the ocean.

I have to say that West Vancouver does a great job with its municipal plantings.

But this is the real attraction, for me.

At this point, during the dinner hour, not many people were out on the seawall, but an hour later the pavement was jammed with walkers.

Sculpture, man-made and natural.

There’s UBC, way out there on the point.  No longer a source of stress for me . . .

As we turned around and walked back toward the car and our picnic, I could see clearly the devastation that remains after that huge wind-storm years ago that took out so many trees in Stanley Park:  before the storm, these cliffs weren’t visible, but the loss of the trees has both exposed the friable bank and encouraged erosion.

I just love driftwood that’s been silvered by water and weather.

The surf was so gentle that it couldn’t be called surf, more just murmurings.

I wish I looked half as glamorous as my Mum, as she takes a breather on a convenient bench.

Love the reflected light on this log.

I fetched our picnic supper from the car and we got comfortable on the shingle, using a log as a backrest, to eat it.

In between bites, I kept taking photos.  As you can see, the tide was high and we weren’t very far above the water.

You can see that smoke from wildfires was still hanging over the strait.  This gull looks as if he’s ignoring us, but he was on a mission.

He didn’t get any of our picnic.

Sigh.  So beautiful, the whole thing.

We can’t have spent more than a couple of hours here, but to me this moment was probably the highlight of my summer.  I look at these photos and I can smell the ocean and feel the combination of cool breeze and warm evening sun. And I can instantly recall the mood of mellow satisfaction that Mum and I shared all the way through.  It was great.

A Modern Quilt Show

Can you believe it? That summer is nearly over? For those of you connected with the school system, it’s over; the rest of us have a couple of weeks before the seasons officially turn.  But here in our cold little valley we’ve had frost several mornings in a row and the foliage is ripening into its annual gorgeousness. I’d like to share some of the highlights of the summer with you before they’re dim memories.

I managed to get down to the coast to see my Mum a couple of times over the summer, and the second time, quite by chance, my trip coincided with a quilt show hosted by the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild. Even better, the show was in North Vancouver, which meant getting there was easy for us. Yes, Mum was game to see the show and she saw everything, not needing to take a seat until the very end. Well done, Mum!

The venue for the show was wonderful: the Pipe Shop, in what was once the shipyards at the foot of Lonsdale and is now a light-filled, airy space perfect for this kind of event. In return for granting permission for photography, the organizers asked that those of us sharing images of the show on social media use the hash tag “#VMQGSHOWCASE.” So there, I’ve done it. Whether this will actually make any difference on a blog is moot; I have no idea.

The exposed massive timber framing and ample windows made for a great backdrop to the quilts.

The quilt below was the first beyond the entrance, and what a colour punch it is! It was made by Holly Broadland, but I forgot to take a photo of the quilt description so I don’t know what she called it.

And check out the one below! Isn’t it stunning? I was pleased to see it won a Viewer’s Choice ribbon. The graduated values in the neutral background are just great, and I love the variety of pieced designs in the diamond shapes. This is Lisa Novich’s take on a quilt design called “Gravity” by Julie Herman. Nicholas Turcan quilted this one.

Here’s another colour punch, this one by JoAnn Lee, who calls it “Millionaire.” It’s a variation on the traditional Chinese coins pattern.  See all those swirly spirals in the grey panels? That’s all produced by the quilting. I particularly like the way JoAnn used organic, hand-cut shapes for her coins. It’s refreshing to see the coins all done in solids rather than prints.

For more colour, but a much more formal layout, have a look at this four-patch Lone Star called “Pop Stars” by Krista Hennebury. The machine quilting in this one is impressive; she credits Nancy Zieman for the motifs.

As soon as I saw this next quilt, I knew it had originated with Victoria Findlay Wolfe’s latest book “Modern Quilt Magic," which is all about partial seams, inset seams, and Y seams; in short, the kind of quilt construction most of us would reject long before even starting. It was made by Anna Jarzcewski, who gave it the same name as the book. While I like this scrap quilt, I have to admit that I don’t believe the painstaking partial seam construction added a huge amount to its impact. A traditional herringbone would have been just as effective, in my opinion. Just saying.

If you follow my blog, you may know that I’m partial to a medallion quilt, and I like this one, “Sew Happy," with its clear, bright colours and asymmetrical arrangement of the elements. This quilt was part of the Round Robin exhibit (in case you don’t know, a round robin quilt is started by one person, who creates the first element, then passes it on to the next person, who adds something else, and so on). The quilt originated with Eileen Currie, and was added to by eight other members of the guild.  

Aren’t you impressed at how well I’m doing giving credit to the makers of these quilts? I learned from my mistake in not noting quilt titles or makers’ names at Quilt Canada as I photographed quilts.

Here’s another Round Robin result.  Alas, I didn’t take a closeup of the quilt description so I’m sorry, whoever you are, that I can’t give you credit for starting the quilt or adding to it. Of course, no sooner do I brag about my conscientiousness with credits than I stumble. Oh well.

The colour palette below might not be to everyone’s taste, but I love it:  Elisabeth Geller, who made it, calls it “Bohemian Vomit,” a name I feel kind of sad about because I think these fabrics really sing together. Love the feet at the bottom of the photo:  I found I’d done this a lot when I reviewed my photos from this day. (No, the white writing on black isn’t part of her quilt; it’s the backing of the quilt behind it.)

I like the asymmetry in this next one, with all the colour interest in the bottom third of the quilt. When I read the description, I was amazed to discover that amy dane (I know, no caps in her name) made it as a test quilt for the “Bias Petals” quilt score for Sherri Lynn Wood's book “The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters.” I have pored over this book many, many times and I think Sherri Lynn Wood is a bit of an improv genius: the results from her “scores” (these are not patterns, more like gestures toward concepts) vary wildly from quilter to quilter. Sooner or later I’ll get around to showing you what I did with one of the scores in that book. (How nice that the quilt behind it has a backing in a colour that sings with amy’s quilt.)

As well as a lot of punchy colour, the show had its moments of low volume and neutral palettes. I liked the next one because (again) of the asymmetry of the value placement. Not a lot of colour here, but I think it’s really effective, don’t you? This is “Whirligigs” by Lorna Shapiro.

And here’s another with the same kind of colour story. Alicia Storey began it in a class with Barb Mortell (who also made a test quilt for Sherri Lynn Wood’s book and who shared a table with me at a Maiwa workshop a couple of years ago; Barb is a terrific improv quilter). Barb’s class was called “Door Jam” (clever!) and Alicia called this quilt “Knock, Knock."

And then there’s this stunner by Terry Aske, whom I know from the Fibre Art Network. Terry is a true professional at this art quilting gig; she teaches and sells her quilts and has won award after award.This piece, which Terry calls “Shades of Grey,” was my favourite at this show. I just love those gradations of white through greys to black, with the subtle lines and shapes of intense colour. It was smart of whoever planned the hanging of the show to place Terry’s quilt back to back with one that sports a grey backing: that backing is a wonderful frame for Terry’s quilt.

I liked this fellow too. The modern quilt movement is all over the deep mustard hue of the background, and I confess it’s a colour I’m loving right now. It works really well with the cool neutrals of the piecing in the elephant. Dawn Flatten hasn’t named this quilt, but she credits Violet Craft’s paper-pieced pattern “Elephant Abstractions."

The show included a number of small pieces all based on iconic Vancouver images, and I found some favourites there too. The one below is another by Holly Broadland, who calls it “And One for Good Luck."

Using a similar colour scheme, amy dane calls this one “VanCity palette,” referring to the city’s main credit union.

Right away I could see that Linda Morrison had been inspired by the famous mid-20th century Vancouver artist B.C. Binning for her piece “Safe Harbour."

And here’s Janet Archibald’s piece “West Coast Reflections,” which won a ribbon for her (don’t you love those ribbons? someone worked hard thinking those through and then making them). I know Janet from the western Canadian chapter of Studio Art Quilt Associates, so I was happy to see that her piece won this award. Clever, the way she created those reflections.

And here’s another great piece by Terry Aske, entitled “Sailing at Sunset.” Terry used a sheer fabric to create the skyline reflections in the ocean. Two different solutions to the problem of creating reflections in water, Janet’s and Terry’s.

And here’s my favourite from this section of the show: this is “Special,” by Krista Hennebury. I like the way her pared-down title echoes her pared-down suggestion of the basic outline of the ubiquitous Vancouver home design known as a “Vancouver Special."

There was a lot more to see at the show than I’ve included here, but that’s about all I have for photos for you. Hats off to the VMQG for putting this very attractive and diverse show together. 

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what makes a particular kind of quilting “modern,” let me try to summarize what I’ve gleaned about it. The “modern” aesthetic as it applies to quilts is often described as featuring:

• solid colour fabrics, rather than prints
• simple rather than complex designs
• lots of negative space
• asymmetry
• lots of neutral shades, particularly black, white, and grey
• improvisational piecing, often without the use of rulers
• simple, often straight line, quilting

Not every modern quilt shares all these traits, of course, and there are other characteristics as well, depending on who’s describing modern quilting, but I think I’ve got the basics right. Whether or not you like this style of quilting, this aesthetic has brought a whole new tribe of makers, many of them young, into the quilting family. Which is a great thing, no matter how you slice it. Sorry, no pun intended, honestly.

 

 

Flowers and Floating the River

It is a sad fact that nearly all of the photographs that my dear husband has taken of me over the years have made my toes curl up. He seems to have a gift for catching me at unflattering angles, or so it seems to me. But a couple of months ago, as we were working hard potting up bedding plants, he caught a good one and I thought I'd share it with you. He is so good at making me laugh.

We made potting up easy for ourselves this year, or at least easier than in years past. That's the bucket of the tractor in the bottom right of the photo: dh used it to scoop up well-broken-down horse manure from the barnyard and bring it down to where I was working in front of the house. What a bonus, not to have to use wheelbarrows to do this!

As you can see, our collection of pots is motley, so say the least, ranging from the utilitarian to the frankly ramshackle. But by now, mid-August, the state of the pots doesn't matter. I always deliberately over-plant them so that when they fill out the flowers completely hide the pots. I'm pretty pleased with how they're looking right now.

As you can see, I potted these plants up with blithe disregard for colour: it's a cheerful mishmash that I was hoping would look like an untended herbaceous border in an old English garden. I think I got what I was after, complete with the grass growing up between the pots. It's not really much of a display of flowers, our seventeen pots, given the size of the yard, but it pleases us and looks summery, so we do it.

Another summery thing we did last month was to go down to the river on a hot, hot day and plunge in. I took my camera, and managed not to drop it in the river.

These yellow pines that threaten to fall into the river are stunning, and their root systems, revealed by the scour of the river, look like sculpture to me.

My dear husband had casting practice on his mind, so he waded out to just about the centre of the river and cast and cast, stopping occasionally to untangle his line. I helped a bit. As you can see, even at this point in the summer, mid-July, the river was fairly shallow.

Me? I floated the river. Not the way the locals do, on everything from inner tubes to floaties, those ridiculous inflatables in the shapes of everything from mushrooms to dragons and unicorns and alligators. Me, after the shock of forcing myself to submerge (inch by painful inch) into the cool water, I simply lay back, took a deep breath and totally relaxed. My water shoes kept my feet at the surface of the water, I extended my arms out to the sides, tilted my head back, and there I was floating, floating . . . It was miraculous.

The current carried me slowly down the river, but I wasn't worried: the difficulty was having enough depth rather than too much, so arresting my progress downriver was simply a matter of dropping my feet and leaning forward until I had my feet under me on the riverbed. But for the most part I just floated. With my head in the water, I couldn't hear a sound. I fixed my gaze overhead and watched the sky pass overhead, with pigeons and swallows and, since I was close to the shore, the branches of the pines. This is how close some of the branches passed over my head.

Aren't yellow pine cones and needles gorgeous?

I took the one below after I'd lowered myself as close to the surface of the river as I could and still keep the camera dry.

I love this huge pine beside the sandy open spot where people park their cars. The river is at the end of the fence over the rise.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I'd been a bit balky at dh's suggestion that we trek to the river but once there I totally got the point. It was such a simple thing, but it was one of the highlights of the summer. Next time, I'll be in the truck with my water shoes on as soon as he makes the suggestion.

Changes in Our Animal Family

There have been some changes around here, both sad and happy, in our family of animals.  Let’s get the sad stuff out of the way first, shall we?

I haven’t wanted to say anything about this, since I’d like this space to be a cheery place to visit, but it has to be said.  Our spirited calico Soop disappeared a few months ago, and we have to assume that she fell prey to a coyote or a cougar or perhaps an owl.  I spent days looking and calling for her, because I’ve had the experience in the past of cats who, hurt or sick, hide themselves away.  In the past, a cat in such a state has crept out of hiding in response to my voice.  It didn’t happen that way this time.  

I’m sad, of course I am, but I’m philosophical too.  Soop was thirteen years old.  She had a superb life.  She was an in-and-out cat in the country, close to a forest, so she took her chances every time she went outside.  She was a pretty canny beast, alert and aware of potential dangers when she was outside, but even the canniest of creatures can’t see everything coming.  

Soop was also the cause of a lot of lost sleep, not because of my worries about her but because, unless it was the depths of winter, she liked to go out during the night.  And come in.  And go out.  And come in.  To signal her middle-of-the-night desires to go outside, she’d use the bedpost as a scratching post.  To announce her desire to come back in, she’d leap up the screen on the bedroom window and hang there for a few seconds, until she saw me get up out of bed.  Hissing at her, spraying her with a spray bottle, nothing worked to deter her.  As my dear husband wearily told someone who was staying here while we were gone, there was no point in trying to ignore or deter her because she’d keep at it until her demands were met.

On the plus side, other than Madeline (Winston’s mother), Soop had perhaps the best-developed personality, and certainly the best sense of humour, of any cat we’ve ever had.  She was a constant source of amusement, particularly to my dh, with whom she had a complicated and very affectionate relationship.  I liked the way that when she wanted me to pick her up, she’d sit in front of me and then stretch way, way up to put her paws as high as possible on my leg, and stare up at me till I hoisted her into my arms.  She liked dh, on the other hand, to hoist her into his arms by her tail.  Don’t try this at home, folks:  this behaviour developed over several years and isn’t every cat’s idea of a good time.  Dh would let her down the same way, by her tail.  She’d walk away, then come back a few seconds later for another round of tail-hoists.  Soop was also a very chatty girl and had a wide range of verbal expressions.  We were sure she was saying thank you if we opened the door for her reasonably quickly, and equally sure that she was swearing at us if we took too long to let her in on a cold night.  She was also a completely useless mouser.  Mice were occasionally toys, in her view, but never prey.  

But she was great company, both in the house and in my studio, and I miss her.  We both do.  And of course, she graced these blog posts many times, inserting herself often into the shot.  Such a help.

Goodbye, Soop, and thanks for many years of keeping me warm, and vice versa, with your winter lap-sitting.  And for the loving head-butts to my chin.  And for making me laugh.  

As we say farewell to one non-human family member, we have acquired a new one.

As you know if you visit here regularly, Ivy and Oscar have been dh’s working team for several years.  But they’re getting up there in years:  Ivy is 21 now, and Oscar 23.  Ivy is still hearty and sound, willing to be harnessed and put to work, whether it’s harrowing a field or pulling a wagon-full of audience members at the winter show at Caravan Farm Theatre.  But last winter, my dh noticed that Oscar didn’t seem to be enjoying himself during the theatre gig:  he seemed to find the physical work just a little too demanding.  So the stint of pulling the manure spreader that I showed you in a post a few months ago was Oscar’s last working afternoon, and from now on our beautiful bay gelding will enjoy a much-deserved retirement.  

The next question was whether dh was going to declare his own retirement from working with horses or try to find another horse to team with Ivy.  Through a serendipitous confluence of events, a fellow teamster from Caravan happened to call the night before dh was about to leave for the big horse sale in Olds, Alberta in the spring, looking to buy a replacement for Oscar.  Dugan had a Percheron gelding he thought my dh would like to have, a good match physically for Ivy.  Well, dh knew the horse, who’d been at Caravan the year before, and right then they clinched the deal.

Say hello to Frank.

Unfortunately, the only photos I have of him so far show him in harness, and what with the halter, the bridle, and the blinders, it’s hard to see much of his face.  Take my word for it:  no one would call him a handsome beast.  Homely, that’s Frank.  When Frank comes home from summer pasture with the rest of the herd, I’ll take a few photos of him for you.

I took these photos a few days after Frank came to live with us.  He had a few days to get used to Ivy, and vice versa, in the corral, and then dh decided to see how they’d work as a team.  (Ivy initially refused to have anything to do with him, but Frank was patient and didn’t press the issue, and she came around pretty quickly.  I think he made it plain that he had no interest in throwing his weight around.)  Harrowing the field is a spring chore that’s a good choice for a new or untested horse, because the weight of the harrows means that if things go sideways, nothing is going to happen very fast.  So that was their first task as a team:  harrowing the field.  Frank is on the left.

And Frank proved to be a dream work horse.  Well-trained, intelligent, willing, wanting only to know what was expected of him so he could do it to the best of his ability.  

And what a stunning match for Ivy!  As you can see, they’re the same colouring, very nearly the same height, and almost the same depth.  Ivy is undoubtedly the rounder of the two, but they seem to be well matched for strength.  Here are a few beauty shots of the harrowing afternoon.

See Django lying in the shade beside Ivy?  He’s a smart boy, and it was a hot day.

It just takes my breath away, looking at these photos again.  What a beautiful team.  To say that dh is tickled is to understate the case.