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It was the large-scale B&W print that prompted a quilted version of ‘Roumanian Blouse.’  Beginning with simple stripes in different widths, I built the background.  A freehand version of the flowers from the platter (photo in earlier post)  provided the pattern for the applique.  As I cut out the background behind the appliques, I found a gift of a smaller set of flower petals–now in the lower RH corner.  I had some interesting red buttons for the flower centers.

This quilt developed very quickly until I needed to design the quilting for it.  I took some photos and printed out two or three copies.  With a white pencil, I auditioned some quilting lines until I found that outline quilting created a second layer of texture very simply.  There was no need to mark the fabrics with the outline stitches.

A darker quilting thread looked very thin and weak on the red background fabric.  The red rayon thread works much better.  In general, I have learned that lighter color threads for quilting are more of an enhancement; darker threads are a distraction.

The completed quilt could have been displayed with any one of the four sides at the top.  I chose to place the section with the most B&W prints at the top, and the ‘gift’ flower at the bottom.

My eye moves down the piece from flower to flower, resting on the most complex area last.

Artists generally  have a powerful sense of the motion of the eye through the work.  It is only recently that I have become aware of how I look at artwork.  It seems that half a century of reading from left to right has predisposed my eyes to travel in that pattern.

I have been applying a graphic to both ceramics and wood that I first saw used in textiles.  It was derived from Ukrainian embroidery, and it was used by Nina Bych in a silk-painted kimono, derived from  ’…Early Trepilian ceramics, with their precise black and brown geometric designs…’ (Tuckman and Janas, The Best of Silk Painting,  1997, p. 79.

Somehow, in my memory, the design elements recall  ’the Roumanian Blouse,’ after the painting by Matisse, which has a red background, but not a strong bicolor graphic.    It is very much like Matisse, however, to look for decorating schemes that challenge both line and perspective.

I used the graphic scheme first on a pottery vase, with a resist line around the flower segments.  

Then I tried it on a platter, using two tones of brown oil colors to lift the flower petals slightly above the surface of the stripes.  It is important to keep a strong color in the outline of the petals.  The carved lines between the stripes and around the petals creates a channel to carry the color.  This seems to be a key step in making the design work.

For the vase and the platter, just one color is added to a background that functions as the second color.

turned wooden platter

The study piece for the goblet goes back to the red and black version of the graphic.   There are multiple combinations for the interior, cup, step, and base.  I will need to turn quite a few of these to find the best choice.

study for goblet

Flask within a flask

In September 2009, I watched Craig Timmerman from Austin, Texas, create a large torus (doughnut-shaped form) shape with a glass test-tube for a flower vase.  Craig sells these commercially, so I wanted to adapt the idea to a shape that I have made before.  There is certainly nothing wrong with the torus form, but I was hoping to contribute something to the development of the vase.

My flask shape begins on the lathe in the lengthwise direction, from which it gets the outer curve of the form.   It takes a few turner’s tricks to turn away the center passage.  This one is about 4″ tall overall, and holds a tiny test tube.  It would be just about the right size for the first little yellow crocus of the spring.

This ornament combines a sphere of  spalted Missouri hackberry  with a top and finial turned from baltic birch.  It has been fun to learn some spindle turning this year.  I have my own names for the elements of the finial:  apple core, umbrella, golf tee, and O-ring–all present in this example.   To see a more refined version of this finial layout, visit dennisliggettwoodturner.com.

We have a lot of things waiting for attention in the shop and in the sewing room.  The Claus household must feel a little like the Liggett’s this time of year!

This detail from a quilt I made in 2008 began as a sketch of five tall cylinders turned by Richard Raffan.  The cylinders were turned from green wood, so they moved and twisted as they dried.  I have enjoyed arranging them as an ensemble, and then drawing the results.  One of my favorite drawings became the silk painting at the core of this quilt.

Silk paints can be contained within a wax line which outlines the vesssels in this painting.  They also flow and mix freely, which I have used in the background of this painting to represent the color and light of the forest.  When it was time to quilt the background area, I chose outlines of tree trunks with cut-off limbs.

The red interior of the vessels is the color that Richard Raffan used inside the cylinders.  It seems to be a necessary color, both in the cylinders themselves, and in the painting.  Without the red accents, the purples, greens, and blues would be less emphatic.

'Pine Floor' Kay Liggett, 2008

I have been fascinated by the grain lines in wood ever since I began woodturning.  There is a sense in which grainlines on a board resemble a drawing.  It is the story of the tree’s life, in just the way that wrinkles tell the story of a human face.  I also enjoy using ‘natural process’ image transfers.  For example, in ceramics, I sometimes press leaves or bicycle tires into the damp slab to record the textures.  With fabric, I have borrowed a rubbing technique to transfer grainlines from weathered wood by rubbing an oil pastel crayon over the fabric placed directly on it.  This was the beginning of the Four on the Floor series of quilts.  The grainlines become a very direct way to quilt through the fabric layers, transforming a hard-edged reality into a soft image of it.

‘Pine Floor ‘was the first quilt I made with this technique.  I chose light colors and color washes.

In contrast to the loft and color of ‘Pine Floor,’ I chose a thinner batting and silk to make ‘Laminated Floor.’  This quilt has a more uniform surface quality, in the way that the laminated floors keep the grain,  but lose the texture of wood.   This silk was dyed with hickory bark.

'Laminated Floor' Kay Liggett, 2009

The quilting on the silk fabric makes a very subtle grainline, compared to the effect of the oil pastels and stitching on the first quilt.

After working with the very smooth surface of the silk, I began to look for a rougher texture in the fabric.   I have also been interested in discharge-dying of fabrics.  I chose black raw silk to start the pattern of grainlines on the next quilt in the series.  the rubbing was done with black oil pastel.  Then I applied discharge dye to remove the color where it was not protected by the oil pastel.  The discharge process created lighter areas where the color was removed.

'Back Porch' Kay Liggett, 2009

Although the texture of ‘Back Porch’ is rougher, I wanted a contrast between the visual roughness of the fabric and the hand of the quilt.  I chose a rayon backing fabric, and bamboo batting to give this quilt the softest and most plyable hand in the series.   Hand-dyed cotton and patches of rayon add to the multi-layer sense of this quilt, which is light and pliable  (photo -below)

As I was working on ‘Back Porch,’ I began to think that the grainlines could be strong enough to construct a whole-cloth quilt from just the pattern of the wood.  I looked up one afternoon at the subfloor visible from my basement, and I recognized the big clue in almost all subfloors–they are laid on the diagonal across the floor joists.  This change in the orientation of the ‘boards’ gave the design enough motion to use just one fabric choice.  The fabric is natural raw silk, dyed with cherry bark and highlighted with SetaColor silk paints.

All of these quilts are approximately 50″ x 24.”

'Sub Floor' Kay LIggett, 2009

The four quilts in this series will be in the “Sublime Surfaces” show November 13- 27th, at the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado.

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woodturnings

Opening July 10th at the Manitou Springs Business of Art Center, ‘3 Ladies from Aspen’ will join dozens of other woodturnings by the members of the Pikes Peak Woodturners.

Figurative work is relatively rare in the woodturning world, with the exception of the nested and painted Russian dolls known as matroshki.  My interest in turning figures evolved from a snowman Christmas ornament–three turned spheres with an offset top hat.  I elongated the form, feminized it, and rotated the holding point in the base off-center to create a sense of movement.  The vertical figure in the Colorado aspen shows to good advantage in the lengthwise dimension, giving another meaning to the concept of ‘figure.’  

The hats are turned from contrasting scraps of cedar, burl, and canary wood, and glued on at an angle.  The tallest figure is 10.5 inches.

How to count mistakes

Chris Alexander’s four-volume essay on the Nature of Order has a remarkably simple starting point on page 186 of book two.  to paraphrase: “… every element in the construction of an object represents a decision…which has the possibility of being wrong.  …The vast superiority of generated plans [is that] they avoid mistakes.  A fabricated plan cannot avoid mistakes, and in all fabricated plans, the overwhelming majority of possible mistakes are actually committed.”

This insight provides guidelines for quilting, not only in terms of avoiding unnecessary precision, but for the basic process of constructing the quilt.

I have given a great deal of thought to the process of constructing the Indigo quilt.  Starting with the fabric collection, I have searched for ‘structure-preserving transformations’ that give the best combination of elements within the quilt–fabric pattern, color, lines, local symmetries.  I am satisfied with the piecing steps.

The quilting often feels like a separate process.  The challenge now is to perceive the quilting as a natural unfolding of the creation of a quilt.  Instead of thinking of the finished product, I am focusing on the way that the process can help me to discover the correct decisions.

Looking at the whole, I have these rules of thumb and a pencil to develop the plan for the quilting:     1)  always quilt in the ditch,  2)  add contrast to the quilt –use curves if it is geometric, and geometrics if it is curved, for example,  3)  recognize the quilting as a way to add levels of scale, 3) review the machine quilt patterns that I have used to see what might work.

The basting gives a simple clue.  Making the ‘sandwich’ is often minimized by quilters as a timeconsuming nuisance.  But this is one of the things that defines the very nature of quiltness.  I have decided to handquilt the structural quilting, so often dismissed as ‘in the ditch’ stitching, although it is generally acknowledged as a necessary step.  The reasons to handquilt on a quilt that will actually be primarily machine-finished  are  1) to keep the structural quilting soft, and 2) to spend time actually handling the quilt so that contact time will generate the correct decision of what type of pattern to use in each section.

We have a lot of theories about how folk art happens.  Working with children’s drawings is one way to investigate the actual way that human beings shape our vision with the work of our hands.  In the day that I spent with the girls at Sewing Camp (earlier post), I discovered that Josephine was already able to formulate stuffed animals that were simple, fat, and easy to make.  She already had a sense of stuffed-animal-ness and how to re-create it.

Holly is younger, and has not quite formulated the key features of a stuffed animal.  Her drawings included the dancing cow, which was quite challenging to transform into a 3D figure, and the charming bat pictured here.  The overlay is tracing paper that I used to flesh out the bat to a shape that was easier to sew.  I also had to recognize that all of the points of the feathers would be tricky to turn, so I chose to top-stitch the front to the back.  As the flannel unravels, it adds to the feathery appearance of the points.  

The key challenge is to keep the child’s vision by matching it to construction techniques that allow asymmetrical shapes, unexpected features, and the opportunity for the child to change or add elements as the project evolves. 

the overlay keeps the style of the drawing

  Holly drew the features only after we had assembled the bat, adding elements that did not appear in the original drawing:

Three girls between 10 and 12–a full day and two sleep-overs–an ironing board, sewing machine, and boxes of scraps = sewing camp here at Ridgeway Studios.   We started out with drawings of animals.  I always enjoy quilting on my drawings, so it seemed logical to start the girls with their own designs.   For the first round of projects, I traced the drawings onto fabric of their choice, sewed it to a backing, pillow-case style.  The girls turned them right-side out, and stuffed the forms.  They chose button eyes and used fabric paints for beaks, hooves, and other features.  They used simple embroidery with black pearl cotton for the horse’s main, and for highlighting the little square patches they put on several of the animals. As we developed more animals with a lot of points, I began to stitch the front and back together on the right sides.  Before long, I found all three of them sewing on the machine with this construction style.    On their own initiative, they also began to try some of the fancy stitches available on the Bernina.  After we completed nine different animals, they began to make sleeping bags and pillows for them, as well as clothes for two horses and a small elephant.  

Photo:  The Dancing Cow  10″ tall