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Flying above the earth, I see a rumpled quilt of colors, shape, and lines.  Throwing a stone in a pond, I create concentric lines around a center point.  I take out my hiking map, and find contour lines create a 2D record of shapes.   These experiences become useful again when it is time to add lines of quilt stitching.

Traditional Hawaiian quilting uses outline stitching around flower and animal motifs.  It adds a kind of vibration to the surface.

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Looking at Google Earth is something like viewing a huge quilt covering the earth.  From about 25,000 feet, the Midwest shows that it was divided before it was settled.  Sometimes the contour lines cross over the survey lines that divide one field from another.  This small quilt is a study of crop circles in Western Kansas.

Some of this quilting is on cotton T-shirt fabric, which has a very sculptural quality.  The closely-set quilt lines have become a texture, instead of a drawing.

The first clue was at the third graders’ art show:  a complete set of self-portraits, all done with oil pastel on a gray ground, so the children had to add color to every portion of the painting.  Happily, they used different patterns and textures to infill the backgrounds and their clothes.  A wonderful way to learn the difference between drawing and painting!

Then our Christmas cards arrived with another wonderful mix of textures.   If I had not just seen the self-portraits, I would have been tempted to see these as quilts.  The first is a print of ‘Partridge in a Pear Tree’ by Eyvind Earle, painted in gouche, although it looks like a collage.  Many other prints of his are available as cards from pomegranate.com.   The second card  from Punch Studio (above-URL not available) has multiple levels of pattern and texture which inspires me to do more carving on my woodturnings, although it more easily resembles an art quilt.

Now I have these sugarplums of texture dancing around in my imagination, leading me back to the studio to indulge myself in the wonder of Christmas yet again.

‘Life is Good’ works with another artist’s work to present it in the best possible way by adding layers, contrast, and motion to some very engaging batik drawings of salamanders.

I first saw reflected light on water in a grid design in Hawaii, when I discovered that the design on the sea turtle shell was an imitation of reflections in a tidal pool.  So the grid of colors creates the sense overwhelming light that pools of water always create.

The biggest salamanders are outlined with little white seed beads; all the other salamanders have white dot outlines from the original fabric,

‘Life is Good’ was a birthday present to my son, Gabriel, who kept pet salamanders as a young man.  When you see them in the wild, you know that life is good because of their environmental sensitivity.

In the five years I have been turning bowls on the lathe, I have resisted the woodturning doctrine which says that a good bowl has paper-thin walls and a shiny finish.  From my backgound making pottery bowls, I find that a functional wooden bowl even 1/2″ thick is already light compared to its ceramic counterpart!

Returning to the potter’s wheel in the past few weeks, I must admit that it is the pottery bowls that need the most help to achieve a sense of lightness, or a kind of liveliness.  Not the weight, per se, but the sense of lightness is missing from most of the bowls I have thrown over the years.

My clay bowls carry the weight of their initial forming on the wheel, which requires that the base stays stuck onto the wheelhead.  After they stiffen up, I flip them over on the same wheelhead and trim the outside of the base.  The inside, however, remains unrepentant.  The result is a series of bowls that have a somewhat squatty relationship to the table.   [and I am not the only potter who routinely achieves this outcome!]

Bringing the clay bowls to life needs at least two remedies.  The first is to find the way that clay is fundamentally different from wood, and feature that difference in the forming process.   The second is to experiment with using wood-forming standards in the clay medium.

Clay has some properties lacking in wood.  Elasticity is first among these, so I have been working with ways to stretch and shape the inside of the bowl after it comes off the wheel.  It is possible to get a very round base on the inside by stretching it with a rib.  Many traditional hand-building artists stretch or paddle the form to create a strong vessel wall of uniform thickness.  After this process is completed and allowed to dry for a bit, I then trim the base again, but this time–to match the curve of the inside.  The woodturners usually form the inside first, and then shape the outside to match, so I am transferring this thinking to the ceramic bowls.

The new bowls now have the gentle curves of a handbuilt base, and something of the lightness of their wooden counterparts.

Lightness means both weightlessness and luminosity in English.  Thinking about the question of lightness, I am reminded of Calvino’s wonderful stories about the Moon.

I was turning a very light-weight slab of spalted pecan, and I found that it was only a fraction of the weight it appeared to be–it was quite dry and very porous.  I turned it to  a shape that reminded me of the full moon, with a cross-section deep enough to be a crescent. The finish is a white matte acrylic.  It features peach-colored highlights, and eliminates the normal yellow color of pecan:

Most of the time, my pile of quilt fabrics works like the paint for an easel artist.  I see the fabrics as colors or textures that will work (or not) in the quilt I am making.  In 2011, some of the fabrics were more compelling as themselves.  Using a printed fabric as itself is known as ‘per se’ applique.  In speech, ‘per se’ means for oneself, or as oneself, and it works exactly the same way with fabrics.

Still Life Per Se 41" x 31.5"

‘Still Life Per Se’ features flowers and leaves from prints. The simple shapes create elements of a still life painting.  I was looking for a balance of curves and straight lines.  The large philodendron leaves add a larger scale to the abstract brown leaves and the pink flowers. The quilt became a fine canvas for lots of free-hand machine quilting.  Sometimes I find the quilting design in the fabric, as in the two abstract leaves.

Traditional quilting is often a collaboration of several quilters.  There’s no time limit, as far as I know, so I designed a quilt background to display Panamanian embroideries known as ‘molas.’

Panamanian Molas 28" x 39"

My husband brought these home from Panama years ago.  Every little applique has a delightful character, and they were anxious to escape from the storage box.  My goal was to create a background quilt with a little jungle and a little heat to put the embroideries in context.

This is the second quilt I made with the molas folk art.  A friend’s mother had given him two different embroideries sized for throw pillows.  One was quite worn, and a few pieces needed to be replaced.  I worked for quite a while to create a wall quilt with both embroideries.  I’m sure there are lots more of these embroideries in circulation.  They seem to be a mainstay of the tourist trade, and yet each one is expertly crafted with care and joy.

These two quilts will be in the ‘Fabric Treasures’ show at the Tri-Lakes Center for the Arts in Palmer Lake October 15- November at Hwy 105 just south of County Line Rd.

The opening is October 15th, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.  There are also sewing demonstrations on other weekends — call TLCA for details.

Artists are some of the original dumpster divers.  William Gibson, the novelist, writes in his short story, ‘The Winter Market’ that folks who can recycle stuff into art are the one who don’t read the manuals.  I find that my grandkids are terrific at picking up pieces of cast-off stuff and seeing a new use for it.  This week I found some thin squares of aspen trimmings in the wood bin.  It was a short jump to seeing them as prototype paper pulp.  And the size was just like a post-it.  So I made a post.  The eraser is some sandpaper glued to the bottom board on the stack.  

Carpenter’s Post-It Notes

about 4″ tall, recycled aspen scraps with a post turned from maple

I won some old pine lamps in a raffle at the woodturning club several years ago.  I had never done any spindle turning, so these were some of my first turnings of that type.  When I had cut through the old finish and starting rounding off the squared-off shapes of the lamps, I found that they were made of glued-up pieces of plain construction pine.  The curves of the turning process created some ovals and curves from the glue joints.

The pine turned out to be full of knots, which added a lot to the character of the lamp.

Lamp:   ‘Naughty Pine,’  22″ tall

Sea urchin shells always seem somewhat Victorian to me.  When they are painted, they seem very much like oil lamps.

I found the proportions for turned wooden lamp bases in a book of projects for industrial arts students published in 1926 by Earl W. Ensinger (Problems in Artistic Woodturning.)

There are endless variations on table lamp bases that make each ornament a new way to investigate spindle turning for furniture on a small scale.

The woodturning community just lost our friend, Paul Thode, who was the master of 1/3 scale furniture.  These ornaments for 2010 mark his passage for me.

The wood for these ornaments is spalted hackberry from the Owl Creek Mill in northwestern Missouri.  The lighter woods are easier to see on the Christmas tree.

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.