Moving My Shards into Elul

And so the wheels of introspection move forward.

On a walk along the towpath with the dogs this morning, I spotted a great blue heron on the path ahead of us, just perched on the ground by the side of the canal. Billy finally noticed and charged ahead.The bird let him get about three feet away and then hopped in one single laugh of air to a log in the middle of the water. Three feet away. As if she knew that Billy only steps into water to lie down for a combination drink and mud bath.

And around the bend, another heron sitting on a rock in the middle of the pond. And yellow coneflowers. A network of groundhog (or anaconda) tunnels. Giant sycamores wound in some kind of ivy, with their bark shards ringing the ground. And drops of rain just here and there. I noticed everything around me and I got the message: I am part of it all. Connected. And perhaps that means I don't have to fight with life so much, just fold in. Just go, as Jude says.

I came home to start a project that has been on my list for approximately four summers. It starts with this:

These boxes contain broken bottles and shards of china that I have dug out of trash heaps in ghost towns throughout the West, from the surf at Deadhorse Bay, and from a really good midden that we found just across the river when I was trying to coax Himself to take up walking. Leave it to him to look down and find an ivory cuphandle sticking up under his boot, which meant we had no choice but to run home for our trowels and gloves. Which meant he never did have to go for the walk and, now that I think of it, he probably planted all that stuff there the day before.


Where was I?

Oh yeah, sorting shards by color so that I can enter them into The Permanent Record by making a mosaic on an old cafe table. I felt for the memory in each piece. And I felt the women who had tossed them into the trash. The one who put her mother's cobalt blue platter back in her china cabinet after Thanksgiving, the one who dusted ivory porcelain cups on a piece of lace on the shelf over the piano, the one who always hated the ochre vase her mother-in-law gave her and was SO happy when the cat knocked it over.

The woman who perhaps loved this:

Then there was my own collection of shards-to-be.

I used to have my little girls throw our broken ceramics into the field over the fence, planting shards for the archaelogists of the future. Just like all the other women?  Now, I save them for this project and today, I took a hammer to them...and folded them into the boxes with their ancestors.

 All one. All connected.

A Month of Introspection and Itching

That's what began this week in the Jewish calendar.

The month of Elul is the last month of the year. It slides right into the Jewish New Year and the entire holiday package known as the High Holy Days or the Days of Awe. Like the secular new year, Rosh Hashanah ("Head of the Year") involves both celebration and transformation.

Unlike the secular new year, Judaism gives you about 30 days to warm up. You get the entire month of Elul to look inward, to see who you have become and how far off your path you have wandered. Many rituals facilitate this introspective assessment. They increase in intensity as the holidays draw closer, spiraling you near and nearer to your Truths.

On Rosh Hashanah, you invite those truths, good and bad, to creep into your awareness. For 10 days, you look hard at them. Then, on Yom Kippur, you flood yourself with Your Self. You acknowledge it all, move nakedly to ask others to forgive you, move compassionately to forgive (especially yourself). And then, as the sun sets, you feel cleansed, renewed...and ready to start yet another year of marching off track. 

This year, Opening Day of the spiritual pre-season that is Elul coincided with the one-year anniversary of my total knee replacement. I have been wildly grateful for my return to long walks with the dogs, for the hiking adventures now on my calendar, and especially for the glorious absence of searing pain in my joints. This anniversary renewed my sense of physical power, which I then aimed at the weeds covering our front porch. For nearly three hours, I yanked and pulled till I turned into a sweaty mess. Hah, I sneer at sweat!  With the back of my hand, I just wiped it clean off my arms, off my brow, off the back of my neck. My new knee makes me Mighty. Invincible...

...but apparently not immune to poison ivy.

Its not like I didn't know it was there at the start. Himself saw it and refused to go out there unless I got him a biohazard suit from the Centers for Disease Control. Me?  I was just so enamored of my strength that I consciously decided not to change clothes. Even if the clothes were shorts, a tank top and...oy, I can hardly bear to type it...flip flops.

Yes, I sneer at toxic plant life!  And I continued to sneer for the next two days. Which is exactly how long it takes for those first bumps to appear. They quickly turn into vicious lesions that pop up on wrists then toes, on fingers then neck, like some dermatologic whac-a-mole. One week later and I am still on fire. I am even scratching my skin in my sleep.

You're probably wondering what all this has to do with Elul. Let's just say that a person who wears flip-flops into a poison ivy patch probably should start the process of transformation by reviewing the chapter on humility.

Something Significant

I had a transforming creative experience last night.

My intention had been to take this cloth:

...and turn it into a story of The Power of Spirit. Riveting. Dramatic. Intensely Personal.

A whole lot of stuff to put on the end of the needle, don't you think?  Not surprisingly, the process got pretty heavy too.

First, I stitched radiating circles on the nine patch but then there was no more empty space and I had to move into the dreaded What Comes Next?  I paralyze myself exactly at this step because, let's face it, each creative turn is only one of a million options.  Every time I start to commit to one (and by that I mean putting a pin into fabric) the voice Julia Cameron calls "The Internal Critic" starts screaming. "NOT THAT! SOMETHING BETTER!"and I drop the pin. The noise hurts my head, not to mention my soul.  It ultimately causes me to turn out the light and head for the freezer in the off chance there's a stray piece of Halloween candy in there somewhere.

This time, as I pinned and unpinned around Horse, the voice started up again. And this time I made a deliberate decision not to listen. For two reasons. First, the last trick or treaters were through here in the mid 1990s. Second, just that day, Jude had said something in a What If Diaries audio clip about stitching samplers that I immediately transcribed. "I like to think of the sampler as a small library of possibilities and a place for practice. That frees you from too much expectation that the piece has to become Something Significant." The caps are mine, but if you create, I'm sure you recognize the concept.

That was in my mind as Horse and I went back to the studio. It must have lodged itself somewhere deep because of what happened next. I had been positioning Horse on a background cloth that I had woven, one I was saving for...well, for Something Significant. But this horse really didn't care how Significant she would be.  She only wanted this cloth. And to make it worse, she didn't want the whole cloth, she wanted only half. So, I picked up the scissors and cut out the piece she needed! (If you need some history on my clinical aversion to Scissors, please see this.)

Cue Hallelujah Chorus, like all you stitchers promised me, the cutting set me free.

The same Diaries post also touched on integrated applique. This stitching technique blends one piece of fabric into another, creating the perception of a whole in place of edges and seams. As I put scraps on and off, I focused on integrated applique. Could I integrate this bit of blue? Or this one? A title even flowed from fingertips: Integrated Horse. On and off, on and off, the challenge felt playful. So much so that I upped the bar: no second guessing, just figure out where it goes now and then you will somehow use stitch to integrate it all together. Ok, there was a bit of second guessing, but no fourths, fifths, or sixthes.  And whatever I pinned had to stay. And whatever stayed would get basted down that night, before I could come to my senses.

And whatever I basted will now get stitched.  And what else could I call her now besides this: Horseplay.

Sometimes I feel like Patty Duke being Helen Keller with her fingers in the gushing water at that well...finally oh so finally comprehending a truth. 

A Bowl of Memories

When we moved into this house 18 years ago, my mom bought a scraggly little raspberry stick for my youngest daughter. She wore overalls and white Carter's underwear with pink flowers (daughter, not Mom) and we planted it back near the new post-and-rail fence.

The bush has spread throughout the yard and into the field next door. The fence is now an ivy-covered wall.  Mom is 82 and doesn't remember bringing her the bush. The little girl in the overalls is gone, replaced by a 23-year-old woman whose underwear has a whole lot to do with tiny pieces of black lace.  

Me?  I get these. And everything that went into them.

The Furthest Thing from Triangles

With the last scraps of Haze Kilim triangle detritus picked off the carpet and the dogs, I am flying back with outstretched arms to Cloth Without Rules.

I find myself returning again and again to Saskia's story cloths that also tell stories in words. Especially after I saw Patricia undergo the same experience: creating a story cloth that also spun words.  Probably because they are the furthest thing from sewing triangles together, those two projects floated around me in my first free day in the studio. I started to imagine MY cloth that could write...and what it would say. I put on the soundtrack to Dances With Wolves (music that was written for me, not Kevin Costner in a loincloth). I hit the "Buffalo Hunt" track, turned the volume to its maximum and then my hands reached for the old indigo Shot Cotton that fell into my life when I cleaned Liza's drawers. I hit replay again...and again...

...and here's what came out.

There's a girl in grey and red  and a mane/tail made from Glennis's Shibori Ribbons lying in wait.

The Quilt That Taught Me a Truth

It started months ago with two questions. First, could I remake Kaffe and Liza's Haze Kilim quilt with the new handwoven stripes that landed in the shop? Second, could I do it with a heretofore unexamined attention to detail and precision? 

First, a review. It started with half yards of stripes of all shapes and sizes...

...cut into strips by color family...

...then sewn together to form new fabric.

The trick here is to keep the lines...well, in line.  Because they are loosely handwoven, they want to undulate when disturbed. And because my 1/4 inch seams are often a "more or less" operation, those undulations can quickly deteriorate into waveforms. When you keep pulling at the waveforms to straighten them out, you end up with spikes normally associated with ECGs.

This part went more or less okay because I threw all my attention into the accuracy of the 1/4 inch seam. (It helped that I took every stitch in the grip of an audiobook set in Bombay, read by an actor whose voice breathed life into Australian, Indian, Afghan, American, Italian and Palestinean characters. Shantaram is an epic novel based on the author's escape from an Australian prison and his years on the lam in Bombay; the book is over 900 pages and the audiobook is about 40 hours...enough to become a good friend.  Enough to envelope you in delicious loss and disorientation when it ends.)

But back to the quilt.  The new fabric then gets cut into bizillions of triangles. With accurate measurements and straight stripes.

I was still trying to be precise but by this point, it didn't come very naturally. Still, every time I saw some wonkiness, every time I sensed that I was fudging on the cutting, I redid my work. Then, it came time to sew Light to Dark, creating squares from the triangles and then sewing the squares together into a family.

And then, sewing five families together to create a row, a neighborhood...and eight neighborhood rows together to create a city. Make four borders out of leftover triangles and at last, it is born. A finished quilt.

So it started months ago with two questions. First, could I make a new Haze Kilim?  The answer is Yes. I love all the jewel tones bouncing off each other and the handwoven feel that I cannot capture in my photos is intoxicating. Second, could I muster accuracy and precision?  The answer is...um, for a while. In the company of a good book. And really, only because I could channel the Emergency Broadcast System and alert myself that "This is a test. This is only a test."

But.even then, my attention to detail lagged.  At some point, the need for precision and the ensuing frustration when I couldn't deliver same just got on my nerves. I ripped out really obvious lapses but by the time I sewed the borders on, I had really lowered the bar on the definition of "obvious." And I even changed my perception of those moveable lines, daring any quiltmaker to intentionally duplicate the wave that I had created!!

Don't gasp at my conclusions while looking at these photos. They are not close ups.  Just trust me, there are little mismatches everywhere.  On one hand, we say, "yes, that is the nature of the handmade." But I work with women who can do this perfectly and with Grace. The truth is that I cannot. I simply do not have the technical skills and Grace leaves the building every time I do something that requires a ruler. I used to think that if my life depended on being technically proficient, I could do it. With this quilt, I now know differently.

And here's the bigger, more important truth: I am just fine with that.

Its just one more shortcoming. No matter how many leggy pony-tailed friends tried to show me, I could never do a cartwheel and I was reasonably athletic in my leggy and pony-tailed days.  No matter who explains it to me using words with only one syllable, I cannot understand quantum or any other kind of physics and I am very smart. I make lousy pie crusts, get paint everywhere if I don't tape off the woodwork (and I even do a pissy job of that), and am invariably brought to my knees at work when I have to  calculate the cost of an 1/8 yard of fabric that costs 10.50 per yard.

These shortcomings, they are my friends. They are me. (Don't get me wrong, I am still fragile enough to have shortcomings that can close my throat, but damn if it will be about a 1/4 inch seam!)  I am glad that this quilt taught me all this.

Coming Attractions

Taking photographs here in Spain is a challenge. The "calendar ready"  images cover every corner: white washed walls dotted with terra cotta pots of red geraniums, curving cobalt blue Gaudi tiles in the afternoon sun...the town that painted itself Smurf Blue to host Sony's world premiere of a Smurf movie in 2011 (ok, that one is not a cliche but it is real and I wanted to make sure I was holding your attention.)

What is a girl to do?  How about a focus, like Jude gives to her work? Wings, white, windows, and even things that do not start with a W.

So please return to this space sometime next week to see...ta-da...The Nine Patches of Spain.

PS To paraphrase the Wizard, pay no attention to the little box below if there is one on your screen. It is my ipad trying to wrest control of my blog from me.

Potato Famine in Bucks County

Well, not in all of Bucks County. Just this .97 of an acre.

I love planting potatoes. What I really love is harvesting them, snaking my fingers through the soil till I get all the spuds from the bed. Another one! And another!  Its like those sand table treasure hunts we used to have at the kids' preschool Purim carnivals. If you have never been to these exercises in pediatric chaos, count yourself among the lucky.  They are the only thing in my life that has made me contemplate another religion besides Judaism. 

But I digress.

For the past several weeks, I have been coaxing my seed potatoes into sprouting some growth and by Monday, they were ready to go into the ground.  I cut them into pieces and laid them out on a cookie sheet so they could get a protective skin around them before I planted them Tuesday evening.  I put the cookie sheet in the center of the kitchen table.

Which is exactly where I found it when I came home from work on Tuesday.   Only it looked like this.

I was dumbfounded (don't you love that word??) Do we have mice and if so, do they have biceps the size of those little cartoon mice you see carrying away hunks of swiss cheese?  Do we have ground hogs that go grocery shopping in our kitchen? Oh wait.  We have this.

In Clutch's defense, there was no barfed-up potato skin anywhere.  There was no spud smell on his dog breath (visualize me figuring this out), and most important, look at his teeth. Those little nubs peeking through his smile are all he has, courtesy of some pre-rescue jackass who filed them down.

But there is that smile...smug and self-satisfied, I say. And there is history of prior offense.  There was the dozen bagels that turned into an empty bag with a few poppy seeds on the living room rug. The entire soup-pot of veggie chili left on the back of the stove that evaporated into a licked-clean pot, left upright on the kitchen floor.  And of course, the legendary tray of baclava that Allyson left us as a gift, which turned into exactly that: a tray.

I think, Grace, that losing raw potatoes to a toothless dog who knows how to cover his tracks is the singular definition of The Unforseen!

The Discipline of Discipline

Because we are leaving at the end of this week for an adventure in Spain, I wanted to get the Haze Kilim triangles cut. (Isn't that what every traveler has on her to-do list?) 

I spent this cool and windy weekend cutting triangles while listening to the first 10,000 hours of an audiobook novel called Shantaram.  It was a great combination--my imagination carried off with the main character into the vividness of Bombay, all the while creating little color stories of my own.

And before I knew it, there they were, all 570 triangles, plus a few spares. I had intended to just stack them in piles for my return, but they had me at hello, those little patches of jewel tones.  I started arranging them on the wall,  just a few,  just to see...

...and I looked up two hours later.  

 I still have to lay out the bottom row, which puts my eyes just inches above the floor molding and requires contortions reminiscent of the last moments of a limbo contest. But it will be worth it.  To me, this quilt is turning into a novel made up of lots of wildly compelling major characters and some really neat minor characters, too.

Thanks, Jude, I took the time to learn Picasa "collage."

The real trick awaits: precision sewing of these triangles. I look forward to this about as much as I do stepping on the scale at Weight Watchers after Halloween. But I am intrigued not only by the idea of having this morph into its next phase (the color stories will shapeshift yet again as I stitch 1/4" seams all around).  I am also intrigued by the challenge of discipline...can I sew slowly and carefully? Can I fix mistakes when they happen so that a short seam on a triangle doesn't catapult an entire row off its rocker? There's no crime when that happens and I am most attracted to the imperfection of folk art. But what if...what if I approach this task differently than I have other projects?

What if I impose the discipline of discipline on myself for the duration of this quilt? That's something I've always envied in others...not so much for their perfect seams, but for sustained healthy living, sustained use of mind, heart, and soul. Sustained farming of time.  You know what I mean.  

What would it feel like to intentionally impose discipline on my self in a defined (and thankfully limited) way? Can I do it? What will it teach me about the way I live? 

I'm going to take two weeks under the Andalusian sky and inside bottles of Cava to mull it over.

A Whisper Through the Dark Haze

I finished cutting all (270) light triangles for the Haze Kilim quilt this past week. My goal for the weekend was to create the four dark fabrics just in case someone breaking into the house during the night wants to cut them into 270 triangles.

Thanks to a rainy Sunday and some really terrific Radio Lab and TED Radio programs, I assembled all four and finished sewing three of them. I think you could make popsicles from them.

 In the spirit of "And," I also took out my Michigan cloth.

I added some red and some stitching bits but I've largely been stuck on the next steps here. When my writing freezes, its inevitably because I don't know what I am trying to communicate and I just make pretty sentences with no punch. When that happens, I screech to a halt and complete this sentence with the simplest nouns and verbs I can find:  What I am trying to say is this:_________.

And I think that's what has been happening here. I'm not an extraordinary stitcher like so many of the What Iffer's. So my cloths will not speak through artistry or fine craft. That's ok with me, I am happy being remembered as the curly-haired girl with the lettuce leaf stuck in her teeth. But the cloths could be more expressive, telling something about me, if I shut up long enough to listen to what they are trying to whisper. I've been practicing that Intention with this cloth, coincident with an overall new year's intention to try listening before speaking or even instead of speaking.

But the damn cloth has kept its mouth clamped tight these past few months. Until just moments ago, when I read that Jude's next focus over at "What If Diaries," (which, by the way, she has reopened for enrollment so run don't walk to here) will be "windows." And in the very act of uploading the photo here, I heard the cloth whisper, "windows."  It wants to be viewed through a window, echoing the way I watched the state fly away through the airplane window on my last visit.

I have no idea what that will mean and that really excites me.

Shopping for Himself

I was on the coast of Maine last week, visiting daughter and getting to relive the early spring once again. (If you just keep traveling north 10 degrees latitude every week, would you get to stay in May forever?)

I spent a lot of time shopping for Himself...on the beach at Moosepoint State Park. Here's what I brought home for him.

I had to haul it all from the beach to the car parked up on the road, about half a mile away.  In two loads. In the rain. But it was worth it, because the last time I scavenged wood for him, I got this:

And this.

Sometimes, the objects he forms from our forays are functional.

this used to be a shutter on our house

His daughter demanded one for herself...

As did mine.

And so did the dogs. They got another shutter from the house

Sometimes, the projects are just to marvel at.

 As is the man Himself.

Making Stripes

I work at Glorious Color, where we sell fabric packs that quilters use to recreate quilts designed by Kaffe Fassett and Liza Lucy.  At first, this was a funny proposition for me, since the notion of making something already made by someone else seems contradictory to...well, making something.  But as I really listen to and get to know our customers, my arrogance wanes. I understand now that they are simply immobilized to their cores by Choosing. And these kits are not fueling laziness...rather, they provide a way to fulfill that primal urge for handwork, even if it means skipping the step that is the most fun for me.
 
So I've taken on a fabric pack biggie: redesigning Haze Kilim, a lovely quilt made from handwoven stripes that are no longer available.  It has the effect of a kilim rug and the nubbiness of the woven cloth adds to that feeling. (You can google it, I don't know the rules about stealing photos and can't afford to go to prison since Himself refuses to walk the dogs in my absence.)

So here I've been, working the current and soon-to-be-available harvest of woven stripes into a new quilt. What holds my interest is the process. You start with about 25 different pieces of fabric, each consisting of its own little treasures of color:

 Then, you capture the colors you  want and cut the fabric into strips ranging from 1 to 3 inches.

Now comes the fun part.  You sew the strips back together to create brand new sheets of fabric. Eight different hues, two families of light and dark. Here are two of the lights:

You then zoom in and focus on various areas of each sheet, cutting triangles so that each becomes its  own color story (Liza's most excellent design term!).

I see that I've become more confident, free and joyful in this process since working with Jude. After all, what are we doing over there but making new cloth?  I love looking at each of my triangle babies...these hues are like strata of the Grand Canyon to me.

 I will let you know how long I can sustain joy in the face of the approximately 500 triangles ahead of me.

Weavening

Weavening...the process of evening out woven blocks by weaving them together.

Jude created the process and taught it somewhere on Spirit Cloth.  I made up the word.

It describes what I am doing in the studio right now... weavening my fruit juicy cloth woven blocks together in groups of four, to start.  And then, eventually, weavening the four to each and so forth until...well, who knows.

Its really fun, mostly because I  decided to overlook the fact that because my strips were not the same size to begin with, row rarely meets row, column rarely matches column. I decided to overlook this because the alternative was to start all over with fresh, measured strips and that seems ANTI everything I am trying to become. Or actually, that I already am, since I am generally described in this family by the spinach in my teeth, the wine stain on my shirt, and the dirt all over my toes. Himself says even my smile is crooked. In short, I ain't hardly a precision kind of gal.

Anyway, I start out with four guys that are in position according to a master photo off the collection on the design wall.  The blocks are woven onto harem cloth and I've been putting each group on a piece of unbleached muslin, mostly because I have that.

Then comes the fun part: introducing each edge to its neighbor. Some go over, some go under. Some disappear and a new strip bit jumps in that I hope will get integrated into the neighborhood at large when the stitching comes.  I can't describe how interesting and joyful this is, getting so up close and personal with each edge.  

Then, I pin it all down, prick myself ten different places at once carrying it to my living room chair, and invisible-baste every edge going across and going down. Yesterday I also basted an entire row to my shirt. I have no idea if this is what is necessary to make this cloth durable enough for use...I will let you know in 3 or 4 years or until Jude steers me right.

In the end, I have these.

They seem sturdy, and yet, they are wonderfully, incredibly soft.  I don't understand how that happens...layers of cloth get SOFTER, not harder.

I am really happy.

Don't Mess With Me Ever

Julie vs The Ivy

I've put aside my cloth problems because I've been drafted into a war with my English Ivy. It dazzles you into complacency with its beauty but here's what is left of the fence it had gobbled up.

 It marches slowly but firmly...

...pulling apart patio bricks, climbing into the pool heater, sneaking through the wood siding and into the basement!  I started pulling and yanking the little bastards up by the roots for hours.  And I'm headed back out there now.  After I finish clearing, I plan on taking the love of my life--my trusty Mantis tiller--through their encampments.

 

As God is my witness, there will never be ivy again!

What Iffing the Boxer

Early this winter, I created this as part of Jude's Magic Diary workshop.The story of Clutch the Boxer in the glow of Beloved Red Ball.

 

Clutch the Boxer moved to the starring role on my blog.  And the cloth itself grew new parts as I explored Jude's concept of lateral movement, AKA "banding." (The distortion is me being too lazy to take down everything on the design wall so I could photograph it properly.)

 

I was happy last night after stitching the red squares (who could not be happy stitching in scarlet?) but this morning, I felt a nagging dissatisfaction. Or more like the absence of satisfaction you get when the creation is In Its Right Place. 

Now, Jude's current workshop "The What If Diaries" has been focusing for the past month on White.  I haven't. But something valuable snuck past the Color Guard anyway.  Because I picked up the cloth and said, "What if...."  I love the banding...I love Clutch.  I don't love them together.  So what if the banding stood on its own?

 What if it stood on its own two three feet?

And what if Clutch became a new cloth? 

Or he just gets a whole fresh start in life?

Why not just jump into this "what if?" Because it means the finality of this (cue music to Jaws):

We've talked a lot over at Spirit Cloth Plus about letting ideas take their own shape, about cloth morphing from one place to the next. The stitchers over there are fearless and fierce in doing what it takes to make a piece right. But boy, is it ever scary for me. Not scary like snakes, but scary like the first minute you look down from the high diving platform. As in I really really want to do this, but I can't seem to get my toes uncurled from the edge. In the hours since I thought the first "what if, " I grow more excited with the possibility of the new cloth(s) and less attached to the present. And I am REALLY excited about just arriving at this place where I want my work to become what it wants to be. 

So, I am probably going to jump but I need to look down a bit more, ok? I think I will post over at the What If Forum and let all my coaches over there give me a pep talk.