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.

Lettuce Rising...and Me, Too

Last evening in the garden, I scraped back the straw and found the first stirrings of the lettuce seeds I planted 10 days ago.

I felt an immediate and oh so primal rush of emotion.Two emotions, actually. And today, because I am nothing if not emotional overkill,I am thinking about how bizarre these feelings are.

First, I felt excitement.YES, YES  there WILL be wonderful salad this spring... romaine and mesclun and some weirdlings called "tennis ball lettuce" that came from a visit to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello a few years back.

That was ridiculous enough because this is 2013 in metropolitan Philadelphia.So it is not as if there will be No Salad on the Homestead This Spring if the seeds stayed below ground. Or, for that matter, if they stayed in the package or even back at Monticello.

My second feeling was pride.Yep, pride.I beamed down on their little green heads like they had just gotten the lead in the 5th grade play. But I had not taught these little seedlings to read, I had not nursed them through stomach viruses  and head lice, I had not given them years of Unconditional Love.  I ripped open a package, hurled them onto the soil, covered them with 1/4 inch of dirt/rock and then buried them beneath straw so disgusting that the farmer wondered why I would even give her money for it.  

Oh, and I forgot to water them.

Yet, somehow, I felt proud of their existence. Of their conception. Now, conception has been sort of a sore subject for me since my so-called "childbearing years" were anything but that. I've chronicled my descent into infertility elsewhere.  Even though adoption brought me into double-barrelled motherhood (see vomiting and head lice, above) I have always kept my sorrow at missing out on experiencing pregnancy, delivery, nursing buried beneath a, well, a layer of moldy straw. Last evening, in the pink of the first warm sunset in months, I pulled that straw back, too.  

And you know what? There was nothing there. I couldn't find an ache. I couldn't evoke a tear. Wow. It only took 30 years, but there was not even the slightest trace of a scar.  Or perhaps the other scars --you know, the ones you get from that tiny part of parenting that starts AFTER birth, from failing eyesight and creaky knees, from just Living in This World--those scars have left bigger marks.

Who knows.  It doesn't matter. So much of what I let define me for decades...just doesn't matter anymore. Which leaves me free to feel magic where there once was straw. I wish I could jump up and down and tell all the 20 somethings in my life to exhale, to assure them that it will all be all right in whatever form it takes. But if they were truly able to hear that, why, they wouldn't be 20 something, would they? 

I'm going back to the garden, where I can just be amazed. And excited. And proud. Because gardening is just this thing that evokes those kind of emotions, especially in an era and a place on the planet where the successes and failures are not life-threatening. Perhaps because it offers connection with forces much bigger than our own lives and the sight of a seedling is proof of connection made?

I'll keep you posted about my little darlings.

My OTHER Girl

I'm working on one of those posts with Big Thoughts.  Meanwhile, I will entertain you with the OTHER girl on my bulletin board.

Judging by the way the guys around her are dressed, this must be the 1920s.  I see more than her vampiness...maybe her independence? Her ability to command your attention?  Who knows...I just know I love her to pieces.

And I wonder a lot how she turned out.  I never forget that the blue-haired ladies blocking Aisle 5 with a shopping cart, the invisible women lining the halls of the nursing home, the aunt with the funny-smelling apartment...they are each the stuff of the black and white photos scattered on the flea market table.  You just can't tell unless you know how to see.

My Girl

I bought her at a flea market years ago and she has survived all the many rounds of stuff purging since then. Look at her.

I mean really look at her. 

I love her the way I loved Scout Finch, Jo March,Nancy Drew, and little Elizabeth Walton. I am jealous that she got to ride her bike on a dirt path through the field.  I imagine her looking at her wrist watch, wiping the mosquito off her cheek, and gunning those pedals because she had to get home before Some O'Clock.  "Would you hurry up??" she winces to the photographer. "I gotta go!"
 

Decades and decades after this summer, there was a daughter, daughter-in-law, or second cousin once removed.  She finds this picture amidst a thousand others in a yellowed cardboard box from the local department store.  She looks at it and tosses it into the "to go" pile without a second look because there is no time for second looks when there are still 8 rooms left to pack up and out.  All by herself, My Girl makes her way into a wooden cheese box filled with a million other black and white  photographs that sits beneath the sign written by the enterprising flea marketer: "Make Your Ancestors!"

And on to my wall, where I look at her every single day. My Girl, my Girl.

The Fabric of My Life

Inspired by Anne Frank and her dear "Kitty," I started keeping a diary in 6th grade. Anne wrote lofty observations about humanity, I tracked my progress towards getting a bra. ("FD" being my very secret code for "further development.")   

I continued through junior high, chronicling my yearnings for that first kiss and my fury at how Cheri acted at Gayle's bat mitzvah. It kept up through high school, college, and all the years thereafter. The outside of each book reflected every stage and pretention of my life but the inside...well, it always held the most honest of words.

 It was exactly these Most Honest of Words that started to weigh on me in recent years. I had made the grave mistake of reading through bits and pieces of my brother's journals in cleaning out his stuff after his sudden death and I became very worried about my own legacy. Thoughts captured in a rage or hormonal flux could really sting innocent eyes and so, several years ago, I ripped out the worst offenders ...

 and ceremonially fed them to the firepit. Now, this winter, in my general purging of Stuff, I began to feel that 40 years of carting these books around was getting pretty old. I sat with that and yesterday, I decided that I no longer needed them.  Baskets overflowing with endless chronicling of moods, fallings in love and breakings apart, psychic restlessness and question after question after question...ugh.

The pages bored me. They had little to do with who I am now and boy, do they take up room.   Firepit, here we come. Until...

Until I found something incredible.

Tucked between the ramblings were the tenderest of young girl moments...

the Dear John Julie letter, complete with tear stains...

The sage words of my new college roommate, so new that I wasn't sure how to spell her last name...a perfect chronicle of the birth of a 40-year friendship (I SEE YOU CRYING, J) :

The frantic agony of just trying to grow up...

The joy of getting there. 

 I found a heart that was wide open...

And a joi de vivre that I really like.

So, here's what I know. The ramblings still bore me.  But beneath them, I now see the history, the heart, the spirit that is me. Words are the warp and the weft of my life and so these old pages, well, they are like the lacy handkerchiefs and yellowed linens tucked in your grandma's dresser (mine had receipts for gold coins and old Dear Abby columns).  Over at Spirit Cloth, Jude Hill teaches us to look for story in fabric, especially the old ones.  And to make a cloth with meaning.  And so here it is...my latest quilt, made from the fabric of my life.

The story of me. Without the dirty parts.