Back to Basics

All summer, I felt torn between coming here to write Big Thoughts about life vs staying outside and living it. As if there were nothing in the middle. Anyone who has spent more than 20 minutes with me knows that balance has never been my strong point. Now, however, it is becoming a medical necessity.

Because for first time in my 61 3/4 years, the insanity out there is actually worse than than the routine craziness in my mind. It has shaken my balance and I am in desperate need of a safe haven.

When I think of safe havens, I thought of my connection to all of you. Yet my lack of posts in the previous months and months shows me that writing Big Thoughts is obviously more than I can handle, at least until November 10th. And so, for the moment anyway, I'm just going to go back to basics: writing about the stuff I am making. And maybe we can pick up where I left you off?

I created this over a very snowy winter a few years ago.

The rule for this quilt was simple: only fabric already in my shelves, and even then, only my favorite ones.It holds the story cloths that really reflect my My Story:

It has bits and pieces from flea markets...

And from the pile of jeans that Himself has been stockpiling for future black market operations:

I basted the quilt top to some kantha cloth and began some handstitching here and there. But no clear direction emerged. I threw it on the bed for inspiration...

But nothing happened, so so I just rolled it up and stashed it away.

Meanwhile, over the past three years, I have also been handstitching the world's longest connection of blue and white squares, with no intention other than an idle fantasy about the Guinness Book of Records.

Several weeks ago, these two worlds collided. Probably moved by a search for a piece of myself to cling to, I put the quilt top back on the wall and the blue and white squares jumped on. That lead to these four borders:

I have been focusing all my stitching on them, embellishing them with other scraps that I have created for no apparent reason...just moving the needle through them in complete contentment.

And THEN, all the stars aligned. Specifically, the stars over at Spirit Cloth, where Jude has retooled her Sun, Stars, and Moon teachings. She periodically fills her shop with clusters of overdyed indigo stars and moons and lo and behold, I was actually able to score a few sets. Within 24 hours of landing here, these little beauties found their way into the border:

 

Sooner or later, it will be time to marry the borders to the quilt but right now, we're just enjoying our very fine romance.

Thanks for looking. I feel better already.

The Months of Kindred Spirits: Part One

I loved this phrase the moment I first heard it from little Anne Shirley (of Green Gables fame). Kindred Spirits.  Those souls whose core contains a piece of our own...who trigger the feeling of deep connection in even the most simple of encounters.

May and June brought me two precious encounters with Kindred Spirits.  (July brought a war between my camera and my computer, with a momentary truce attained just today.)  

In May, I returned again to the Crow Timber Barn for another week with fiber artist Dorothy Caldwell.

Remember how much I loved her first class, Human Marks? This workshop is called In Place. It consists of various exercises that capture Dorothy's passion for experiencing place, recording information about it, and translating all this onto paper and cloth. Specifically, two small handmade books.

So there we were, 19 women. Some in pairs of friends or sisters, many on their own. We started with a simple map and three pins each. One by one, we pinned 1) where we were born; 2) where we live now...

...and 3) a place that is important to us. In the stories we told explaining this last pin, we begin to perceive Place as much more than landscape. "I left Cuba when I was just a little girl." "This is where my daughter was born." "I saw the Aurora Borealis here." 

"Look how much we impose on the land," Dorothy points out. "It is the library. It holds heritage, experiences, and people.  It holds everything."

For Dorothy, everyplace is Place. Look how she records airplane landings from every trip.

She makes rubbings from soil or plant matter everywhere she goes (or ink wash, when the mood strikes). I noticed she uses a singular expression about her fieldwork and it fits: When I am working, when I am In the Land...

 
We start by comparing dirt she had asked us to bring from home...

 ...and rubbing it into fancy Japanese paper.

There were many other exercises. We made cord and colored it by rubbing it in local flora...

I couldn't get enough of this one.

We wandered with pen on paper and then stitched those lines.

We each selected a Place on the farm (roped off with our cord) and recorded with simple lines the sounds, the sensation of the air there. And then stitched THOSE lines. We examined maps and how they reflect our beliefs. Read through this one if you can:

We dyed with rust and plant, we marched blindfolded around a pond. We talked about curating collections, comparing the 100 objects she asked each of us to bring from home.

As if you couldn't guess which one was mine.

Are you wondering where the Kindred Spirits come in yet? From their introductions and samples of work, it was clear that many women in the group were dazzling professional artists. From the remarkable use of paint, of color, of line, it became equally clear that the quiet ones too were extraordinarily accomplished Makers.

Yeah.

Yikes.

It didn't take long for me to feel underwhelmed by my own work. Seduced by the colorful pages emerging around me, I too took watercolor brush to paper. At which point I felt even worse. I had a sleepless night and then called Himself in tears. I don't know how paint works, I sobbed. He suggested that a one-week workshop might not be the place to master a new medium. And anyway, wasn't I there to learn and absorb the approach Dorothy takes to Place?  

And feel grateful that you are in the midst of such talent, he added. Would you rather you were spending a week with people who didn't know how to do anything?


Sometimes, he is the most Kindred Spirit of all, that one.

I took his advice and surrendered into the warmth and comraderie in the studio.

After all, when in the history of time have 19 girls ever gotten along all day, every day? Seriously, this place was far from the high school lunchroom as possible. I felt the strand that ran through us all, the urge to create, and just hung on to that.

 Creativity is probably the most elemental part of my spirit and it became magical to be among others made the same way.

 By Day 4, I recognized that while I don't understand paint, I do know more than a little about how fabric works. Hey, now I get it. I am not a painter. I AM a quilter.  So I asked each person for a two-inch square of fabric, whatever she could spare. (One woman--a gifted professional painter, naturally--shrewdly bartered her Japanese shibori scrap for a piece from my 100 finds from Dead Horse Bay.) 

 I sat with the squares and within a few hours, had the last page of my book all sewn together.

 

While You're Waiting...

I am trying to write a brilliant post about Kindred Spirits. It is taking me a long time because 1) I can't bear to come in from the yard in this beautiful green June; and 2) Picasa is stubbornly holding on to the mistaken belief that my photo files are corrupt.

So while I 1)wait for a rainy day and 2) wind my way through yet more troubleshooting forums (fora?), I have some news to keep you entertained.  Oddly enough, it too is on the theme of Kindred Spirits.

For Molly has found hers, in the form of her new friend.

 Meet Tui, a four-year-old formerly male boxer. He's a rescue from a family who adopted him several years ago as a stray and then had to relocate to New Zealand and did not want to put him through the rigorous quarantine requirements.

 My best guess is that this explains his name: a tui is a New Zealand bird with a stark white chest (feel free to step in and get the record straight here, Mo).  His two inner toenails on each foot are white, while the outer ones are black.

He loves squeaky toys and food on the counter and jumping into bed with us at 5:30 AM.  It took the obligatory three weeks and then we became a new family.

Here we go again....

My Life As An Alfred Hitchcock Movie

Every day for about two years or so, at every groundfloor window in this house, we have this.

Apparently, he is defending his territory against the Intruder he imagines he sees in the reflection of the glass. 

What a metaphor.

Billy Dog

Of all our dogs, Billy was the simplest. He was not "almost human." He was not "my best friend." 

 Billy was a dog.

Last weekend, Billy's abdominal tumor snaked into his well-being. When we fed him, he collapsed in contortions of abdominal distress. When we didn't, he told us he was starving. In the wild, he would have been killed by another animal.

In our world, the animal was me. 

 He didn't make it easy on me, the little bastard. By the time we made the decision, six months to the day when he was given three weeks left to live, he could no longer get himself up without me lifting up his butt.  Except when I asked him if he wanted to go for a ride. Then, he jumped into the car, bounded out at the vet's, and eagerly answered all the doggie messages he read on the landscaping. 

Once inside, he wriggled in insane delight at being the object of so much attention. I love this practice--they had already spread an old comforter across the floor, complete with a dog treat in three corners. A box of tissues was in the fourth corner. But my wonderful older vet had just recently retired and sold the practice to a new fellow. Kind and gentle though he was, he has not yet learned the magic words.

"You're doing the right thing."

When I expressed alarm at Billy's apparent animation, he told me that the burst of adrenaline an animal experiences at the vet's can supercharge an impaired body. He said, "that makes it hard."But he didn't say what I needed to hear.

"You're doing the right thing."

As the sedation took hold, Billy's head slipped onto my lap and damn if his tongue didn't slip an inch out of his mouth, exactly the way Clutch slept. Oh God, Billy, don't you be making that moronic face too, I smiled to myself.  I wish I could tell you I saw it as a sign Clutchie was there to welcome his old friend, but I didn't think that.  All I thought, as the up-and-down of Billy's chest slowed and then stopped, was This is Death. I thought, I still am thinking, that Death gouges out a deep black footprint onto the soul. Separate and apart from the heart's loss is the hardness of this act. A being...a big sloppy dog, but a being nevertheless...

is no more. Is No More.

I don't need reminders that this act was merciful in light of his suffering. Now, I don't even need to hear that I did the right thing. Because, let's face it, I have already done it. I--we--need to feel the weight of this when we make it happen. Its only right to feel overwhelmed in the presence of Death. Simply, as Grace so often reminds us,to stand and face it.

Oh My God

I had always wanted to make a quilt by Karen Stone, which, as you can see even through this miserable image, is essentially an insane concoction of Tiny Little Pieces That Can Kill You.

My friend Dr. J was thrilled to be the recipient of it. In return, she offered me her handiwork: a needlepoint pillow.

So last year around this time, we spent a Saturday hunting and gathering our respective goods. First, we went to the needlepoint store, where I fell for a pattern of Chinese spice jars. She let me have my brilliant red and lime wool and told me to shut up about the rest of my crazy choices that were disrupting her conservative color sense .  Then, we tore apart her local quilting store for fabric. We needed tons of bits and pieces in each of the five different colorways that form the quilt. I let her have some conservative choices and told her to shut up as I filled in with crazy outliers that reflect my sense of color.

And, yes, we really say "shut up." It takes a long time to make old friends and the ability to speak to one another with minimal filters is a clear sign of that you've reached that point.

We then sat outside in the April sun dripping massive Greek salads onto our laps (well, my lap) and promised to exchange the finished products in about a year. We each headed home, took naps, and then started our engines.

Now, as a concept, doesn't needlepoint seems like a no-brainer? In and out of little squares that are colored right onto the canvas, no more than paint-by-number with a needle. Except that the one time I tried it, my square turned into a trapezoid and the flat surface became a relief map of the Himalayas. So I had a tremendous sense of awe when, sometime last fall, Dr. J presented me with this:

 

The squares are microscopic and yet she captured every shadow, every turn, without a burp. Oh my god, I couldn't even do that with fine-tip markers, let alone a needle and fat hunk of wool.

Meanwhile, I was still cutting little triangles and dropping them all over the floor. In fairness to me,  she gets to take her canvas with her to airports, movies, and medical appointments so that she can make track all through her week. That doesn't work so well with machine sewing.  Nevertheless, a month or so ago, I took the finished quilt top to her house. My normally highly articulate friend not stop sputtering. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. She taped it to the kitchen wall in ecstasy but eventually surrendered it as I touted the merits of quilting and binding. 

I am naming the quilt, Oh My God. In a few days, she will see this:

I bound it with scraps from the quilt itself, my absolute favorite technique. And look at the extraordinary machine quilting by Barb Persing and how it brings each little corner to life:

The quilting changes about every two inches, try that sometime if you want to understand

Those circles are about a half inch, little kalamata olives

Dr. J and I are now embarking on our next project. She is going to needlepoint a pillow that she will create from the circular star pattern here. I said she could also make one for me. And we will meet up again with the finished products in about a year.