Block print experiments

Starting to make some art again.

For Yule, my best friend Chele gave me a wooden block used to print resist for South Carolina indigo dyeing. I suddenly felt like doing a little block printing. The arrival of the latest Quilting Arts in the mail with an article on block printing was serendipitous or synchronous or something...

I designed a block based on printed circuit boards, because I am a geek. Spent Saturday carving and only cut myself three times.

I think maybe this would have been a better design for screen printing; it's too detailed.

First try was with a metallic paint; it didn't transfer very well. The best print was on a scrap of cheap muslin that I'd been using to wipe paint off of brushes. D'oh! I'll have to use a transparent wash to cover some of that up.

Tonight I made a few prints with a normal pink paint, and they look a little better. Here they are drying on my studio wall.

That's my main man Marvin on that bulletin board. We're going to the Super Bowl. :) I expect to be making some art about that, especially after we win.

Gee's Bend Quilts

I went to see the Gee's Bend quilts at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Dec 30 with my boyfriend Bryan.

With a very few exceptions, I found the vintage fabrics more interesting than the finished quilts, and the very early quilts more interesting than the contemporary (2000 and later; after the quilters were "discovered"). You could tell when they realized that people were comparing their quilts to "modern art" and "African heritage" and they decided to start making their quilts look like modern art and kente cloth.

At the risk of being decried as a racist or a "wingnut," I'm pretty sure the only reason these quilts are getting the attention they've been getting for the past five years is because the quilters are the descendants of former slaves. I say this because most of what I saw hanging on the walls at the museum I've seen in dozens of antique malls and garage sales around the rural Midwest--recycled materials, big sloppy stitches, utility over design--and no one will ever claim that in 1940, Loretta Whitebread from central Illinois was working toward any sort of aesthetic transcending her subsistence existence. No one will ever hang Loretta Whitebread's rectangles of polyester double-knit on the wall and talk about their cultural significance with a straight face. It seems like the "soft bigotry of low expectations" to consider such lowly quilts high art because the makers are black when you wouldn't look at them twice if the makers were white; are the perceived benefits of "inclusiveness" enough to justify throwing out the standards? And if so, can my crappy quilts be high art?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

One difference I did notice is that Loretta Whitebread tends to break up large fields of intense colors into little bits surrounded by white, and the Gee's Bend ladies weren't afraid to put the scarlet next to the evergreen. From a material history viewpoint, you can study the quilts to determine some differences between Gee's Bend society and rural Illinois society. But I still don't buy that either of them are art.

No news

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?

Perhaps because I never update it, because there's nothing to update. Still hand-sewing hexagons, which doesn't move fast enough to justify photographing more than once every six months, but mostly still drinking beer and exploring Wisconsin.

Radish the Slacker

I haven't been doing anything but working, cleaning my apartment for people who never show up, and waving the water bottle threateningly at the cat.

So much for my exciting new life outside of Iowa.

Cats.

Can't live with 'em. Can't eat 'em. Can't sell 'em for parts.

My sordid quilting past

I thought I'd thrown out all my truly awful quilts when I moved (...I'm averaging one move a year, I don't know why I have so much stuff), but after today's QuiltArt thread about old work that is so bad it should never see daylight, I checked my boxes and found "Two polar bears in a snowstorm." I thought I was being clever--it's a total of five traditional bear paw blocks with very pale blue for the paws and scrappy white-on-white backgrounds--but it's just BAD. The "whites" are all various tints of blue, pink, yellow, brown and look gross together, and if you get more than two feet away there's no contrast at all, just a big dingy blob on the wall. The quilting is straight-ish vertical lines that don't follow the blocks at all--what the hell was I thinking?

I actually exhibited this monstrosity in 2001 at a guild show. I'm embarrassed now.

I hung it on the wall of the sewing room (where I will never see it, because 60-hr weeks at work start tomorrow). It's approximately 51" square (although I'm sure no two sides are the same length) and all plain-woven cotton so I suppose it would make a great blanket for homeless animals, but it could be interesting to remodel it. And by "remodel" I mean "utterly destroy."

If it's still on the wall when I move again, I will give it to the no-kill shelter.

NO, I'm not posting any pictures.

Radish Flix

I started a new blog, Radish Flix, to keep a record of what I'm watching while I do hand-sewing.

Nothing exciting, just hexagons.

Six inches square

My best friend Chele sent me some pictures of "boxed art" on sale at Target for $19.99.

I scoffed.

So then she told me to make some--just the quilt part, she'll take care of the box. Then she requested "beige, brown, gold..." Not my usual palette.

But anyway. These are six inches square. I've been thinking quite a bit about a) the principles of design and b) one of the properties of fabric (as opposed to, say, paint) is that it frays.

More ass in chair

Still on the 3.5" pineapple blocks, but also pulling out scraps and fabrics and arranging them in pleasing combinations, so something may happen this weekend. I'm thinking a lot about the principles of design, after some discussions on QuiltArt; I'm confident I can use value, balance, etc. well, I just don't know where to start.

Also signed up for the Tiny Treasures challenge on QuiltArt.

Major weirdness from my furry roommate, though. Every time I sit down at the sewing machine and turn it on, he sits on the table, whines, then bites my left arm. To get anything done, I have to throw him out of the sewing room and close the door (which sucks because the the apartment is cooled by a wall unit in the living room--it gets hotter'n blazes with the door closed) . When I emerge for more soda he runs back in and sits in the window like nothing ever happened....until I sit back down, then he bites my arm again.

We've been here almost two months. When I worked on Ron's quilt he would sit on the table and watch or play with the binding. He only started biting when I started the paper-piecing. I guess he doesn't like pineapple quilts.

Cats, sheesh.

Daily blog posts are SO Web 1.0...

Why blog post frequency doesn't matter. Whew!

I have nothing new to report today. I dyed some fabric yesterday but I don't like it...I may or may not take pictures. It might be a better use of my time to go sew something instead of documenting the unsuccessful.