Virginia Greaves

I should say, conquering MY fears. Every time I finish a quilt, the hardest point for me is when I have to sit down & start quilting. I think about everything else in the world I can do to put it off, and my heart races at the thought of beginning. I think it is very similar to the fear of drawing — which is the fear of failure. Moving through a process that makes it less initimidating & breaks it into smaller, workable pieces is how I have to approach quilting — or I would never get it done. To be honest, I’ve even considered skipping this part altogether. I know an artist that mounts all of his fabric pieces on wood — and another one that mounts it onto a frame — but in the end, I know that the quilting adds a dimensionality to the piece that I like. I just don’t always know how to get there.

What works for me is to take a black & white picture of my photograph & start drawing on it with a pencil. I can mess up, erase, and start over. I try to follow the natural contours of the face — or the line of the shirt, or the neck, or the ear. Pulling all of these lines together into something cohesive is what I am working out on paper so that I won’t be pulling out stitches later on the quilt. I used to draw all of my lines on the quilt — I don’t do that anymore (it took too long & once I had my confidence, I didn’t need it anymore.) I look at my roadmap & I draw in a few primary lines on the quilt — and then fill them in with contour quilting lines.

I won’t always follow my map exactly, but I have an idea of where I want to go and I refer back to it as I quilt.

I had to remind myself today to hold studio time more sacred. I realized that I have just over a month to complete my current quilt if I want to enter it into Houston. So I ignored the ringing phone and did everything I could to finish cutting out the appliques on my latest quilt. I had to re-do the turban — I really didn’t like the fabrics in my 1st effort & the actual drawing in the turban needed some tweaking.

Even though the light is at the back of her head, all of that white just looked wrong so I switched it with my medium tone used on the front of the forehead to add balance. I then added some deeper tones in the folds and ignored the final value I had in the drawing — I didn’t have enough in my new fabric range & I decided it looked fine without it.

I am so pleased with it. Strange that the turban would be the part that gave me the most trouble.

Tomorrow I will begin covering the raw edges with an applique stitch — I use a narrow zig-zag. That will take me about a week — although it will be next week until I finish it as I have company coming tomorrow for a few days. Nose to the grindstone.

I have been doodling a lot in my drawing notebook with a Sharpie — and it finally occurred to me that I was doing a short version of what is called zentangling. I saw a post about it recently on QuiltArt and was directed to www.zentangle.com. They don’t describe it so much as show you. I started researching and found several videos on YouTube about it — but I am surprised to find that there is currently no Wikipedia entry for zentangle or zentangling.

OK — so what is it? It is a process of doodling that brings about a meditative state. You use heavy white paper and thick & thin black markers — although I’ve seen someone online use black paper with a white marker. If you’ve read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain — the author talks about reaching the meditative state in drawing that is needed to tap into your best creative energies. Zentangling is an easy way to do this.

So I went to Dick Blick the other day & bought some 80 lb. bright white drawing paper and a couple of Sharpies. That is really all you need — and some time. I had to sit by the pool for a couple of hours yesterday — and it was a perfect activity to keep me occupied. There is a lot of detail in each piece so it takes quite a while to fill one out — but it is also a lot of fun. It seems to take away the pressure of the blank page and lets you experiment with drawing in a non-threatening way.

My first piece is around a circle — so it is technically a mandala — which also helps with the meditation. I had several people who saw it tell me that they would love to see it silk screened onto T-shirts. I’ll have to ask someone if you can create a screen from a Sharpie drawing.

I used a plate to draw my circle — and then used wavy lines to divide it into sections that I then filled with circles, dots, lines, squares, diamonds, whatever. It uses repeating patterns to give a sense of rhythm. It is not dissimilar to the process of coming up with quilting patterns to cover background areas.