
Professional Headshot
0(I have reposted this blog post from 8/29/14 that appears to be lost due to a technical issue between my database and WordPress. If and when is recovered, I will delete this copy.)
Last week, I had SAQA inquire about a headshot of me to include in their announcement of new Juried Members. I gave them what I have used as a professional headshot — but unfortunately, they wanted something not just for the internet but also for print publication to send their galleries. I put it aside for the weekend and hoped that I had something in my arsenal of pictures.
But you know, like most moms, I don’t have many pictures of myself because I am almost always the one taking the picture. I tried really hard to pull something out of thin air — but it just wasn’t there. So I went back and asked when they had to have the picture. End of the month. A week away. Oh wow.
I spent a day or two fooling myself into thinking I could do it myself. I have all of the equipment — but I knew in my gut it wasn’t the right thing to do and it would take a lot of time if I did it all by myself.
In the end, I did something that I have a hard time doing — I asked for help. Beth Buchweitz is a counselor at my daughters’ school and both of our daughters have taken lacrosse together for the last couple of years. We both take team pictures. So I asked her — and yesterday, she took time out of her crazy schedule to set me down in the shade and take pictures of me in a suit.
I don’t have them yet — I’ll share them when I do — but they came out really well. She asked me to stick out my chin and then dip my head down to create a shadow along my chin — I’ve not been asked to do that before but it made perfect sense. She fixed my hair when it was out of place — and best of all, she refused to accept a plastic smile. I had to carry a natural smile and chuckle under my breath and it made a big difference.
I heard this week that my piece Dolce Far Niente was accepted into the International Quilt Festival special exhibit What’s for Dinner? 2014. This exhibit consists of 36 quilts to be debuted at the International Quilt Festival in Houston in October/November — and then it will travel to other IQF shows around the US. I’m honored to be included.
I shipped off The Cardinal — IQF asked me to donate a piece for their auction and given how kind they were to purchase The White Raven from me as well as to grace me with a prize last year in World of Beauty and to include so many of my other pieces in their wonderful exhibits, I was happy to send them something. It will be available in their silent auction at their Houston show October 30 – November 2, 2014.

Collaboration
0Yesterday I met with Leisa. She still has plans for the small piece we did first so I didn’t get it back — but I took her the larger abstract piece that is second in the series — now that it’s quilted — and she liked it! I thought she would want to embellish it but she made an excellent point about restraint and knowing when to stop. We are both happy with it as it is — so I will add a binding and sleeve and consider it done.
I’m strangely drawn to the thought of an almost completely machine stitched binding. I’ve only done this one other time but it seems apropos to the piece — and has the plus of eliminating a large part of the hand sewing.
I have finished drafting a third piece — I picked out fabrics today — and Leisa and I talked about a fourth piece which will be a whole cloth that we will cut into strips and otherwise playfully manipulate. I have learned so much in this collaboration.
I really didn’t know how to work in groups until graduate school — and I was really forced to do it there. We each gave our best to create the best collective effort. Now it’s easy — with the right people that know how to do it too. People with control issues don’t work well in collaborations. It has to be a give and take. You don’t always get your way but you learn from the other person and respect their opinion. You don’t worry about getting your way — you work on finding a solution that works for both of you. It’s a beautiful theory — it’s a shame that governments don’t work this way.

Shibori Discharging Denim
0I have been busy playing catch-up with my girls. Although I spent the beginning of the summer working on abstract pieces in partnership with Leisa Rich, I have been dedicating more time with my girls lately. They will both be in high school this year and I wanted to spend some quality time with them before they went back to school. The first day of school is this coming Monday and I should return to my normal schedule at that time. I usually drop off in the summer. The fact that I was able to work on my art as much as I did this summer is a testament to the age of my girls.
Sometimes I have an hour or so but it is hard for me to dedicate myself to a project when I don’t know if that time will be cut short or not. I’ve been needing to quilt the #2 car wash piece for a couple of weeks — and although I’ve started, I’m not 25% done. I really need some time to think about what I want it to be and I don’t have the time to concentrate on that just yet.
I did come up with a project that I’ve had sitting in my closet for a while though. About a year and a half ago, I bought 2 yards of denim to make a Kimono jacket in a class taught by a friend of mine. Unfortunately, she was not available for the original class and I was not available for the re-scheduled class — so the denim has just sat there.
It’s very blue. It seems to me to be very 80’s. I thought about making a kimono with it just as it is — Martha was hoping to get several of us to work sashiko stitches onto our kimonos — but I couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm for handwork.
I devised a plan to discharge the denim with bleach by experimenting with shibori pole wrapping. I have wanted to try this for years and just never taken the time.
I bought bleach — and since I didn’t have access to Anti-Chlor (to use as a bleach stop) — I bought a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. (Note that SEVERAL sites recommended white vinegar — but vinegar and bleach create a noxious gas — it’s highly dangerous. Paula Burch recommended the hydrogen peroxide and it was easily and cheaply obtained.)
I didn’t have a piece of PVC pipe — but I found a precut 4″ wide by 2 foot long piece at Home Depot for less than $8. Perfect.
I grabbed my masking tape and a ball of twine I found in the basement and started.
Most of the websites I found said to tie the string on the pole first — or tape the denim at the top and then tie the string over the denim. I chose to tie on the string first with the leading piece falling between the opening in the denim. Then I would tape the denim to the top.
I marked the top of the pipe in eight fairly equal sections.
I knew that I was going to put the cut end at the top and scrunch the two yards along the selvedges onto the length of the pipe so I started by taking the cut end and folding it in half — and then in half again. I marked all the folds with little pieces of tape and then taped those to the pipe at the top using the tick marks I had made on the top of the pipe.
This gave me fairly even pleating. You can see that I’ve drawn the two selvedges edges together and let the knot on the pipe come out at that point.
And then I started wrapping. I didn’t do a very good job at the top but I got better as I went. I was holding the pipe upright and it was resting on the ground — so every turn around the pipe I had to stop and twirl the remaining fabric around the pipe so it wouldn’t twist up like crazy. I found that pulling the fabric straight down helped the parts being tied down to pleat better and not create a massive twist around the pipe under the twine.
It’s a good thing I timed this because it took a LOT longer than I thought it would. I have a newfound respect for shibori artists — this is time consuming.
I finally realized that holding the pipe on my lap with the end off to the side made the whole process much faster. I no longer had to stop at every rotation to swirl the bottom fabric around — it moved with me instead.
I scrunched and scrunched every 6 turns or so but I began to realize that I was only going to get about half of my fabric on the pipe. That was a sad realization. An hour and a half and I was only going to be able to dye one yard at a time.
I also had a problem with the top circles of twine popping off the top. I was so glad that I had taped at the top — that helped — and if I do this again — I will tape even more. I managed to wrangle the twine back onto the pipe and then stopped being too aggressive about scrunching all of the fabric down the length of the pipe.
I then realized that not even this much was going to be submerged in the bleach because I was limited by the height of my bucket. I did think that I could pour bleach on the top though and have a more subtle gradation.
When I reached the bottom, I circled the twine back up to the top and rewrapped it — and then tied it off with the beginning of the twine.
I borrowed my husband’s pickle bucket since it was taller but you can see that quite a bit of the wrapped fabric still stuck above the water.
I filled the bucket with water with the pole in it (making sure that the fabric on the pole was saturated with water). Then I took out the pole, measured out 2 quarts of water, and walked it outside.
Outside? Well, I don’t have a wet studio anymore. The only sink that was large enough was my kitchen sink, and I’m highly allergic to bleach. I bought a bleach cleaner for my bathroom once, and after spraying five times, I had to sleep downstairs that night.
I put the bucket by the street so that I could slowly pour it into the gutter when I was done. I knew it would go into the drain down the street.
Then I added 2 quarts of concentrated bleach and added the pole into the water. I piled the leftovers on top — stuck partially in the open top of the pipe — and squirted some bleach solution on the folds that fell above the water line.
And then I waited 10 minutes. Nothing. Another 10 minutes. Nothing. After 45 minutes, finally the portion in the water started to fade. There was nothing on the top though so I grabbed a cup and started ladling a lot of bleach solution onto the top section. I did that for a couple of minutes and then let it sit another 10 minutes.
After an hour, this is what I had. Looked great. I pulled it out and hosed it down with water.
Then I cut the twine and unwrapped it. Some of the tape still held it up on the pole. It almost looks like an elegant gown at this point.
I unwrapped it off the pole, laid it flat, and soaked it with water from the garden hose.
Isn’t it beautiful all wet like this? I have to say that it does surprise me though. The part that was submerged discharged less than the section that I ladled the bleach solution onto. I think I overdid the ladling and lost the contrast of the dark color.
This is a different perspective.
I can’t help but see all of that unbleached dark denim and wish it was discharged as well — but I’m not certain that I want to repeat this process again. So if I use this denim for a kimono jacket, I can either make the front light and leave the dark on the back — or I could turn it the other way and make one side dark and the other side light.
Then I took it inside where I had filled the washing machine with water (about a third full) and the whole bottle of hydrogen peroxide. It’s important to use a bleach stop or the bleach will continue to eat away at the fibers of the cloth. Many people think that merely rinsing or washing with soap will take out all of the bleach, but the truth is that the process has to be stopped chemically.
After about an hour, I ran it through a cycle with the hydrogen peroxide — and then a second cycle with a few squirts of blue Dawn.
I hung it in my studio after it was dry to take a pic — and it looks very stark — but really, this is more a testament to bad lighting and high contrast. All of the very white sections in the photograph are not that white in the actual denim.
At this point I have to decide whether to repeat the process for the bottom or go ahead and make the kimono with the fabric just as it is. Shibori wrapping takes about an hour and a half — and the discharge process takes another hour and a half.

The Ongoing Collaboration of Ginny and Leisa and their love affair with fabric, texture and Leisa’s fixation with car washes!
0Ginny and I met up at Starbucks today to do the exchange of car wash quilt #2. I turned the work over to her with some trepidation; I find it is always so intimidating when you are sharing both creative process and technique with someone…what if she judged me (my vision/skill) and found me lacking? I had spent most of last weekend happily stitching away, building up the surface with a variety of stitches and was truly hoping she would be pleased with my interpretation. I had worked feverishly, using the free motion machine embroidery that would enhance and embellish the pieced fabric, choosing carefully with Ginny in mind. However, as I worked away, I mulled over that I was feeling a little….bored! After much thought, it finally came to me that the problem was that there were NO 3D elements!
I am definitely an artist who needs a LOT of texture, dimension, and most certainly the tactile to be a part of my works. Throwing caution to the wind, I pulled from my varied collection of nubbly, velvety, netty fabrics until I found the right textures to enhance the piece. This was no easy task deciding to do so; Ginny makes really technically perfect quilts that fit neatly into the precise definition of a quilt and the base of this one was so lovely, her use of color and the choices of fabrics so spot on, and the skill with which she cuts and places the fabrics so perfectly daunting, I really was frozen with fear at “messing it up”. However, I knew that she could “take it” as I am finding her to be a woman with the ability to roll with the punches and be open to see what happens! Whew! She was happy with the end result, and now it has gone back to her to use her mad quilt skills on.
HOWEVER! I still have quilt #1 in my hot, little hands and have dastardly plans for what we thought was a sampler-type piece. In Leisa, she must trust!
We also talked about getting together a proposal for an exhibition…this is shaping up to be something truly inspiring and gorgeous and we must expose it to the public!
Here are a few photos of my work on the piece….though as many of you know, it is near impossible to capture the extremely intricate nature of cloth, stitching, and texture in this form. You’ll all just have to come and see the works in the show!