I am non-verbal

I show up. Every day. for hours. and hours. It's a nest. This week has been particularly intense due to my goal of finishing a number of lingerers — those pieces that linger on the draft board without a finished edge, without a way to hang themselves, without a final yes in my final work-in-progress voting booth.

Here, Silent Witnesses is on the trimming board.

So I finished a few, hand-sewing facings and hanging sleeves. Fixing that little divot of stitching that bugged me. Adding just a bit more detail. Trimming excess.

I focused in on the details of craft.

My favorite thimble, a metal tipped silicone model, is a must have when finalizing the details of facings and hanging sleeves. This piece was done on canvas, so pushing the needle through the facing and fabric back proved difficult. I was tempted to just glue them down. But using an embroidery needle and pushing it through with that metal tip worked.

Refuge needed more marks and texture.

Finishing makes me edgy and still at the same time. I count stitches, measure space and drift into repetition. My brain goes into non-verbal mode. I look at the endless edge that needs turning and call upon my inner, resolute put-my-head-down-and-do-it mood that stops everything else. At the end my shoulders ache and I am eager to clear away the boards.

Scattered showers needed some rain.

Don't get me wrong, I can be distracted. Answering emails, looking for lunch companions, organizing one last shelf of collected debris provide respite. But finishing is its own reward. It stops a thought and allows it to move on. It shows the weaknesses of a piece and gives me an avenue to pursue the strengths.

The boards are cleared. Space allows new thoughts. Ready or not, here I come.

Free-motion Quilting 101

Many people have asked me how I do my free-motion quilting. And, usually, I say I am no expert. I couldn't do a feather if you paid me to do it. What I can do is respond to my ideas with a threadline that makes sense to me.  I do it sitting down on a domestic machine.

For me, using YLI 40 weight thread, both in my bobbin and on top, helps. But it is no panacea. Tension issues can arise based on how fat the batting, how loose my shoulders are and how dull my needle might be (I switch out my needles at least every two weeks and sometimes more if I am stitching intensively). I don't drop my feed dogs as it gives me a little more resistance that I find helps me in directing the thread. Some people prefer that the dogs are lowered. Let me remind you: it takes hours and hours of practice and a vision for where you want the thread to go.

If you are interested in starting the journey I recommend my friend Nysha Nelson's new video Free-motion Quilting 101 (buy it here). His precise, easy-to-follow instructions will get you bumping along the road with a set of tools that allow for creative exploration. Nysha takes the time to think through the zen of stitching. He allows the casual bump or divot to inform the work rather than detract from it. Nysha sets up simple exercises that won't overwhelm the beginner and will still challenge seasoned stitchers.

Starting the journey takes planning, deep breaths and a certain devil-may-care attitude that allows you to make mistakes along the way.  Listen folks, do we really want each stitch to be so precise that when people walk by they say that it must have been done by a computer? Not me. I like my quirks. Spoiler alert: I will not win blue ribbons at quilt shows because of it. Blue is not my color anyway.  Dips and dingles are part of the charm of moving the fabric around.

I say go for it. Start. Practice. Walk away from those pre-programmed stitch patterns. Dream stitchlines. Nysha will help.

embroidered story

Earlier this year I was going through some family photos and found a wonderful shot of my grandmother and her three sisters. When I scanned it in and added it to my iphoto library the face recognition function identified each of these ladies as "unamed". And the software was right. They were unknown quantities in my family history. My grandmother, Babi, shown here at the far left, emigrated to the US from the Czech Republic in the 20s. Her three sisters stayed in their home country.

So I never knew them. Or named them. In fact, I didn't really know much about my grandmother. She spoke English with difficulty, made the best dumplings and apple strudel this side of Mars and lived in Cicero, a couple blocks from Al Capone's headquarters. I remember walking up to the second floor of her brownstone building with the smell of pork, dumplings and sauerkraut wafting toward us. She had a walk-in closet that smelled of varnished wood and bath powder. And an attic that hosted many a broom-sword fight with my brothers.

I love that these ladies are all wearing white shoes. Their dresses look like they all came from the same store.

I love that these ladies are all wearing white shoes. Their dresses look like they all came from the same store.

She didn't talk about her sisters or her life before America. In fact she didn't talk much at all.

But she did go back occasionally and the family photos show these four women hand in hand through 50 years. They shared stories, played cards and worked on their gardens together. I have one photo where a couple of them are relaxing in a haystack. I wonder about those stories and gardens now. Now that it is too late to get the juicy details. It's clear that they loved each other and the bonds were strong.

I've been working on a piece featuring this image since then as a way to explore embroidery stitches. I'm calling it The Grass was Greener. Spending a little more time than usual with four strong Czech women seems worth it.

12 months

Another year. Faster and faster they zoom by. Still breathless.

Birds_PaulaKovarik

One of my favorite thinkers, Brian Andreas, writes this:

"She asked me when the season of joy was supposed to end
and I said I didn't really think there was an exact date.
So we left the tree up till June that year. "

refuge

The piece I was working on last week transformed before my eyes after several hours of experimental stitching. The cloth is an old circular tablecloth that I dyed with a spray bottle filled with watered down dye. It was going to be an underskirt for my nuclear testing piece that is languishing in the corner of the studio.
I pulled it out of the experiment pile last Friday and folded it in half, then cut it into two wedge pieces so that I could try some stitching ideas I had. The stitching exercise gave me some great textures. It started with random straight lines that went across the piece higgledy piggledy to anchor the cloth.

Then at each new bobbin I changed the color of the thread to add more interest. Eventually a wonky grid emerged. As the grid grew I noticed that at the junctions of the navy blue lines there was a sense of dominance. So I decided to reinforce that by starting a new line of thread (in black) that started at the juncture and traveled on in a wavy line across the piece. Letting the thread ends hang.

As the thread ends started to accumulate I had to figure out how to handle them. Bury them? let them hang? cut them off? Tie them together? I loved the extra texture the thread was giving me but the thread ends were obscuring the texture below so I decided to nail them down with a spiral of stitches and trim them off. It was then that I realized I had created a terrain of sorts with little focus points that could represent targets.

Laying the stitched cloth over the remaining wedge of fabric made me stop in my tracks. Suddenly it all made sense. This piece is about a land ravaged, surrendering to chaos and on the edge. The stitched piece created a shoreline over the second wedge.

The edges are raw. The threads are chaotic.

And now I am hand stitching trails, individuals and groups across the void. Moving them toward the calm and away from the chaos.