Berlin Cathedral

Not exactly recycling...

I've been trying for the last several months to get rid of things that I no longer need, but keep coming across boxes of stuff stowed away in closets and under worktables.  Sometimes it's straight to the grab bag pile, but other times I find work in progress, often things that I started in workshops years ago but never finished.  And often those things aren't half bad, just not exciting enough to have made me work on them once I came home.

I've thought, seriously, that perhaps my next body of work should be using up all those partially pieced expanses.  Because my fine-line piecing is so complicated and labor intensive, there's an awful lot of work invested in those little bits, and I hate to flush it down the drain.  Uncut yardage can always be donated for charity quilts, but who wants to inherit a bunch of little modules of varying shapes and sizes that cry for more intricate piecing to match?

Last month I found a box with leftovers from an experiment in piecing with stripes.  It happened at the Crow Barn in 2007 or 2008.  I was struck by this array of batiks in the fabric store, variations on brown and chartreuse. I was just starting to experiment with striped fabric as the very fine lines separating my small shapes, so the striped fabric was also appealing.  I also bought a chartreuse fabric marker so some of the white dots in the brown-and-white fabric could become green.

I sewed up a bunch of samples and was unimpressed.  I have never been a fan of brown, and though I love chartreuse, there was too much just-kinda-plain-wishy-washy-green in this bunch of fabric.  But I carefully folded and bagged up everything and took it home with me, to languish for a decade.

Last month as I unpacked that box I decided maybe the samples weren't that ugly after all.  And there were a lot of modules already sewed together.  I was in the mood for some therapy sewing, so I started sewing them together.  I even found, in another place, that chartreuse fabric marker, which miraculously still had enough juice in it for a lot of new dots.  I went through my stash of striped fabrics and found several in greens and yellows to use as the fine lines, which added a bit of interest and pep.

Halfway through I realized that I needed to make a quilt for my International Threads challenge, on the theme of "integration," and this could be it.  So I made the piecing fit the IT size, quilted it up, and sent it back to Europe with Uta Lenk, who was visiting.

Not a masterpiece, but finished. Actually, not half bad -- I like the graphic contrast of the light and dark, and the many different variations on the simple three-color palette.  And I love how all that long-ago sewing paid off in the end.  There's plenty more unfinished piecing where that came from, and maybe I'll start working with those UFOs.  I have enough square footage already sewed to occupy me for the rest of my life.

Shaxi Yunnan, China

I think I have found an ideal plein painting place. Shaxi is a small town in the mountains of Yunnan  Province, China. All members of my China Painting trip consider this is a ideal painting location. Very few people know this place. The hotel is luxurious, The place is clean. Very little tourists. The scenery is fantastic. We are having a super time here. Here are some photos I took. I will post my paintings later.

My favorite things 38

In 2013 I had a solo show at the beautiful art gallery at St. Meinrad Archabbey and Seminary, a monastic institution in St. Meinrad IN, an hour or so west of us.  It was founded in the 1850s by Benedictine monks sent from Switzerland to the frontier; their presence generated a large and thriving Catholic community that still exists in southern Indiana.

My husband and I drove over to deliver the quilts, and as we went through the closed gallery we saw that the artwork from the previous show was still there, leaning against walls and stacked near the door.  It was sculpture by Brother Martin Erspamer, a monk at St. Meinrad with an MFA who paints, designs worship spaces, and makes furniture, ceramics and stained glass.

Ken fell in love with a ceramic Jesus and we bought Him and took Him home with us.  It's a ceramic bas relief, about an inch thick and amazingly heavy.  After we got it home I went to hang it on the wall and realized to my dismay that there was no hanging apparatus -- no holes so you could slot the piece over nails in the wall, no wire loop embedded in the clay.  Hmmmm.

Having seen it in the gallery only leaning against a wall, I had no idea how they had displayed it in the show.  I called the gallery and said how am I supposed to hang this?  Well, they really had no idea.

Thank you.

Jesus leaned against the wall in Ken's office for several months until my wonderfully practical son figured out how to put Him securely on the wall.  The solution was two wooden railings, long enough to be screwed into the studs, rabbeted to make lips that keep the ceramic slab from coming loose.

I surrounded Jesus with a bunch of appropriate companion artworks: two medieval handwritten manuscripts, a 16-pointed cross, a wax replica of ivory saints from a cathedral.

I particularly love this piece of art because it was Ken's choice.  For 47 years he has been graciously welcoming art of my choice into our home, with only a few pointed comments about how so few of my paintings have any people in them.  (Yes, I'm a landscape junkie....)  This time he got what he wanted.

Coastal City!