After following the dazzling techniques Pat Pauly taught me for printing fabrics and creating strong compositions with them, I feel pretty proud of my latest art quilt.
This piece started with a fabric that featured yellow-gold leopard spots on a white background. In Pat’s Glorious Prints class, I added visual texture by stenciling, squeegeeing, and “drawing” big, black arcs with a squeeze bottle. For maximum kickiness, I brought in black fabrics stamped by the Textile Workshop and discharged by Lisa Reber of Dippy Dyes, plus graphic black & white commercial fabrics–a large checkerboard and little polka dots. One of my husband’s worn-out pin-stripe shirts and a batik gave me more contrasts in pattern and scale. Here, I’ve done a bunch of cutting and piecing, improv-style.
I composed with units in various ways, and asked my Facebook friends to help me decide on the strongest composition.
A was the clear winner, especially since that version got the votes of not only Pat Pauly, but also Elizabeth Busch–another brilliant art quilter. Rather than voting, my buddy in Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) for Pennsylvania, Camille Romig, wrote “Jazz” in the comments, naming the piece perfectly for me.
The composition went through some further finicky piecing as it came off the design wall…
…and then I rotated it, added a border along the top, and carved out a couple of chunks from the bottom. My feeling is, since my art quilts aren’t going on stretcher strips or into a frame, they are free to diverge from the rectangle.
For the quilting, I reunited with my HQ midarm, which hadn’t gotten much use in way too long a time. Was quick and so much fun. Here’s the finished art quilt:
Jazz, by Eleanor Levie
It’s actually one of the very few art quilts I’ve made that I don’t wish to part with! And I cannot wait to use this method again of composing with a combo of my hand-printed fabrics and bold commercial fabrics.
Let me introduce you to my most recent art partner, Meryline Ingaso, who lives in Kangemi, an under-served neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya. She writes:
Hi! I was born 17/12/1996. I am an orphan, a mother of two kids, all girls. The first, 6, is in baby class. The second, 3, is not yet in school. I earn a living as a mentor. I do voluntary work to empower girls on how to protect themselves in this pandemic. There have been a lot of challenges e.g. buying food and paying rent. But I get a little support from washing cloth to people. That’s how I survive.
Beautiful, inside and out. Hard-working. Creative. Caring. Nurturing. Meriline has joined with forty other “Sister Artists” who under the auspices of the Advocacy Project and during the height of the pandemic, produced beautiful embroidered blocks depicting Kenyan wildlife.
I answered the call to choose a block and incorporate it in an art quilt, and Meriline’s “Crested Cranes” called out to me. The finished piece will be auctioned off to fund services that benefit Meriline and others like her. Maybe you’ll become the proud owner for the completed piece, or another featuring a Sister Artist and a quilter?
By the way, two years ago, I participated in a similar project celebrating the creativity, in embroidery, of young women in Mali. That time, security issues surrounding these women who were victims of sexual violence prevented me from knowing the artist’s name. Nevertheless, I was proud to support the cause and create a Mali Medallion around the charming village scene. Read my story about the making of that art quilt here.
This time, the plan is for a Skinny Quilt. If you know my books, Skinny Quilts & Table Runners and Skinny Quilts & Table Runners II, you’ll be aware that this long narrow slice is my favorite way to compose. And that I love to weave with a variety of textiles. I decided to elaborate on the cranes pictorial with a new, l-o-n-g weaving easily composed on my Big Board. And on top, I added a little UFO — a landscape I threw together long ago in Sue Benner’s exciting Composition Quartet class. My goal is to integrate the three sections so they are cohesive and hopefully flow together.
In addition to my usual weft of commercial fabric and assorted ribbons, I’ve included trimmings from my recent art quilt made with fabric I printed or discharged, and strips cut from upholstery samples. Always keeping Meryline’s charming pictorial close at hand, I tried to bring out the colors she used.
Standing upright, their branches like outstretched arms, certain trees certainly take on the spirit of a human being. Quilt artist Libby Cerullo has a really lovely series of trees in diaphanous frocks. Here’s how Libby works–and I trust she will correct me if I’ve got this wrong: A photo she has taken gets transferred to fabric, using a service like Spoonflower. A following stage involves dressing her subject with appliques of chiffon or organdy with a translucence that allows the photo to show through. Makes me want to dance until dawn!
On a recent trip to Denmark this winter, my family and I got many chances to commune with the trees. Covid lockdown prevented us from going to museums or shops, so hikes to various woods and sculpture parks proved to be the cure for our cabin fever. In the cold, damp environs, many of the trees wore skirts of moss. Such wearable art gave the man-made art some stiff competition:
Makes me want to sew and wear a green velvet midi.
Other trees were gnarled and burly, like an old village elder:
Many a tree sported facial features:
These trees resemble a couple who have grown apart…or two people with different outlooks on life:
Human relationships, as expressed with trees, brings us back to two more exquisite works by Libby Cerullo:
“Mother/Daughter,” by Libby Cerullo“The Lovers,” by Libby Cerullo
How have you engaged with trees as if they were people?
Because we have a son and daughter-in-law and baby grandson living in Aarhus, Denmark has graciously allowed us to visit — with all due process of Covid testing, natch. Denmark is on lockdown, with only grocery stores and pharmacies open. Even so, walks in icy, mostly gray January and February weather yield lots of cool sights re: architecture, design, and art. And plenty of inspiration for quilting, I daresay.
The above mural continues, as shown below. It occupies the wall of a driveway leading to a parking lot.
Believe it or not, the “gallery” below takes up two facing walls of another passageway to a parking lot:
Murals aren’t nearly as numerous as in hometown Philly — dubbed the City of Murals with a Mural Arts Program that has made it the largest public arts program in the United States. Still, art finds a home in Aarhus on many a vertical space, no matter how odd-shaped, narrow or wide it may be:
The next photo depicts tagging more than street art, and comes with a message of protest:
Look down to find pure pattern:
Then, look up: specifically, at the ceiling under the library. I hear that Penn Station in NYC adopted this upside down design idea for a ceiling as well. Has anyone seen it?
In the windows of what I take to be an art school, I gather the instructors have presented some pretty cool assignments.
Finally, at least for now, our son’s latest art project in his spare time: 3-d printed photos. The thinnest areas allow the most light to penetrate, the thickest are almost opaque. Result, a really detailed image. Of the grandson, of course. Which we’ll hang in a window when we get home.
If anything good has come out of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s been that 1–forced to stay home means more time for quilting, and 2– a good kind of pressure to share online. Just in time for Mother’s Day weekend, let me present some of my favorite, funniest quilts about Mothers…
First, Psycho Moms Bake a Cake, by Katherine L. McKearn and Diane Muse. A real oven mitt and apron give you an idea of scale. The fire in the untended oven reveals the truth: that getting together and schmoozing with a chum is more important than successful productivity.
Psycho Moms Bake a Cake, by Katherine L. McKearn and Diane Muse
This quilt by Amy Stewart Winsor reads, If you want to see me, come over anytime. If you want to see my house, Make an Appointment! (Cuz God knows I’ve got lots and lots of cleaning to do.)
Make An Appointment, by Amy Stewart Winsor
Mrs. Noah, by Pamela Allen honors the woman who obviously did all the cooking and cleaning aboard the ark…yet in a literary injustice of biblical proportions, she doesn’t even get her name mentioned.
Mrs. Noah, by Pamela Allen
Most quilters could easily identify their own mothers — and more horrifyingly, themselves — within Jean Ray Laury’s famous quilt, Listen to Your Mother. Each of its Nine-Patch silk screened panels contains a cartoon bubble with the text of a common maternal maxim, such as, “Change that underwear! You might get hit by a car!” or, “Put that down! You don’t know where it’s been!”Who doesn’t hear her own mother’s voice?
Listen to Your Mother, by Jean Ray Laury
Inspired by Jean’s iconic piece, I borrowed the image of Whistler’s Mother, and directed her criticisms to quilters, to wit: “It takes how much guilt ‘til you finish that quilt?” “What about the label?” “The baby is due any day! How are you going to get that thing done in time?” “Pull up that bobbin thread! You’ve got little nests all over the backing.” “Better needle-turn; you don’t know what fusible web will do after 50 years.” “What?! You didn’t preshrink before lumping that new fabric in with the others?” “Get those new rotary blades while your coupon is still good.” “If you’re not going to quilt, then you should be cleaning your house.” “You’re going to use that for the binding?” “Move that needle position back to center! You’re going to break that needle!” “Check your tension! Loosen up! Go faster! Keep to an even pace! Relax! No pressure!”
All rules I frequently break!
For more inspiration and entertainment around Motherhood, see some charming story-quilts by Bodil Gardner in my blog post here. And my Tribute to Moms from way back in 2012 here.
Happy Mother’s Day, to everyone who is a mother, grandmother (me, finally!) godmother, aunt, mentor, teacher, nurse, nanny, child-care provider, or girlfriend…of any gender. That is to say, anyone who mothers others! We need you!
Gee’s Bend is a small, poor, black community in Alabama. It’s only 44 miles west of Selma — where in 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr. led protest marches to Montgomery, Alabama. But surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River, Gees Bend is isolated, a far cry from modern-day consumerism and attitudes. Most of the 700+ folks who live there are descended from slaves. After the departure of Joseph Gee and the dispersal of his slaves, the Pettway family ran the plantation. In order to stay on this land, many of them had to take on the Pettway surname. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers kept workers in poverty. Planting and picking cotton, peas, and peanuts, and tending hogs and cows provided long, hard days of bare subsistence farming. But poor by any standards, generations of Gees Bend women have created a rich legacy of quilt masterpieces. And these have garnered attention and accolades from the art world.
Now, when I worked on needlework and craft magazines in NYC in the 1980s, I studied pictures of American quilts made by European descendants, in order to write directions for recreating them. Typically, these quilts featured hundreds of patches — like the quilt at the top of this post, but each patch absolutely identical. Precise and ultra-fine handiwork, heirloom patterns, fabrics from England and France. Such fancy-work could only be made by women living in the lap of luxury, with plenty of time and money. Even the country quilts were mostly made using fabrics off the bolt rather than scraps and repurposed clothing.
So I admit, it took me a while to appreciate the wonky, asymmetrical compositions with edges out-of-square of the Gees Bend quilts. These women received only a few weeks of education a year — squeezed in after planting and again after the harvest. Quiltmaking, too, was fit in only after work and chores were seen to. They used what they had: denim and wool work clothing too far gone to mend, feedsack bags, and corduroy remnants when Sears was paying for pillow-making. Especially admirable in an age when reusing, recycling, and repurposing has gained moral importance. Yet these quilts, meant for the beds where sleeping family members needed warmth, now grace the same museum walls that show minimalist abstract art by Josef Albers, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, and Sean Scully.
Roman Stripes (I’d call it Rail Fence; the maker calls it Crazy Quilt), Loretta Pettway, 1970
From an interview with Loretta Pettway: “I didn’t like to sew. Didn’t want to do it. I had a handicapped brother and I had to struggle. I had a lot of work to do. Feed hogs, work in the field, take care of my handicapped brother. Had to go to the field. Had to walk about fifty miles in the field every day. Get home too tired to do no sewing. My grandmama, Prissy Pettway, told me, ‘You better make quilts. You going to need them.’ I said, ‘I ain’t going to need no quilts.’ But when I got me a house, a raggly old house, then I needed them to keep warm. We only had heat in the living room, and when you go out of that room you need cover. I had to get up about four, five o’clock, and get coal. Make a fire. Them quilts done keep you warm.”
String-Pieced Blocks and Bars, Sue Willie Seltzer, using cotton, denim, and flannel, around 1965Blocks and Strips Work-Clothes Quilt, Andrea Williams, 1991This detail shows the seamed together fabric from well-worn blue jeans, a pale color everywhere except where a pocket once kept the dark denim from fading.
Like all the women in the show–and for that matter, in Gees Bend, Irene Williams has lots of quiltmaking relatives and neighbors. However this particular woman seems to have stitched to her own aesthetic. Since the age of 17, quiltmaking has been for her a solitary activity, a relief from working the cotton fields and raising six children. She explains, “When I got married, I started making quilts. I just put stuff together.” Among that “stuff” were basketball jerseys she pieced into a quilt top. Art critics delight in the whimsical way this work recalls maps with housing plots and numbers — or reflects a sly sense of humor.
Strips, Irene Williams, 1960s
Irene Williams also created the piece below. Here, too, she used what she had, which obviously included a good deal of polyester knit. Using such a fabric means you get lots of stretching — distorted seams, puffy texture, and wavy edges. But you also get intense color, an iconoclastic shape, and a bold, attention-grabbing graphic that made this the image used to represent the entire Souls Grown Deep exhibit for the Philadelphia Museum of Art promotional materials.
Blocks and Strips, Irene Williams, 2003
I recently led a group on an informal tour through the exhibit, sharing what I knew and listening to their reactions. Each person chose her favorite, and this one was selected by several. My charges also asked how fame had affected their lives. This article explains it best. Many of the quilts originally sold for $75 when the maker thought that was far too much. Or, later, for hundreds of dollars when the value was listed in the thousands. Some quiltmakers cite the satisfactions of recognition and newly installed indoor plumbing, the occasional air conditioner or heater. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation engaged the Artists’ Rights Society to secure for each maker her due: intellectual property rights; copyright fees that are owed for use of the images, remuneration for the work of deceased artists finding it’s way to the rightful next-of-kin. Some of the Gees Benders are grateful, others have engaged in long, drawn out lawsuits in which money is consumed by the plaintiff’s lawyers.
Quilts have put Gees Bend on the map. But it is still a small, poor community.
Last summer, I took a collage class at QSDS–Quilt & Surface Design–from Deborah Fell.
Standing alongside my design wall in Deborah Fell’s class.
See that sprawling assemblage to the left of my hip? It started as a small abstract composition…abstraction being something I aspire to. But I can’t help myself; my work invariably calls to mind some object or scene, and I’m off to flesh out figurative or landscape designs.
This held true here: I saw buildings and began to recreate my current hometown of Philadelphia. I had a few recognizable buildings, some vague representations, the Schuylkill River on the left, the Delaware River on the right. It came together in stages, and I placed sturdy pieces of canvas or upholstery weight fabric under the expanding areas as foundations for a large, odd-shaped wall hanging.
City between two rivers…
A few months later, I read about a SAQA (Studio Art Quilters Association) call for entry: Forced to Flee. The theme resonated. As a volunteer, I’ve long advocated for compassionate immigration reform and protested against Muslim bans, the Wall, family separations, and inhumane detention centers. I decided to finish my cityscape to express pride that Philadelphia is one among hundreds of sanctuary cities in the U.S. My “city of brotherly love” (sisterly love is implied!) accepts its moral obligation to protect immigrants and refugees. City leaders and activists alike fight against detentions, deportations, family separations, and discrimination. We rise to welcome the stranger, give shelter, secure safe haven for those “forced to flee.”
Knowing the caliber of work submitted to a SAQA show, I thought I’d have less competition for a 3-D piece, and be more likely to get in. So, I traced around an oval trashcan for a pattern — cuz what better to give me elegance than a trashcan? I continued to build my city over thick Pel-tex stabilizer so the vessel would be an upstanding example. Alternately, I worked on the inside surface, using a vintage quilt fragment for its soft, comforting associations, plus emergency mylar thermal blankets of the sort that are given to detainees. I cannot express how much struggling, how much cursing, how many broken needles went into assembling this beast. It stands 28” high. To ensure steadiness without adding weights, I fashioned a spiral pathway with signs and symbols of concern and welcome: bi-lingual expressions, caution tape, keys and safety pins and zippers.
There were further frustrations as I hand-stitched the elements together. Then I had to photograph it to try and meet the demands for pixels, clarity, background, and appropriate depth of field. I managed to submit my information and images 45 minutes before the deadline.
I didn’t get in to the Forced to Flee show. I get it. Jurors receive hundreds of submissions and usually curate down to under 50 — for a cohesive, high-quality exhibit at venues with limited spaces. Perhaps my piece was too discombobulated and did not appeal to the judge. Perhaps there were no other 3-D pieces and this would have been odd man out. And perhaps my photos weren’t up to what SAQA demands for not only the judging, but also the catalog.
Rejection gave me several advantages: I really wasn’t satisfied with the piece, and was now free to make significant changes. Another SAQA call for entry beckoned: 3-D expressions. I had time to revise and polish the composition from all sides and the inside. New construction and embellishment strengthened the overall aesthetic and referenced more Philly iconography. I added more vintage mini-blocks and doilies to the inside, and crocheted an oval rug to cozy up the “inner sanctum.” I want those who see the piece to take time to walk around it and peer inside. And yeah, I’m tempted to throw in little stuffed heart-shaped pillows, additional keys, and poems of welcome…but mostly because I don’t know when to stop. What do you think? More secrets and treasures? Or enough already?!?
Happier with the piece, I took the time to hire an expert photographer — Gary Grissom — and set it up in a better-lit niche. Now I felt more confident submitting it to the other show.
More time and attention to detail and good workmanship, along with professional shots, did the trick. I got in!
Icing on this cake is the impressive decision-maker, an art professor and gallery director who is one of the finest modern fiber curators in the world. (Oh, and he’s a Philadelphian.!) SAQA’s website states, “The wide variety of pieces selected by juror Bruce Hoffman include vessels, wearables, wall-pieces, and sculptural artworks. This cutting-edge exhibition shows how textile art can expand both into the third dimension and into the future.”
This exhibition, 3-D Expression, will premiere at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan in September 2019. I am angling to see while it’s there. Aside from the honor of having my work included, I would be thrilled to study all the other works in the only way they can truly be appreciated: by walking around them and checking them out from every angle.
Meanwhile, I’m back to making essentially 2-D art quilts for a while. Oh, and shopping for a workhorse of a sewing machine that may allow for thick, sculptural work in the months to come.
Back home in the bosom of my family for the Passover seder, I took the opportunity to see an art quilt exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art that’s been getting a lot of great press, which it richly deserves. It’s comprised of new work by Stephen Towns, trained as a painter, self-taught to quilt — for this body of work in particular. BTW, you can see it in the cloth if you get to the BMA before Sept. 2.
The piece above and below, titled “Birth of a Nation,” is the star of the show. A black mammy, tenderly suckling a white baby against the backdrop of an American flag of 1777, puts slavery and white supremacy in tension with each other. A coffee and tea-dyed dress, patched with toile prints and barely clearing the bed of dirt below the quilt evokes the humble status of the Madonna-like figure.
Surrounding this installation are seven smaller story quilts; whether portrait or landscape orientation, each is about a yard along its longest edges. These works depict key moments in the life of Nat Turner’s life and the rebellion he led against slavery in 1831. My favorite one featured another mother and child: Under the cover of night, when plantation work was done, Nat Turner’s mother teaches her young son to read, or schools him in gospel. The composition proves Mr. Towns’ incomparable talent as a portrait painter…just as the materials and techniques give away his seat-of-the-pants sewing and quilting skills. Fabrics are from an old stash (perhaps his mother’s?): those of us sewing and quilting in the ’60s, and ’70s will recognize the calicos, ginghams, and synthetics, and that proud feeling when you think to add translucent tulle and sparkly beads to skies, buttons to clothing.
Titled, “Special Child,” this piece is the first in the cycle, which all show what how the facts known about Nat Turner coalesced into myth and icon: slave, keenly intelligent child, preacher man, leader of an effective slave rebellion. It’s refreshing to have the story, told so often by whites such as William Styron (The Confessions of Nat Turner), reclaimed by an African-American living and working in the Black Lives Matter era.
Stephen Towns assesses his “framed” portraits of Nat Turner and his wife, Cherry Turner, which accompany the exhibit.
Stars, moons, or suns (plus the occasional butterfly) play a role in each work of art, connecting people with the universe, and with the spirit as creator. Celestial bodies stand in as haloes, symbolizing sainthood or martyrdom. And is the red scroll below an ecclesiastical stole, or a symbol of the bloodshed already committed and also up ahead?
In each work of another series of paintings, the halo is a blue moon behind an enslaved rebel leader who has been caught. A hangman’s noose and a fist figure prominently. Click here to read what happened with these intensely powerful, provocative portraits.
On a lighter note, quilters viewing this blog post may want to look back at the story quilts and note the minimal free-motion quilting in thread that matches the fabrics flattens the backgrounds, so they recede. In contrast, large stitches that most seasoned quilters would decry as “toe-hookers” become strong design lines in Towns’s narratives. Not only do they define important features, they add naivete, the mark of the hand.
As an art-lover, I have so much respect for Towns’s cohesive works within series, for his conceptual underpinnings and iconography–sun, moon, stars, haloes, butterflies, and the gold-leaf that recalls the elaborate frames on medieval religious art (as in the “framing” on Nat and Cherry Turner’s likenesses). The piece below is from yet another series. Each work depicts a child who experienced slavery, and each work bears a title from the Lord’s Prayer.
Riveting. Heart-rending.
And yet one detail resonates most for me as a quilter. Can you guess what that is?
In honor of Mother Earth, I just added a new piece to my ReUSE series.
I don’t know how long I’ve been stalking the idea of a Tea Roses piece, that is, roses made out of tea bag envelopes. Last year, I took lots and lots of pictures at a rose garden in Florida. Then, meaning to get rid of one horrid picture of me, I mistakenly deleted all my shots. That’ll teach me to put on my glasses when reviewing my shots!
Starting again, I found a photo of a yellow rose that I cannot now find–I think it is one of Sammie Moshenberg’s lovely images. I traced the picture, numbered the pieces, and prepared to do a cut and glue sort of applique with tea bag envelopes.
The “kit” of materials I assembled sat by the TV for months. Turned out this method that was waaaay too complicated for me. I’m more of a slap-dash kind of quilter.
Last week, an online quilt class taught by the extraordinary Pamela Allen of Canada featured an assignment for a fantasy fabric garden. That was the impetus to go back to my Tea Rose project once again, and substitute my trash stash for fabric prints to dash off some flowers. Following the lead of my sister students, I cut petals freehand, and worked in rounds. In this series, I simply adhere shapes with glue-stick over patchwork. White bags that once held ground coffee gave me bigger pieces and a quiet background, too. I cultivated plots of assorted tea bag and coffee packaging to sort of fence in my garden.
Due to the foil-lined packaging that holds a crease, I was able to fold back some of the petals like a real flower. But even with the silver backing peeking up, the flower heads looked too dense, and the petals weren’t readable as separate shapes.
Back to the drawing board, I tried out an open design, like an arts & crafts style stencil or stained glass design.
Better! Then on to layering over woolfelt (wool and rayon blend), preshrunk for a thick, sherpa-like quality. Quick quilting and trimming with passementerie and ball fringe gets everything sown so I can reap the rewards before Earth Day ends!
My garden is a bit messy, and even though the bottom edge is angled, the whole thing should still hang straight and true. Not the case, not even close. But as they say, DONE is better than perfect.
Hope everything’s coming up roses for you! And that you ReUSE, RECYCLE, and REPURPOSE trash or found objects to REDUCE your carbon footprint. Oh, and RECONSIDER the many ways of creating quilted art!
Announcing the winners of my purple comment challenge! I’ve listed them below, and replied to them individually below. Please send me your addresses (so I can get your prizes off in the mail) via email:
elevie@comcast.net
Honestly, I was struck by the winning qualities of every single comment. You showed me that people are reading my blog. And since that “literary form”– if you wanna call it that–is a one-way street, you made it fun to check my inbox all week long for your points of view.
On to the prize winners:
For inspiring me with her courage in the face of adversity and her rhapsody for the Purple…er, Blue Ridge Mountains, the big stash of purple fabrics goes to….drumroll, please…. Robin. BTW, because you made yourself absolutely unforgettable, I will be throwing in a complimentary copy of my book Unforgettable Tote Bags.
For tickling my fancy…er, my funnybone, a copy of my Quilt Blocks Go Wild! plus one purple fat quarter goes to: LeeAnna Paylor. And she didn’t even mention her quilt inspired by the famous poem, “When I am old I shall wear purple!”
For Sue Levin, who is so passionate about purple she uses it for walls and ceilings of her home, as well as in her quilts, a copy of my Skinny Quilts & Table Runners II book….plus a purple fat quarter.
For Kristin Freeman, who paints landscapes with her words, a copy of Accidental Landscapes, by the amazing Karen Eckmeier, and edited by yours truly, plus one fat quarter (with purple and earth tones!).
