New Year

Hiya! It's a good thing that one of my New Year's resolutions wasn't to blog regularly.

Actually, I don't "do" New Year's resolutions. Instead, I choose a theme that helps guide my choices and decision making over the course of the year. For example, last year my theme was Mindfulness and my goal was to become mindful of my thoughts, feelings, and actions. This year, my theme is Energy; that is finding a balanced and sustainable source for the physical, mental, emotional, and creative energy I need to achieve my personal goals.

I tend to use my energy like a cheetah--I either run flat out at 150 mph or I sit on the couch. When I'm productive, this tendency is great because I get lots accomplished. But, when I'm in couch mode, things pass me by until I have to get up and run again to get caught up.

While practicing mindfulness over the past year, I became more aware of this tendency and tried to moderate it. It worked for a while. I was particularly productive this past spring and summer, but at a sustainable pace. I got a lot done, without working too hard or resting too much. But, when life got busier in the fall, I fell into my old cheetah habit of doing too much and ended the year as a couch slug.

So, over the course of the year,I want to reestablish old habits and create new ones to enhance my personal energy. I also want to learn to practice moderation, rather than falling into the habit of overdoing or underdoing. To these ends, I have identified four areas of focus:

1. Physical energy: eat fresh, unprocessed foods, exercise regularly, and make sure I get plenty of sleep.
2. Emotional energy: journal daily, make sure to spend time with family and friends.
3. Mental energy: maintain an updated calendar, keep an ongoing task list, establish a notecard system for goals.
4. Creative energy: reorganize studio, build design wall, and finish UFOs.
   

My goals for creative energy are finite (once I have reorganized my studio then that task is done), while my goals for physical, emotional, and mental energy are ongoing (more like habits to establish than tasks to check off a list.) That is intentional. After working on the Early Morning Club last year, I realized that I need to create better physical and mental space for creativity. So my goals here are to clear the decks, so to speak, and then dive into new work. At that point, I will look at my creative goals and determine what habits I want to establish.

I'm excited about this year. My cheetah tendency has been with me a long time. Even my second-grade teacher commented on my report card about my tendency to race through tasks to finish quickly. But the moderation I practiced over the past year taught me that it is possible to change. I'll let you know how it goes.

What I've been up to...

*blows dust off neglected blog*

Wow. Two months since my last post. I knew it had been a while, but I didn't realize it had been that long. I wanted to get a quick update up and continue blogging in the new year.

I know people have been wondering about the Early Morning Club because they've asked me. I made a conscious decision to discontinue it back in November. I began it thinking that it was an open-ended project that I would continue as long as it was a help and not a hindrance. After a few successful weeks, I began looking long-term and committing to it for a year. And for a while, the idea of the long-term commitment was helpful.

I loved the little hour or so I carved out for myself and my art every morning. It was a great way to start the day. Every morning I would wake up, create a little piece, place it in the stack with others, and continue my day. I made great gains in understanding my own preferred aesthetic and in learning new skills.

But as autumn deepened and my life got busier, I began resenting my morning commitment. There were other projects I wanted to work on and other UFOs I wanted to finish, but many weeks the only quilting I had time for were these little stand-alone pieces. The creative ideas my morning pieces inspired were left neglected because I just didn't have the time to work on them.

I actually have the last week of pieces that I never got to blogging about. Although I made them, my heart wasn't in it because I created them in a state of resentment. It was on that Sunday, when I usually would photograph and blog about the previous week's work, that I decided to discontinue the project and just focus on finishing projects.

In the two months since I have been busy with quilting projects for the shop and for myself. I finished designing, piecing, and binding 2008's Block of the Month. I finished two Christmas mystery tablerunners. I finished a large throw for my family room, finished a couple Christmas gifts, designed some fabulous journal covers, and finished several other UFOs. The idea was to finish projects and clear the decks, so to speak, for the New Year.

I've also begun rearranging my studio to make room for a large 7' x 8' permanent design wall. I've never thought that I've needed one because most of my art quilts are small. But my work in the Early Morning Club inspired me to work larger. Reorganizing my studio has lead to a bit of chaos at home. I've moved out large bookcases and a desk, leaving only the essentials: sewing table, cutting table, drawing table, a single bookcase, and fabric storage.

I'm quite excited moving into the New Year. I've whittled down my UFOs to just a few. I've designed a more functional and less cluttered studio. I have a stack of morning pieces to inspire. I'm ready to focus on my work and apply the lessons I've learned.

Early Morning Club, Week Sixteen

Oy! Midweek is becoming the posting time of choice for my pieces. Never fear, I'm still getting up and doing them each morning, but the process of posting them is slipping away.

Monday, October 27th

After last week's scattered series of pieces--some of which inspired me and some of which bored me---I returned to improvisational patchwork. This piece began with a background rectangle in which I made a series of random cuts and then pieced in a variety of brown fabrics (just scraps really, that were hanging around my work table). I like the overall composition of this piece--it feels balanced.

Tuesday, October 28th
Here's another piece that began as a black rectangle randomly cut. Again I was working with balancing negative and positive space. Too often my improvisational pieces have no background, no negative space, which is alright, but I think designs are often more interesting when they balance them both.

Wednesday, October 29th
Here, I wanted to work with focus fabrics. But I think the design is lacking. There is no connection between the various patches--they just feel plunked down and sewn together. This is comparison with Monday's and Tuesday's pieces where the various fabrics interact to create a more cohesive design.

Thursday, October 30th
Another attempt at using a focus fabric (the vintage chickens). I like the red, blue, and gold fabrics I picked to go with it. This is a more successful design, I think, because the patches related to each other and that helps my eye move around the piece.

Friday, October 31st
Boo! A customer gave me a piece of this cute Halloween fabric so of course I had to use it today. (Thanks Chris!) The white, yellow, orange striped pieces are my ode to candy corn. I like this piece. It is simple and makes me happy.

Saturday, November 1st
As I was cleaning my sewing table, I found a pile of scraps arranged like the design in the middle. I thought that was a fortuitous find, so I used it for the center of this piece.

Sunday, November 2nd
Again, another piece that began with a background rectangle that I cut. As I made my cuts, I thought about design and balance. I chose a palette of colors--blues, teals, purples, and yellow--that is not one I typically work with. I tried to balance placement and size of the different colors to create an interesting design. I'm really happy with this one.

General Thoughts

I adore this improvisational patchwork. When I work in this manner, I think I get closest to expressing what is inside me. So that is good to know. It may be time for me to work on a larger improvisational piece outside of my morning work. I can see making a wonderfully cozy bed quilt using these techniques. Making an art wallhanging would be alright, but so often I look at these improvisational pieces and just want to wrap myself up in them.

Early Morning Club, Week Fifteen

Whew! Sick cats (poor Max has irritable bowel syndrome and food allergies), power outages (that, among other things, kept me from watching Liverpool beat Chelsea...grrr), company visits (thanks for visiting Mom and Nana!), all-day workshops (mucho fun but also mucho work), and birthday celebrations (Happy Birthday to me!) have made my life a bit crazy. So here are my pieces from the past week...belatedly.

Monday, October 20th

I wanted a folk art look for this piece, so I cut simple shapes from solid fabrics and applied them to a piece of raw muslin. I added some stems through embroidery. Simple and sweet.

Tuesday, October 21st
I don't know what I expected from this piece when I started. I wanted to use embroidery to echo to motifs in the center pot. It's a sketchy start. I realized as I was working on it that I really need to learn more embroidery stitches so that I have a greater selection to choose from. I do very much like how the gold stitches at the top are consistently inconsistent--it's like my own stitch handwriting.

Wednesday, October 22nd
I have a cording foot for my sewing machine that I have never used and thought that it would be fun to couch a self-striping yarn. So I cut a piece of background and fused it to a piece of Timtex for stability. I threaded my machine with invisible thread and loaded Noro Kureyon yarn through the hole in the cording foot. I then stitch back and forth, roughly covering the background with thread. You can see the suble transition of color from green to purple. I then trimmed the piece up and couched more Kureyon around the outside edges.

As I finished the couching and looked at the piece, I had a vision of a cattail, so I added one. I like how to sway of the cattail matches the lines of the couched thread.

Thursday, October 23rd
Another couched yarn background, this time using Ella Rae's Palermo. When finished, I thought it was a good background for a lotus-like flower. I like how the background appears to glow just behind the lotus.

Friday, October 24th

In addition to my cording foot, I also have a free-motion couching foot that I have never used. This piece is just an experiment to see how it works.

Saturday, October 25th

Not a lot of time today because of company and the workshop, so I quickly sketched this sunflower in plaid out. It is inspired by a sunflower flag hanging in someone's garden that I pass each day on the drive to work. It's cozy and homespun and would make a great applique for a larger snuggle quilt.

Sunday, October 26th
Sometimes I just need to finish something and call it a piece. Today was one of those days. Leftover strip piece. Quick cut leaf. Applique 'em down and call it done.

General Thoughts

The pieces for this week feel scattered to me--without a theme or thread to connect them. And the pieces I have started for Week Sixteen have headed in another direction, albeit one that I have explored before. I am beginning to find this project frustrating in that I come up with ideas that I want to explore in a thoughtful and more considered way, but the conveyor belt of morning after morning keeps moving and I often move with it--away from the pieces I want to explore further.

I want to take some time over the next few weeks and really think about this project and my goals. I feel like I've come up with enough ideas to last me quite a while. I don't want my work to only be about quick morning sketches. I want to be able to work on larger pieces that require more thought and design.

Early Morning Club, Week Fourteen

Sorry for the delay in posting. Busy week of 12-hour work days, leaf raking and yard work, and cleaning and cooking for company. So without further adieu, may I present Week Fourteen!

Monday, October 13th
It's not surprising that my work one week influences the next, but what is surprising is the type of influence it has. Last week's work was fairly involved with lots of stitching and surface elements. So when I faced my work Monday, I wanted to play with the simplicity of line. What would be the minimum stitching I could do and still create an interesting composition?

I created this piece improvisationally--without a preconceived design. I embroidered the blue rectangle and then thought it needed something behind it for depth, so I added the mustard rectangle. I balanced it with the red square.

Tuesday, October 14th
Simplicity again. Here I wanted to explore lines and see how just a few lines and shapes can convey meaning. I wanted to create a calming, quiet fall scene. I like this piece because it matches my intention. I look at it and feel serene.

Wednesday, October 15th
This piece is a really a joke stemming from my undergraduate days as a psychology major. I started this morning thinking of embroidering words like hope, dream, wish, but it felt too cliched. Then I remembered learning about the Stroop effect, which shows that people can read a color word, like red, quicker when it's printed in red ink then when it is printed in blue ink. You can read red faster than you can read red. So consider this a homage to my undergraduate psychology days.

Thursday, October 16th
A few years ago I took a drawing class. I thought that some of my sketches would work well as embroidered pieces. So here you see an embroidered version of a gestural sketch of my cat Max.

Friday, October 17th
Here is a sketch of garlic from my drawing class.

Saturday, October 18th
As I was curling up in bed Friday night, this tag kept tickling me. I ripped it off intending to throw it away in the morning, but then thought it would be amusing to use it as the focus of a piece. This turned out very simple and the red embroidery doesn't stand out in the picture as much as I wanted. (Also, the buttons aren't properly aligned, which annoys me.)

Sunday, October 19th
This little photo transfer has been hanging in my studio for almost a year. So, inspired by the raking facing me on Sunday, I created this quick little composition. There is a lot of apricot in the leaves, so I emphasized it with the frame and the buttons.

General Thoughts

My word, this is becoming challenging. I know I shouldn't whinge too much here, but whew, when life gets hectic it becomes harder and harder to get these pieces done. But that is part of the process.

It was nice to play with simplicity this week. The embroidered versions of my sketches reminded me how much I enjoyed drawing. Once life gets less busy, I'll start drawing again. (I think that will be in April.) There is something completely mesmerizing about learning to look at something and really see it as it is, that is a combination of lines and values, rather than the cartoon-like sketches our brain uses to identify things.

Early Morning Club, Week Thirteen

I started the Early Morning Club as a way to create lots of pieces and meet my crap quota. Each morning I get up and spend 30 minutes or less composing a 6" x 9" finished vertical piece. Here are the pieces from the past week.

Monday, October 6th
I loved the texture that heavy quilting added to last week's pieces, so I decided that would be the theme for the week. I wanted to try yesterday's piece again, but this time using heat-set crayons to color in the squares, rather than using fabric. I then stippled the entire piece, choosing thread colors to match the background fabric and also the crayon colors. I love the color of the background fabric but don't think the crayon colors work that great. I think I wanted--for lack of a better term--a more sophisticated palette, but I have to remember that I was working with crayons (a box of 96 Crayola, to be precise).

Tuesday, October 7th
After playing with crayons yesterday, I was inspired to get out my watercolor pencils and create a colorwash as a background for stitching. I colored the background with the pencils and then used a brush and water to blend the colors together. At this point, the background was fairly wet so I used a hair dryer and then an iron to heat set the colors. (At least I believe they are heat set. I have a piece using these pencils that is at least four years old and I've noticed no color loss.)

Once dry, I had beautiful blending of colors and interesting design lines develop. I used various colors of rayon threads to quilt it by following the design lines. I really like this piece. It is pretty and soothing.

Wednesday, October 8th
As much as I liked yesterday's piece, I wanted the colors to be more intense. So I decided to try another technique that I call fleece and tulle painting. I started this piece the same way--creating a colorwash with watercolor pencils. Then I ironed the background to a piece of fast-to-fuse, which is a heavyweight fusible interfacing. I wanted to have a more stable surface for stitching the fleece and tulle to the piece.

Then I selected colors of fleece (wool roving that has been carded and dyed, but not yet spun into yarn) and tulle and began placing them on the design, following the colors of the colorwash. I stitched them in place using various thread colors. I finished by trimming the piece to size, zigzagging around the edges with a variegated thread, and adding some copper foil.

I love the rich colors of this piece, but I wish I had spent more time on the underlying design.

Thursday, October 9th
Let me just say that I adore this piece. Again, it started as a watercolor pencil colorwash that I heat set and quilted. I used various rayon threads and quilted following the design lines. I like the mostly nuetral palette and I like the texture that developed from the heavy, vaguely parallel lines.

Friday, October 10th
My vision for this piece was to create an underwater feel using the fleece and tulle painting technique. So I started with a colorwashed background and then broke out my boxes of fleece and tulle. At that point I realized that I was going to have a bit of a problem because I didn't have many choices of tulle and fleece in the aqua, teal, blue, purple, and lime colors I wanted to use. Indeed, I didn't have any lime at all, which meant I had to substitute this greener green. So I wasn't able to blend colors as I had envisioned. Ah well, I need to check my supplies next time before starting a project.

Note: the schmutz on the piece is actually an iridescent foil that just didn't want to photograph well for me at all.

Saturday, October 11th
As I have been creating these colorwash backgrounds I noticed that the paper I used to protect my work surface absorbed some of the colors from the pencils and in many cases were prettier and more interesting than the fabric itself. So on Friday, as I created my colorwash background, I placed another fabric piece beneath it. This is the result. The colors are softer and more pastel than I would normally use, but the blending is very nice.

Sunday, October 12th
I wanted to end the week as I began, with crayons and very heavy stitching. I wanted to see if I could get more intense colors with crayons than with watercolor pencils. I can, but it is more difficult to blend them. I quilted this piece to within an inch of it's life, which explains its distortion. I tried to block it to size, but the stitching was too resistant. The stitching alone took 45 minutes.

General Thoughts

I enjoyed playing this week with various art supplies and stitching. After three months of early morning work, I needed a change and to try something new. So I did. More interesting techniques to add to my toolbox.

Early Morning Club, Week Twelve

I started the Early Morning Club as a way to create lots of pieces and meet my crap quota. Each morning I get up and spend 30 minutes or less composing a 6" x 9" finished vertical piece. Here are the pieces from the past week.

Monday, September 29th
Today I wanted to start using my new palette of solids. I made a random strip set and then cut it into three subsections, which I sewed back together slightly offset and separated by brown strips.

Tuesday, September 30th
This is almost the piece I envisioned, but in my mind the blue strips framing the center were much narrower. It reminds me of a mirror, which gives me the idea for a series of abstract self-portraits. Perhaps that is an idea to try in the future.

Wednesday, October 1st
This piece--and pieces like it--are puzzles to solve from initial design until final seam. I like this piece. It feels cheerful and I'd love a larger version of one for my bed. This piece looks like a fragment from a larger quilt.

Thursday, October 2nd
Funnily enough, after three days using my new palette of solids, I found myself longing to use the cozy plaids and homespuns I played with last week. I had a vision of a primitive, folk art fall tree. That was odd for me because generally I am not interested in primitive quilting. So I decided to act on my idea and see how I feel working in that genre. I like this piece because it has the cozy, autumnal feeling that I wanted to create. I don't see myself creating a lot in this style, but I can picture a sweet spring primitive garden using soft plaids and solids.

Friday, October 3rd
I wanted to try some string piecing (sewing random strips to a muslin foundation) so I quickly sketched out some angled lines. I wish that I had been more creative and random with my color selections--the purple, sage, burnt orange combination is repeated on the left a couple times. I see the possibility for mountains here, perhaps if I controlled my color selections so that the darker foreground lead to a softer mountain peak and sky.

Saturday, October 4th
This piece went through three iterations. I started making entrapped fabric, which is scraps and strips fused under a layer of tulle. My plan was to using the entrapped fabric as my piece. But once finished it just felt wrong. I didn't want to use it whole. So I cut it into segments and rearranged them until I found a staggered composition that was appealling. I sewed the segments back together separated by brown sashing. But when I did that I was unhappy with how it appeared grid-like instead of the staggered compostion I had envisioned. So I put it aside and didn't finish it.

Then inspiration struck and I realized that I could cut it apart and rearrange it again. I decided to fuse the pieces to a solid background that I would quilt heavily. I'm not in love with this piece, but I like the solution. And the heavy quilting is inspirational to me. I love free-motion quilting, but I rarely incorporate it into my pieces. But the texture quilting adds is so compelling.

Sunday, October 5th
After a week of hit-and-miss designs, I decided to return to simplicity on Sunday. I was inspired by the texture from Saturday's piece so I embroidered six shapes to a brown background and then heavily quilting the background. I like the color palette, which is a slight variation on a rainbow. The brown sets it off well.

General Thoughts

I can't wait to turn the clocks back. I wake naturally with the sun, which means the later sunrises are throwing my morning routine off, making me rush through each morning's piece. This week was uneven. I didn't feel particularly inspired, but I soldiered through regardless. I am excited by the texture I started adding with free-motion quilting.

Beyond that, it's another week done. I expect that the ebb and flow of my inspiration and motivation is natural and to be expected. What is interesting to me is that I am learning that my mood doesn't matter. I can create something everyday whether I feel like it or not. Feelings don't matter, doing does.