When my fellow Frayed Edges and I started talking about the “Letters” challenge (see the posts in July about our Frayed Edges show at the Camden Public Library), I was working on my online lino-cutting class with Dijanne Cevaal (posts here and here and here and here).  I wanted to use writing on the fabric similar to how Deborah does, and also to perhaps make some linoleum blocks or screen prints to print onto the fabric. As I thought about the title for my pieces, I thought about the conversations that happen at the lunch tables at the Getty Museum…

Lunch was lovely! (and I have NO idea why the watermark is now smack in the middle of the photo!)

and realized that words make letters  make conversations.  Then I realized that it wasn’t just about the literal conversations, but about the interplay, or the conversation, between the sky and stunning lines of the architecture, between the museum patrons and the artwork, between the straight and curved lines in the buildings, between the buildings and the equally stunning landscape.   Conversations among the elements and principles of design–line, shape, form, harmony, rhythm, contrast, repetition….  and finally, the conversation between me and the materials:  white cloth,  dyes I used to color the cloth, and  thread.

Here are my three pieces (click to see larger):

I based the center piece on two photos:

This was the main photo; I used the two chairs on the far side of the table, but didn't like the position of the chair close to me

The chair in the foreground became the one on the near side of the table, but I had to account for the change in the location of the sun

And the smaller pieces were based on photographs I took of the buildings.

It is the contrast in straight and curved line, stark stone against the brilliant blue sky, and the shadows cast by the lines of the architecture and the lines of the bistro tables and chairs in the patio that sang to me.  At first I was going to make the center piece based on one of the buildings.  Then I realized I’d really to have a least a snowball’s chance in a very hot place of selling my work, and the chances of selling a quilt of the Getty Museum (located in Los Angeles) while based in Maine was pretty much less than zero.  So I switched gears and focused on those wonderful tables and lines and shadows.

With all the tumult in my life, the lino-cutting and screen printing, which I thought I would use to texture the cream colored cloth for the stone used to face the buildings and pave the courtyard,  just didn’t happen…I ran out of time and just didn’t get to explore the use of letters in the way I had hoped.   But I did write on the quilt to create the shadows on the table and chairs where there are vertical surfaces on the slats.  It is *really* subtle now that it is quilted…I’ll confess even I have a hard time reading the words! But I promise…the words ARE there (maybe it’s the way conversations fade and vanish into dim memory?).

Before I got to the writing, however, I had to make the cloth.

The fabric dyed for the tables and chairs, on my green-painted studio floor

Then I had to mess around with the cloth.  I couldnt decide how to make the shadows.  I tried darkening the light stone cloth.  I tried lightening the dark gray cloth.  I used various methods.  I didn’t like them!  It looked like paint on the paving stones–not shadows.  Somehow I needed more transparency, and any sheer fabrics in my stash were to shiny/cheezy-prom-dress stuff.  So I decided to try doing the shadows with thread at the quilting stage.  Hmmm.

I tried paint, pencil, ink, assorted other painats, bleaches and discharge agens. Nothing quite worked for the picture in my head. Hmmm....

Then there were the table legs…here, the freezer paper patterns for all the table and chair components that were metal.

No, not white spaghetti, but to-be table and chair legs

Then the construction process began.  I decided to try something new.  Having tried it, I can tell you I will NOT do this again!   Usually when I create a fused top, it is an independent thing… I fuse the top on my non-stick sheet, moving around as needed.  This time, I decided to try fusing things to a base, in this case a large piece of embroidery stabilizer.  This stabilizer is (when used under embroidery or applique) water-soluble and turns into little bits of polyester fiber, which helps add loft to the applique or become a bit more batting.  What I didn’t think was that by fusing the fabric to it, I would make it impossible for the stuff to “dissolve”.  Erk.  Not so great.

Here’s the top in progress:

The initial "sketch;" I used my digital projector to project the photos onto the paper, then outlined and created the composition from a couple photos.

The fusing begins. I cut freezer paper patterns for the paving stones, then cut from various light and dark areas of the hand-dyed cloth to get the varied appearance of the terrace.

Placing the chairs and table top.

Checking out the sky fabric. This railing and table scene doesn't really exist... but I so wanted the contrast of stone and sky, and most of the tables are in a courtyard area. So I made up a terrace that has a railing and sky in the distance!

Next, I had to figure out what my made-up railing and side wall would look like.  Straight across was too boring, so I added the angled wall.

This looks like it can work

Finally, the top is done:

The top, done, before it started looking like a brown paper bag, wrinkled!

Next post I’ll talk about the quilting, at least the first part of it.

What FUN!   Michelle G.  from the QuiltArt list and program co-person for the Northern Lights Quilt Guild (Enfield, New Hampshire and environs…near Dartmouth) decided to organize a retreat with teacher for her guild, and I got to be the lucky teacher!   I arrived late Thursday (tho as the crow flies it’s not so far from mid-coast Maine to western New Hampshire, the roads are two-lane twisty turny—up here all roads lead to Boston, if you’re going anywhere else, it takes a lot of slow driving time!).  We had full day classes on Friday (Applique 3 1/2 ways), Saturday (Intro to Machine Quilting), a lecture Friday night (With a dash of color), and half-day class Sunday morning (Fine Finishes, about bindings, but a short version of the class).

Leaving Hope/home, Thursday morning--it has been rainy for weeks in Maine

I’ve never had the chance before to spend that much time with a group, either as a student or as a teacher.  It was so wonderful to get to know the ladies (hey Chris!  Thanks for being my on-site IT help!), share potluck (I gained a couple of pounds…sigh), and just hang out.  Michelle booked the group into the Shaker Museum.  Yes, a MUSEUM that used to be a Shaker colony. Here’s a photo from Route 4 (or was it 4A?):

The Museum is on the right. My room was the two windows on the 3rd floor on the right. They were doing re-roofing, and every so often during class debris would plummet past the windows!

And my room…really large!  I expect at least four if not more persons slept in these rooms.  The furniture was reproduction shaker furniture (there is a Shaker Workshops catalog..I actually made Joshua a long bookcase from their stuff about 14 years ago and it is still wonderful and sturdy) and there were gorgeous and still well-working built-ins in the room:

View in my room. Like most old buildings, the windows were finnicky, but they were large and the room airly and light.

The door on the left (with the white patch of paint on the bottom) is the door from the hallway. Built in next to it are drawers and a cupboard (perhaps for a chamberpot?). The walls are lined with peg boards. There are these cool shelves that can hang from a peg, plus one can lift the chairs off the floor to sweep by perching them on the pegs. The desk, chair, and stool/bench at the foot of the bed are repro pieces. And that small mountain by the door is my teaching stuff--pink boards to pin up samples, suitcases with class samples and stuff to sell, my laptop/projector bag, and the crate has my handouts and teaching binders for the various classes. I swear the schlepping of "stuff" is what will drive me out of teaching (that and air travel).

And here are some quintessentially New England buildings nearby:

Another Shaker building, lumpy (as opposed to flat-finished) stone, large and gorgeous...across the road

Next to the museum...probably a private residence

Next post I’ll share about the classes!

OK…no pictures today (sob, I’m sorry!).  It has been, as usual, chaos, and more chaos than usual!   I am happy to report, however, there are lots of pictures and things to share….I just need to find a few extra hours in the day to process and re-size the photos, then write and blog!

The biggest interrupted by life was going to the International Quilt Festival in Houston, where I demo’d, met friends, ate Mexican (HEAVENLY!), met new friends, had fun, spent some money on fabric and paints, tried a new product that I think is gonna be awesome, and generally got exhausted and happy.

Then there are the teenager and kid and aging mom things that tend to interrupt life.  And filling out insurance claims.  And selling our house (going like a dream) and buying our new house (not so much…I’ll dish AFTER the closing is done and we own the house, but it has been unnecessarily difficult because of one person…more in maybe February or March on that one).  It looks like, at long last, that all WILL come off without a hitch (I’m an optimist), and in late January we’ll be moving to a new house about 4 miles away (same school district).

Then, on the way home from Houston, I was too tired for the level of attention required by the book I had.  So while changing planes in Dallas (which by the way is like a big city shopping mall with airplane gates added!) I went into the Barnes and Noble (complete with Starbucks) and bought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.   Ooops.  That means I have been DEVOURING that book and the two sequels.  I am halfway through the last book, and will surface when done LOL!
Thanks for checking in, and I promise good pictures and fun stuff SOON, Cheers, Sarah

The ruins and ball court as seen from the short trail from the visitors center.

At long last, this is the final of my Arizona posts.  There was so much to see on our family vacation after teaching there…LOTS of fodder for quilts, quilting designs and color inspiration.  My husband loves to research things on the internet, plan vacations, and do all that sort of thing.  (I’m more the sort that would plan about half of it, get the hotel reservations, then rely on serendipity about where to go and what to do.)  Well, while waiting for Paul and the boys to arrive in Flagstaff, *I* got on the internet to see what was there to see (yes, late in the game I know).  I read about the Wupatki ruins, which are in the middle of a fairly large, empty space northwest of Flagstaff. Fortunately, they were near Sunset Crater which Paul wanted to see, so we were able to add this stop, which ended up being one of the highlights of the trip for me.

The view of the ruins as you walk from the visitors center; to the right are a ball court and another outdoor facility probably for games and rituals.

The National Park Service summarizes it this way:

Less than 800 years ago, Wupatki Pueblo was the largest pueblo around. It flourished for a time as a meeting place of different cultures. Yet this was one of the warmest and driest places on the Colorado Plateau, offering little obvious food, water, or comfort. How and why did people live here? The builders of Wupatki and nearby pueblos have moved on, but their legacy remains.

and:

The people who built Wupatki and other pueblos here were ancestors of the Hopi, Zuni, and other puebloan peoples of today. Archeologists recognize different cultural traditions based on differences in pottery styles and architecture. According to these classifications, most of the monument’s sites are called Kayenta Ancestral Puebloan; others are Cohonina, and Sinagua. But these are modern terms.  We don’t know what people called themselves or how different groups related to each other.

The NPS website tells us that there was more water then than today, but it still sounds as though it was a challenging environment.  We were there in late April, and it was already hot and dry:

The landscape as seen from the back side of the ruins: wide open and arid.

It was absolutely fascinating to see there ruins…with only a little bit of modern reconstruction and re-inforcement.  Imagine….these buildings have been there fore EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS!  Europe was in the Dark Ages… Columbus hadn’t “discovered” the North American continent… WOW!

The boys wanted me to take a picture of the lizard:

Then more about the desert creatures:

On the path down there was a petroglyph, a carving of a snake in the red stone.

The buildings fascinated me, along with the shapes and patterns in the stone:

a closer view

Paul & Joshua on the near side...

Look at the quality of the stone cutting, wall construction, shapes... and then think about quilts and design...oooh!

There was even more inspiration in the gardens at the Getty Museum when I visited in spring.  One of the coolest things were the bougainvillea “trees.”   Rebar…the stuff used to reinforce concrete walls, was formed into these tree shapes, then the bougainvillea vine grew up the center and out into this colorful canopy:

Here’s what it looked like underneath:

How utter cool is that?  If we ever have a garden with SUN so I can grow flowers instead of moss, guess what I’m gonna try (albeit on a more modest scale!)?

The flowers were varied and beautiful…couldn’t resist this shot of a rose alongside the path down to the lower part of the lower gardens:

Again, I was lured by the tracery of the branches:

and their shadows; in this next photo, the “braid” pattern in the stonework is repeated in the wood of the bridge over the run-off culvert which was when I was there a very small babbling streamlet:

Here’s a wide-angle view from the gardens looking back up to two of the main exhibit buildings:

At the very bottom there is a maze/knot hedge which “floats” on raised beds inside a circular pond…. spectacular (I bet you’re tired of my gushing about this place, eh?

Even the drain covers had pleasing designs (notice my lovely lime green sneakers, too):

Another of my obsessive “through the trees” shots:

And a final view back up the hill:

Wow…what a place!