Quilting (and Cracking Up) with Joe the Quilter

It came to pass that Joe Cunningham, aka Joe the Quilter, who in addition to being a professional quilter also travels around the country, lecturing and giving workshops, was invited to speak to one of my quilt groups, the Farmington Valley Quilters.  Joe's a member of that rare species, the male quilter, and he also happens to play a pretty good blues guitar.  Check out his site: http://www.joethequilter.com/
So, because Joe is married to my husband's cousin, Carol Werner LeMaitre, who runs a Pilates studio in San Francisco (check it out, http://sanchezstreetstudios.com/), my husband Joe Rubin and I were thrilled to have Joe the Quilter stay with us for his Connecticut visit, one of many stops in the Northeast on his current three-week tour.  We relished the chance to have some one-on-one with him.
Joe spoke to the Farmington Valley Quilters on the evening of Wednesday, May 15, and though I neglected to take photos of him as he spoke and showed his quilts, I can at least show you a photo of Simsbury's Eno Hall, where we Quilters hold our meetings.

And I can at least tell you a story that Joe told as he told us of his adventures as a quilter.  For example, he told us about using his teenage sons' bluejeans for one project, and finding on one of them, written in Sharpie, "Jules is a slut." 
But my favorite story was about the day when Joe was giving a workshop in which his mother was one of the participants.  The mission of the class was to create some kind of rectilinear patch arrangement.  But Joe's mother was working on a turtle.  When he asked her why, she answered, "Well, you never listened to me."
After cracking up the quilters on Wednesday evening, Joe on Thursday gave a workshop on a project called the Fantasy Four Patch.  It would produce 50 to 56 blocks, each 6-1/2 inches square, which could then be made into...whatever.
I chose these fabrics for my project:

There must have been at least a dozen participants in the class.  Joe explained how we would cut our fabric across the grain into 20 strips of varying widths ranging from 5-1/2 inches down to 1-1/2 inches, then sew the strips together into pairs, cut the pairs into prescribed widths, and put them together in a way that formed 48 to 50, 6-1/2 inch squares.  He serenaded us on guitar while we worked...a perk I've enjoyed in no other quilting workshop.

People in the class seemed to be having fun:

Then it was time for Joe to explain how to put the completed squares together: 

...and whether to do it randomly or according to some sort of pattern.

I still haven't decided about mine.  I finished the blocks at home last evening, after Joe the Quilter drove off to visit friends in Stamford and Brooklyn.  I did pile my squares into groups of sames, though, in case I want to get all anal and come up with some sort of a pattern for them:

The little post-it notes are telling me how many I have of each kind of square.  But I think I'm just going to mix them up and sew them together randomly and await some happy serendipity.

Thanks, Joe the Quilter!

Mountainside Lake, Roadside Shrine

Have you ever seen a place that, on a map, looked so intriguing that you were willing to put some gray matter into figuring out how to get there?  So it was with me once I learned of a 30-foot waterfall in Penwood State Park, and again later when I found that the waterfall flows into a mountainside pond with its own island.

I had to find that mountainside pond, and this is the story of finding it.

 But first I have to show you the roadside shrine that my husband Joe and I found as we were traversing the wooded roads of the Weatogue area of Simsbury, CT, searching for the pond. 

The inscription on the stone says,

This Monument is Erected in Memory of the Fatal wound That Mr. David Russell rec'd at This place By A Cartwheel Running across his body On the 15th day of June 1782 in the 38th Year of his Age.

It was poignant there, on this cool afternoon in early spring, to consider Russell, the June day, and the accident, over 200 years ago, the cartwheel doing its fatal damage.  Someone has planted daffodils at the spot, at the base of a steep wooded hillside ascending the ridge up to its spine in Penwood State Park.

My husband Joe and I wouldn't have found this monument if we hadn't set out to find the mountainside pond.

But before I tell you whether we found the pond, first I have to tell you about how I was obsessed about the waterfall that feeds the pond. 

I learned about the waterfall in Penwood State Park when I read this story by Peter Marteka in the Hartford Courant:

http://articles.courant.com/2008-06-08/news/6waytogo0608.art_1_simsbury-waterfall-cottage-grove-road

If you read the piece, you may notice that Marteka doesn't say where to find the waterfall, which was frustrating, because I certainly wanted to see it.  Joe and I were able to identify its probable location by looking at this Department of Energy and Environmental Protection map of Penwood :

Lucy Brook flows westward out of Lake Louise--a kettle pond named somewhat grandly for the wife of Penwood's prior landowner, industrialist Curtis Veeder--and forms a waterfall as it descends down a wooded ravine before emptying eventually into the Farmington River.  Joe and I located the top of the waterfall on this map and walked to the spot where it plunged and gurgled into a declivity much steeper than anything we wanted to descend.

And that was unfortunate, because look at this map and you can see that the brook reaches a place where it forms a pond almost as big as Lake Louise itself, complete with an island, nestled somewhere on the shoulder of the mountain's west-facing ridge.  Once I saw that woodland pond on the map, I had to see it in person.  But at the top of the plunging ravine, I didn't feel very brave about following the brook to where it emptied into this nameless pond.

But look at the map,  and you can see that maybe there's another way to the pond. Lucy Brook crosses East Weatogue Street.  Could one find the place where the brook crossed the road and then follow the brook up the side of the ridge, ascending from west to east, in search of the pond?

We had to know.

And that was how, as we looked for the place where the brook crossed East Weatogue, we passed the roadside memorial

And lo and behold, near the memorial, there was the brook, about 18 inches wide, bubbling across a downsloping field on its way to the Farmington.  We parked the car and crossed the road to see whether it was possible to follow the stream up the hillside to the lake.

We had to cross a barbed-wire fence to access the brook from the road, but once we got across the wire, we could see that someone  had mowed wide meadow paths through the woods at the base of the mountain's western flank. 

We followed these broad paths along in a generally upward direction across fields like this one:

You can see the wooded crest of the ridge in the background here.  The stream forms a waterfall as it comes down that ridge and then collects in the nameless pond, which as we traversed this field we still hadn't found.  But what a lovely series of open fields on the way to finding or not finding it.

We passed this spooky little vernal pool.  I bet there are a lot of salamanders hatching in there:

Doesn't this shaded, still, mirrorlike little pool look like something out of Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter?  

 We disturbed a very large turkey on its woodsy brink as we approached.

And then, a few yards after that, there it was, the mountainside pond with the little island in the middle of it.  I never thought I'd be able to reach it given the steep pitch of the waterfall that forms it.  Yet here it was, accessible by approaching it from a different direction.

The gray wooded area extending from the middle of the photo over to the edge of the pond is the island.

While walking these paths we saw our first trout lily of the season:

It was a delightful walk through a lovely and easily accessable series of hillside meadows.  I had to find out about it.  Who's been mowing and maintaining those meadow paths?

When I got home I did some research, and though I still don't know who mowed the paths, I did learn that this piece of property is called Tanager Hill and that it was once owned by a family named Ellsworth.  The Simsbury Land Trust would like to buy it so that its present owner won't turn it into housing.  Check it out:

http://www.simsburylandtrust.org/pdf_files/TanagerHillBrochure.pdf

Worth saving!

I'm blown away that after all that imagining about the mountainside pool, there it was, pristine and quiet and easier to find than I'd ever imagined.

My new felting machine

Ladies and gentlemen, I just finished writing a story, for the June 2013 issue of HR Magazine, describing and explaining changes to Mexican labor law that were enacted and took effect in December 2012.  So what?  I mention that story by way of explaining why it took me a while to get around to trying my new felting machine.

My  Baby Lock Embellisher was delivered about a month ago, but until today, it's sat on my work table, challenging me to learn to use it.  Today, now that I finished the article--okay, and overcame the cold feet I sometimes acquire in the presence of a new piece of technology--I broke out the instruction manual, plugged it in, and started.

It looks like a sewing machine, and it has needles like a sewing machine, but it doesn't use thread

Instead, these special barbed needles push through layers of fiber and mesh them together

Today I broke in my new felting machine by working on this felted piece.  I wet-felted it recently, and today, I started using the felting machine to add embellishment.  It's based on the photo below, an image of a path high above the Atlantic Ocean, traversing the dune in a north-south direction between Nauset Light Beach and Marconi Beach within Cape Cod National Seashore. 

I can stop reproducing this image any time I want.  I just don't want.

So, right now, I'm adding tiny squares of silk as leaves, and the barbed needles are meshing them right into the wool roving.

Fun!

Duncaster: The Denouement

I had no idea it was going to be so plush,  the reception for my current art quilt show at
the Duncaster Retirement Community of Bloomfield, CT.

Holy Moly!  It even included a musical combo, not to mention freely-flowing refreshments.

There were a good number of people there. I didn't count, but I'd say there were about 40, including lots of my quilting friends and other dear friends and neighbors.  Thanks, everybody!

I decided to explain the evolution of my art chronologically, starting with the only art form available to women of a certain class and generation:  needlework items for the home.  My grandnother, who had a sixth-grade education, was a great crocheter of tablecloths:, and she started me off by teaching me cross-stitch embroidery.

One of my grandmother's crocheted tablecloths

My grandmother taught me to use this little hand loom called a weavette, and I set out at age 13 to make an afghan

I never made these woven squares into an afghan, as I planned when I made them, but now, 50 years later, I used them as a background for Fall Picnic II, a felted impressionistic view of the picnic area at Connecticut's Penwood State Park in the fall

Eventuallly I took up knitting, and more recently, felting, and now incorporate all three into my work:

Jack O'Lantern Mushrooms: Knitting, felting,embroidery, and quilting

I enjoyed describing the evolution of my art, and the audience listened actively and asked lots of questions.

So, a good time.  Thanks, Duncaster!

And thanks to my buyers. I sold three pieces.

Don't Read This Unless You've Ever Made a Foolish Mistake

A few days ago I was sulking about my fiber art creations not making it past the juror in too many juried shows.

I was feeling the sting of rejection, but you know what?  Some of it was self-inflicted.

Read the sad truth here.

So, the Studio Art Quilt Associates (saqa.com ) was sponsoring an art quilt show called Text Messages. One of the main rules for the show was that all the quilts had to have at least some text on them.  I'd known about this for months and had ideas for three quilts to enter into it.  My ultimate choice: a formula for happiness I'd read in the New York Times a few years ago.  In that issue of the paper, a reader named Harvey Kliman wrote,

The Futile Pursuit Of Happiness

Published: September 21, 2003

As in physics, it may be time to suggest a unifying theory for happiness: Happiness = (Reality x Flexibility) / Expectations.
Harvey Kliman
Woodbridge, Conn.

I was tickled that someone thought to reduce happiness to a formula, and even though I'm not a math person, I could see the sense in its equation.  I liked it so much that I wrote it on a white board and stuck it to the side of my desk with a magnet.

Fast forward 10 years.  What more succinct way than this formula to express the factors that go into happiness?  And isn't succinctness the soul of a text message?

I decided to use that formula for my quilt, and to be on the safe side, I decided to see whether I could find Harvey Kliman and ask him for permission to use it.  Lo and behold, the man turned out to be highly Google-able.  I found him immediately.  He's a professor at Yale University.  I e-mailed him, and told him my situation.  He graciously responded immediately and gave his permission.

I set to work and produced this creation in the style called crazy quilt:

I'd sprinkled happiness-related quotes throughout the piece, such as Thoreau's "Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul."  This is a blurry image of one of those quotations, printed on a strip of fabric.

I toiled away at the piece, embellishing it with couched thread, yo-yos, beads, and whimsical flowers.  It was done 24 hours before the deadline.

As I went through the online submission process, I re-read the size requirements:  Messages must be 24 inches in width.  Length must be a minimum of 24 inches up to a maximum of 60 inches.

I got them reversed.  My piece was exactly 24 inches high, not 24 inches wide.  It was 28 inches wide and 24 inches high.

Oooops.

My own mistake, and an avoidable one.

So, yeah, last week, I was feeling pretty bummed about some of my art quilt failures.  But I was also feeling pretty bummed about this, too.

Self-inflicted.

Feeling rejected

I've been on the receiving end of quite a few rejections these past few months.  By rejections, I mean rejections from juried fiber art shows into which I've entered my fiber art creations.  In a juried show, an entrant's work must make it past one or more jurors in order to hang in the show.  I know that entering juried shows is a crapshoot.

But I think they're shooting me more than my share of crap lately. 

This calendar year alone, for example, my art has been rejected from:
 1.  The national Fiber Directions exhibition in Wichita, Kansas:     http://www.wcfta.com/images/FiberProspectus_2013.pdf

The juror for that show rejected these pieces:

Jack O'Lantern Mushrooms

Serious Sushi

Dog in Eel Grass, which is made with hair from my dogs

2. The Visual Symphony, a musically-inspired art exhibition at the Lazarus Gallery of United Hebrew of New Rochelle:  http://www.newrochellearts.org/calendar_detail.php?cal=1287
The juror for that show rejected this piece, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which just last summer was juried into Art Quilts Lowell 2012, a venue of the Lowell Quilt Festival:

3.  The 102nd annual exhibition of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts http://ctacademy.org/.   

The Connecticut Academy chose my work in 2010 and 2011, but not in 2012 and now 2013.  The juror for that show rejected these pieces:

Two Ways of Looking at Seaside Goldenrod, a piece that won second prize in the West Hartford Art League's 2012 Juried Show

Deconstruction, a look at the destruction wrought by squirrels on the cones of a Norway spruce in my yard

and most lately and most hurtfully:

4.  Local Color, an exhibition sponsored by the Connecticut affiliate of SAQA, the Studio Art Quilt Association, of which I am a member.  This rejection is particularly galling because I'm currently working with a small group of folks to bring this traveling show to the Legislative Office Building, an impressive space in Hartford.

The Local Color jurors for that exhibition rejected these pieces:

The Charter Oak, based on the painting by Frederic Edwin Church.  This one even has an image of the Connecticut State Seal on the back, including the state motto, Qui Transtulit Sustinet.  Does this not qualify as local color?

Seeking a Path, an image of a trail at Connecticut's Penwood State Park.  Is not an image from a state park an example of local color?  To qualify this one as a quilt, in case a juror had a doubt, I added a great deal of free-motion quilting to the back.  Of course, the jurors couldn't see that.  But you can:

Fall Picnic II, an image of the picnic ground at Penwood State Park in the fall.  This one uses woven squares I made at age 13 and never assembled into an afghan.  You can see them, green and brown, behind the felted image of the picnic area. It cracks me up that I still like the same colors at age 63 that I did at age 13. To qualify this one as a quilt, I painted quilt batting and applied it beneath the quilted piece but on top of the woven afghan squares.  No doubt the judges couldn't tell it was quilt batting.  If they could, would it have made a difference?

It's true, ladies and gentlemen, all this rejection.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that I also, during these first few months of 2013, I had not one but two solo shows, had work received into one juried show, and sold a significant piece of art.  

Still, rejection hurts, and I'm sulking.

I'm also regrouping and considering what, if anything, to do next.

At least I can say that I finished my first sock today:

Duncaster

This morning, along with a gang of community residents, I hung an art quilt show in the art gallery of the Duncaster Retirement Community in Bloomfield, CT, --an opportunity I would not have had if I hadn't gone to UConn Health Center for a mammogram.  How's that for the power of preventive medicine?

The day of my mammogram appointment, I saw art on the Health Center's lobby walls, tracked down the woman who arranges the art shows for the facility, and asked whether I could have such a show.  My work was accepted and the show took place in the spring and summer of 2012.  One day during those months, Jackie Mott Brown, a resident of Duncaster, walked into the facility for a medical procedure, saw my art, and asked whether I would have a show at Duncaster.  I said yes, the show was scheduled for March 2013, and today, March 1, 2013, we hung it.

Work waiting to be hung:  L-R:  Serious Sushi, Lunch among the Cabbages, Trail at Cape Cod National Seashore, Trout Brook, Celery Rose

Duncaster resident Paul Sessa, seated at left, has a good eye for arrangement, so he gave advice while a team of Duncaster residens got out their hammers and nails and did the actual hanging.

Here are Judy Wawro, and Carol, whose last name I don't  know, hanging Buddhist Temple I.

Carol and Paul hanging Celery Rose

Here's the Duncaster hanging team:  Gloria, Jackie Mott Brown (who invited me to hang my work there), Paul Sessa, Carol, and Judy Wawro.  Inexplicably not pictured:  Alice Loomis, who worked alongside us.

 Thanks to all of them for the opportunity to meet and hang out this morning...and to show my work in their enviably lovely home!