Quilting, Camaraderie, and Critiquing

It's taken me 69 times around the sun to go to my first quilt retreat--something that most other serious quilters do regularly--and that retreat was both warm and fuzzy while also bracing and invigorating.  To my great surprise, and beyond my expectations, the setting turned out to be a rolling, wooded one, with yellow leaves drifting across the landscape and the smell of woodsmoke in the air.  The weekend was wonderful on that basis alone, and you can read about the wonderfulness here:

https://stitching-it-all-together.blogspot.com/2018/11/i-went-on-quilt-retreat-i-found-cedar.html

Besides the magical setting, the retreat offered quilting camaraderie:  New friendships made and older ones renewed and strengthened.   Quilting is by its nature a solitary activity, except maybe in rural areas like Pennsylvania Dutch Country. So it's validating to come together in one room with others who also have a passion for this demanding and rewarding art form. 

There was a lot of clackety clacking in that room when everyone got going!

One high point of the weekend for me--aside from discovering, and walking through, a cedar swamp on the property--was a quilt critique offered by Sandra Sider, a SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) member who has a lot of experience at this.

I offered my quilt-in-progress, Spirit Moving Over the Waters, for a critique.  It's a smaller quilt on top of a larger quilt.  The smaller quilt is a collage of photo transfers of sand ripples:

Spirit Moving over the Waters is intended to be a smaller quilt mounted on a larger one.  This is the smaller quilt.

The larger quilt on which the smaller one will be mounted is made of blue silk, sewn with rippled lines of stitching.  It's been layered with Fabric Magic, so that when steam is applied, the blue silk will shrink and create dramatic raised ripples.

Here are both parts, mounted for critiquing.  That's Sandra Sider there, sharing her thoughts.

That's me, listening and thinking

One suggestion was that the stair-step arrangement of the smaller quilt was jarring.

 
It was suggested to convert it into a diamond shape, which I did, by basting:

I think it looks kind of cool that way, but possibly too stylized.  And when I put it on an angle on the blue silk rectangle, as someone else suggested, it looks like a UFO.

If this smaller quilt (brown) sat on an angle on top of the rectangle of the larger quilt (blue)., it might look like a flying saucer.  It weirds me out a little.  I didn't intend for the Spirit Moving Over the Waters to be an extra-terrestrial.

Then somebody else suggested a more natural edge on the smaller piece, eliminating the troublesome stairstep arrangement, but looking more organic, possibly more like a real shoreline.  I like that idea and will try it, temporarily, on one of the four sides of the diamond.  Just to see.

It was also suggested that my background quilt may not be big enough, as the Fabric Magic, with which it is layered, will shrink 30 percent when steam is applied.  Can this blue rectangle shrink  30 percent and still leave a decent margin around the smaller quilt?  Now I'm thinking about starting all over again with another piece of blue silk.  Gah! Do I know how to have fun or what?

These are things to think about on the road to completion of this quilt.  The feedback is refreshing, and even if I  don't agree with everything, it helps me see my work with new eyes.

A couple of other ladies had their quilts critiqued, including this one, which is to be part of a tribute to women artists that will be hanging soon in the Tolland Library, Tolland, Connecticut.  This particular quilt, one of many this quilter is making, is a tribute to the photographer Vivian Maier.  Do you know about Vivian Maier?  She was a nanny who took candid photos on the streets of New York as she went about the city with her charges.  There was even a film about her:  http://www.vivianmaier.com/film-finding-vivian-maier/.

Here's an 18 x 24 art quilt honoring her, and Sandra Sider giving her comments:

We all liked the way the artist mimicked the scalloped edge of old-time photos, complete with black photo corners, and included a slice of Manhattan streetscape in the background.

Here's another piece, this one, like mine, a work in progress.  The artist constructed this seahorse from dozens of sewn circles, called yo-yos, made from recycled prom dress fabric:

Gorgeous, isn't it?  It's going to be part of a larger seascape, with the sea horse's tail wrapped around a piece of underwater vegetation.

Part of the value of the critique process also enhanced the group dynamic, with all participants going into it as interested and invested art quilters.  Satisfying all around.

I haven't told you about the accommodations yet.  They were monastic and scrupulously clean.  I slept like a rock in that little bed.

It was inconvenient to have the room's one electrical outlet on the opposite side from the bed.  But that's why God invented extension cords.

So it was all good.

And I'm grateful to be able to come home to this:

My yard, late afternoon, Sunday, November 4, 2018

I went on a quilt retreat. I had no idea it would be like this.

Have you ever been on a weekend retreat?  I've been on a few, usually of a religious/spiritual nature.

But never a quilting retreat.  This past weekend was my first one, sponsored by the Connecticut chapter of the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA).

It was a lot of fun in so many ways, and I'm going to tell you about a few of them. But first I have to tell you about the setting, because it blew me away.

This retreat was held at a place called the Incarnation Center, in Ivoryton, Connecticut. I'd heard of the place, but I had no idea it was situated on so many rolling, wooded acres.  The property was laid out in such a way that trees and rocks had been left in place, with the result that each building, surrounded by trees, looked as if it were set into its own natural nook.  I took this photo from a window of the building where the retreat was held.  It gives an idea of the "nookiness" of the place.

And miles of hiking trails.  I had no idea that there were going to be any outdoor activities there.

Wrong!

I went exploring with my buddies Carol and Linda.

 I could not believe that there was a cedar swamp on the property.  This is a big deal to me, because although there are a few cedar swamps in Connecticut, they're not common  by any means.  I like them because they're so eerie and spooky, with shadows, and ferns, and trees growing out of still, mirrorlike water.

See the boardwalk in this photo?  We were walking on that when Linda's phone rang. It was her son, calling from Florida.  When she told him where she was at that moment, walking on a boardwalk through a cedar swamp, with me and Carol, he told her that she was getting 'way too in touch with her inner white girl!

But what a day for a walk.  Everything you could want for a fall day, especially one that dawned so darkly, with wind and driving rain.  By afternoon, the sky had cleared and turned blue, and though the wind stayed brisk, it had the advantage of bringing down cascades of leaves.

Carol catching leaves

November roses.  What a blessing.

There was also a farm on the property, where Carol saw some llamas, and a mile-long lake.

Who knew?

I went to a quilt retreat and found all this.

And that's not even mentioning the warm camaraderie, kindled by a common passion, and the chance to have my work critiqued.  And the food was good!   I'll tell you about all that next time.

Camaraderie

Critique

Explorations Ending Episode: This is what Finally Happened

I spent five and a half months, from the middle of March 2018  to the beginning of August 2018, working on an all-consuming, and to me, high profile, quilt for an exhibit that would hang in the New England Quilt Museum until the end of 2018.  The exhibit was called
 

Explorations:  Journeys in Creativity:  The Quilt Artist's Studio

This exhibit was to be a journey in creativity, taking viewers inside the quilt artist's studio.  For that reason, participants were required to document their creative processes.  I did that in the form of 17 posts on  this blog, all of them captioned "Explorations: Episode (whatever)."  These blog posts provide more information about the making of this quilt than most people would want to read, but they were required, and I'm a pretty detail-oriented gal. For purposes of the exhibit, I printed them all out  and compiled them in a looseleaf. There were also images of my creative process presented at the exhibit, as well as in a book showing the work of all 24 artists in the show. https://www.amazon.com/Explorations-Journeys-Creativity-Inside-Artists/dp/1725938022/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1541018970&sr=1-1&keywords=Explorations+Journeys+in++Creativity#reader_1725938022

I'm writing today because I want to bring closure to this journey.

This last episode begins and ends on Saturday, October 13, 2018.  That was the day of the opening reception for Explorations.  I was one of 12 Explorations artists whose work would debut on that day.  (The other 12 will have an exhibit in early 2019). Lowell is two and a half hours from where I live.  Joe and I left at 7:45 a.m. so that we could  tour some of the National Historic Park exhibits there.  https://www.nps.gov/lowe/index.htm

Lowell is home to a national historic park because of its status as an intentionally planned, and once-thriving, textile center.  In Lowell, early industrialists noticed that the Merrimac River produced such a powerful rush of water that they built textile mills--and housing--there.  First came the mill girls from nearby farms, then all kinds of immigrant families, including French Canadians and Greeks.  It was quite a thriving, vital place.

One group that migrated there were the French Canadians from the Province of Quebec.  My own family were among such immigrants, not to Lowell, but to New Haven and New Britain, for the factory jobs.  One French Canadian family that settled in Lowell was that of Jean Louis Lebris de Kerouac'h, who later became known as Jack Kerouac, one of the fathers of the Beat Generation.

I loved his work when I was in my formative years, not least because Jack Kerouac rode through life on a high-octane wave of sensation.  I was drawn to the sheer force of his creativity and the exuberance of his spontaneity.  

He is said to have written On the Road in one single, 20-day creative burst , on a 137-foot roll of taped-together paper, 

fueled by benzedrine, caffeine, nicotine, and pea soup.  Pea soup.  That cracks me up.  It's Quebecois comfort food.

I read Ann Charters' biography of Jack, https://www.amazon.com/Kerouac-Biography-Ann-Charters-ebook/dp/B00UFWVE08/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1541012985&sr=1-3&keywords=ann+charters,  and that's when he started to lose his glow.  

He was horribly sexist--well, I didn't need to read a biography to see that--and he ended up pretty much a dissolute alcoholic, dying in his fifties of cirrhosis of the liver, while living with his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Still, he was French Canadian, one of the few of us to go on to greatness.  And he was one of the first beats.  His entourage in On the Road 

The 1949 Hudson Commodore is widely considered the car driven in On the Road

 ...was the progenitor of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, 

and their itinerant ad-hoc lifestyle was the progenitor not only of sixties communes, but the Occupy movement and their tents.

Kerouac has been widely revered for his role in American culture.  Here are  Bob Dylan and Alan Ginsberg visiting his grave at Edson Cemetery in Lowell:

 So Lowell thrived in its day, until competition from southern factories turned the mood sour, impelled the mill managers to ask more of their employees, and compelled the employees to strike. It was all futile:  all the mills are gone.  I asked one of the guards at the National Historical Park what economic engine runs the city now.  He said UMass Lowell and the local hospital/health center.

Still, those mill jobs were considered desirable at first, giving farm girls a little independence.  But they had to put up with a lot.  This loom, one of a roomful, makes an ear-splitting racket.  (The park employees who work there now have to wear ear protection.) There was also brown lung, and machine-caused damage to body parts, and sharing beds in crowded boarding houses. 

The roaring looms in Loiwell's Boott Cotton Mill, now part of the Lowell National Historic Park

Lowell's background in textiles is probably one reason the city is home to the New England Quilt Museum, the venue for the show that brought me to Lowell in the first place.

The opening reception for Explorations was on Saturday October 13, at 1 p.m., which gave me and Joe plenty of time (as long as we left the house at 7:45) to look at the Boott Cotton Mill and other exhibits of the National Historic Park.  

Finally I got to see how  my work had been presented.

 Beautifully, it turns out.  The museum created a banner for each of the 12 artists in this half of the show.

Here's a closer look at mine, which includes some of my process photos, as well as a shot of me after I broke my arm last June.  I hope you can read it.

At the reception, four of the quilters gave slide show talks about their process and their work.  I wish I had taken more photos because the reception turned out momentous for me.

I didn't know it was momentous until a woman came up to me after the talks and told me she had bought Sand and Foam.  I was surprised speechless.

I won't say her name here because I don't know how she would feel about it, but I will say that she had just moved to a new home, and was furnishing it, and had the perfect place for Sand and Foam. She made my day, week, and month!  Go New House Lady!

I'm so glad I got that piece appraised, because I doubt I would have put as high a price on it as the appraiser did.  Now Sand and Foam is not only my most high-profile piece and the piece I worked longest/hardest on, it's now also the piece that brought in the highest price to date.  For those reasons, I was kind of walking on air during the rest of the reception, and didn't have the presence of mind to take more photos of the reception itself and the other artists.  I was so surprised.

Another high point was seeing Katie Fearon, who is my daughter Leah's age, at the reception.  Katie (then Katie Tracey) was one of my Brownies at West Hartford's Morley School back in the day. Now she's an advanced practice nurse at a public health clinic in Lowell, and when she learned that I would be nearby for the reception that day, she stopped over to see me.  I hadn't seen her for years, so it was lovely to catch up with her.  She and her husband, who have three children, are living a sustainable existence on a piece of land in nearby New Hampshire, complete with Buff Orpingtons.  Those are a kind of chicken.  
 
I'm posting all this information now because I felt I needed to bring some closure to the project that inspired 17 previous posts.  The only other information that will come my way, as far as I know now, is the book generated by this show.  I'm waiting for mine to come.  Here's what it's going to look like:
https://www.amazon.com/Explorations-Journeys-Creativity-Inside-Artists/dp/1725938022/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1541018970&sr=1-1&keywords=Explorations+Journeys+in++Creativity

Can't wait!

Today in the Garden: Looking for Hope

This is the kind of thing that keeps me sane in these horrifying, violent days:  Gardening.  Well, that and not watching TV.  At all.  Ever. 

I find sanity in gardening because digging and pruning direct my attention in a more peaceful, and hopeful, direction than the dark tunnel of despair that is the news these days.

These are the bulbs of Siberian squills, scilla siberica.  But they look like tiny red onions. 

I'm choosing to shift my focus away from the New York Times and take a longer view.

 Read not the Times.  Read the eternities.

--Henry David Thoreau

I confess I do read the New York Times.  Nevertheless a person needs to pull away from the paper.

By inserting these tiny red onion-lookalikes into the ground, I'm not just looking ahead to, I'm investing in spring.  I'm putting these purple-red spheres into the ground under the row of roses that separates our driveway from our neighbors'.  I want to see these bulbs produce squills.  If they do, they'll look like this.  Eventually, anyway:

When bulbs carpet the ground like this, that process is called naturalizing, or spreading informally and even haphazardly beyond the place of their original planting. Squills do that, as do snowdrops.  Crocus do too, but you have to squirrel-proof the bulbs first. To do that, I buy a spray bottle of Ro-Pel (a rodent repellent that makes anything they want to eat taste awful) and pour the contents into a bucket.  Then I soak the crocus bulbs in them over night. Then I dry them on layers of newspaper.  This works.  Also, the Ro-Pel tastes vile, if you ever get it on your lips by accident.  Bitter.

But I didn't want to deal with squirrel-proofing crocus bulbs this year.  Instead, I bought a bag of 50 Spring Beauty squill bulbs (scilla siberica) from White Flower Farm:

I planted them in five groups of ten under the roses:

The roses aren't doing much right now except displaying their hips:

These hips are growing because I didn't deadhead the roses last summer.  If I had deadheaded all summer --cut off the spent blooms--we would have had more of a display of flowers over a longer period of time.  Instead, I was distracted last summer by the necessity of producing a 30 x 50 piece for a high profile exhibit at the New England Quilt Museum.  Deadheading the roses wasn't real prominent on my radar screen last summer.

Besides, I reasoned, the fruit-eating birds can have the rose hips all winter.  Well, I haven't seen any fruit eaters on those rose hips.  We have families of catbirds that live in the Norway spruces behind our garage, attracted by our grapes and blueberries.  But the catbirds must have migrated, because nobody is getting these rose hips.  Well, at least the hips, growing between two driveways, are providing a jolt of color against the black of the asphalt.

I've never been thrilled by these roses.  They came with the house, so I take care of them.  According to the late Donna Fuss, the former rosarian at the Elizabeth Park Rose Garden, my roses were the product of a breeder named Walsh, and are a variety called either Minnehaha or Lady Gay.  She wasn't sure which.  In either case, they're extinct, she said.  I guess that means that growers no longer produce them commercially.  That's no big whoop.  These roses are small and thorny and a dozen to a thorny stem, about 1 inch across.

This is a photo of the Walsh rose, Minnehaha, which may or may not be the name of the one growing along my driveway. Mine are more of a garish shade of fuchsia.  And you can't pick just one.  You have to pick a whole gnarly, thorny stem of about six or eight.

 

I'm not crazy about them, but I take care of them.

If I had chosen a rose to grow along my driveway, I would have chosen a long-stemmed, cup-shaped, David Austin beauty like this one:

This is a David Austin rose called Teasing Georgia

Nevertheless, I wasn't around in 1927 when this house was built and (presumably) these now-extinct roses were planted.  Instead, I inherited the roses, and I do what I can with what I have.  I'm certainly not going to rip them out.  I prune them hard every spring and feed them every summer.

By planting squills under this row of roses, I'm throwing a line out into the future, knowing that the line will be caught.

And so amen and let it be so.

In Which I Totally Debunk Myself

The other day, I opined that a pool in a tidal marsh looked like a portal to another world.

This spooky-looking pool. with its crisp clear edges and inscrutable depths, was nothing if not mysterious.

Can you tell how deep it is?  I can't.

If it were really a portal to another world, though, how would one enter it?  Surely not head-first, for the injury that may result.  No, instead, if I were to enter this pool, I would first put on a pair of waders, the kind that are held up by suspenders.

Then I would sidle up to the edge and, very gingerly, sit down, put my butt on the edge of the hole, and dangle my legs in the water.

Only then would I learn what my legs are to encounter.  Silt, I expect, velvety soft and yielding.  The question is how far I would sink once I put my weight on  that unstable surface.  It could be an unimaginable depth, in that watery marsh.

If these holes are filled by water from an underground water table, there may be no bottom.

And what if there were quicksand down there?  Does quicksand occur on Cape Cod?

If this truly were a portal to another world,  it would most likely be a portal to death by drowning.

But it's probably not even that.  It's probably just a deep, mucky hole with about three feet of silty mud on the bottom and a few feet of water on the top.

A reality-based counterpoint to my imaginings of another world.

Portals to Another World

These perfect little pools, plentiful in low-lying marshes, reflect the sky with mirrorlike clarity, but in their centers, purple-green layers of silt give way to a darkness of an unknowable depth.  That's why, in the crisply green and even edges of their perimeters, and the dark layers of silt at their centers, these pools take on an air of mystery.

..."Some of these are several feet deep, and have a spooky, antediluvian look," wrote  Whitney Balliett, in Weeset Journal, a piece in the October 3, 1983 issue of The New Yorker.  "Their bottoms are covered with soft, purple-green silt, [the silt itself] two or three feet deep."

Officially, these mysterious pools are salt pannes, water-filled depressions that occur in salt marshes.

Whitney Balliett says that they are also called pud holes, clam pools, or sloughs.  The first two names seem like a they are both a pretty earthy vernacular.   But slough?  That seems like a more technical term.  It would probably take a hydrologist or ecologist or geologist to determine what is a slough and what is a panne.

For now, I'd rather think of them as mysterious and murky.  Primeval.

Would You Eat One of These?

Would you eat one of these? 

I saw a group of these today on Cape Cod,  and  using this book,

...I was able to identify them as an edible, even delicious fungus called the black chanterelle or horn of death, also known as craterellus fallax.   To me, they look more like part of a Halloween costume than an edible fungus.  

Nevertheless, a web site written by Tom Volk of the botany department at the University of Wisconsin https://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/july98.html

 opines that this fungus, craterellux fallax, is

 "...actually a delicious edible mushroom. It's not prized for its flavor or texture, but mainly for its odor, which is very sweet (much like apricots,) and woodsy at the same time. [...] People who eat this mushroom generally like it in spaghetti sauce. I prefer it sautéed in olive oil and butter and eaten directly or in stir-fry. It dries very well and adds a great flavor to eggs cooked in the middle of winter...." 

 Yeah, that sounds great, but I'm not gonna try it.

Here on Cape Cod, with all this rain, it's mushroom season.  I found out today that gathering mushrooms is allowed within the Cape Cod National Seashore, and that in fact it's a very popular activity.  This information came from a guy named Jason, who identified himself as the supervisor of Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife's Southeast Management Area, speaking from an office in Buzzard's Bay.  https://www.mass.gov/locations/masswildlife-southeast-district-office 

Here's a published example stating the popularity of this pastime:  http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20081018/news/810180307

Tomorrow--now that it's stopped raining--we're going to go out and look.  I don't want to eat these things necessarily, I just want to see them and know what they are.  

Like this delightful little number, which I saw today:

 It looks like a product of equine digestion, doesn't it?  Nevertheless, I was able to identify it as pisolithus tinctorius, also known as the dyemaker's puffball, dead man's fist, horse dung fungus, or dog turd fungus. 

 You can't eat this one...aw, shucks!  But according to the Scientific American's blog, you can look inside one of these things and see a work of art:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/wonderful-things-the-hidden-beauty-of-the-horse-dung-fungus/

According to Scientific American, 

"The roundish objects are locuoles, packets of ripening spores that you can see in successive stages of readiness from the bottom (center) of the fungus to the top, where they metamorphose into powdery puffs of cinnamon spores. Pisolithus literally means "pea stone", and I think you can see how it got that name. They are embedded within a black matrix, through which they appear to bubble up like air in an aquarium in a beautiful textural mosaic of color. The black matrix is the stuff that dyers use to color cloth a shade of reddish brown or black, according to Volk, [referring to Tom Volk of the University of Wisconsin, mentioned above]  giving the fungus its common name."

I never would have been tempted to pull up one of them and bisect it lengthwise, as Jennifer Frazer, the author of the Scientific American piece, apparently did.  But now that I've seen how crazy interesting it is on the inside, I might just go do that.

How did I get so interested in fungi?

Last year at this time, as the trailing coattails of Hurricane Jose swept over the Cape, Joe and I went out to the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail, https://www.nps.gov/caco/planyourvisit/atlanticwhitecedar.htm for a walk after all the rain.  We had no idea that we would see the number and variety of fungi that we saw.  I wrote about it here:

http://stitching-it-all-together.blogspot.com/2017/09/mists-and-dark-mirrors.html 

One guy was running through the woods collecting them in a shopping bag.  I asked him how he knew what he was doing and he said he was going to look them up when he got home.  Good luck, I told him.

That experience led me and Joe to a mushroom collecting experience at Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery a few weeks ago.

 https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxvxBjTCLQbzHcwrklcQqtQjbDWW 

Joe Lenoce, a member of the Connecticut Mycological Society http://cvmsfungi.org/index.html  handed out paper lunch bags, inviting us to go forth and gather mushrooms and bring them back to him for identification.  He had a big tome with him, from which he was able to identify everything we brought him.

Did you know that mushrooms are officially fungi, and that the part we see above ground is only the fruiting body?  The fruiting body does its thing and goes back into the earth, but the below ground part of the fungus, called the mycelium, is perennial.  According to the BBC, http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism-in-the-world, there is a mycelium in Oregon that is so big that it covers two square miles and is the largest living thing on earth.

A humongous fungus.

Soon we're going to follow this magical-looking path through Atlantic White Cedar Swamp and see what we can find: