Huppah huppah hurray!

Yesterday I finished the wedding huppah I've been working on for the past several months.  Today I took it to Temple Habonim, Barrington, RI, where my daughter Julia  will marry Marc Katz on 10/10/10.

More tales from a huppah: Ripping it out and starting over

Today I finished sewing on the quilt binding.

Then I ripped out all yesterday's work, hours and hours' worth.

It was frustrating, but it had to be done.  The work was too messy.  True, I was the only person who would ever notice.  But workmanship has become a bit of a sensitive point with me since my first quilt ever was accepted to a juried show this past spring.  After the show, the quilt was returned to me with a pointed statement about poor workmanship from one of the judges.  Until then, I'd known some of the work needed improvement, but that judge's acknowledgment of it carried a sting that I still feel.

After using a seam ripper to remove yesterday's wobbly uneven stitches, I was fortunate to have my neighbor Edith, an experienced hand quilter, swing by and show me how to hand quilt in the places where my sloppy free-motion quilting had been.  So here I am, baby, hand quilting, thimble and all:

Compared to the stitching Edith demonstrated, my stitches are big and sloppy.  But that's okay.  Hafta start somewhere.

I like to listen to a book on tape while I work.  Right now I'm listening to Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

Quilting the Huppah: I Faced my Fear, and the Result was a Mess

So what if free motion quilting is one of my fears?  I deserve credit for facing it.

Today, I faced it.  I did it.  And I produced some of the poorest looking work I've done for a long time.

I may get an A for courage, but a C- for workmanship.

This is not going to be an inspiring story of triumph over adversity.  Instead, the experience reminded me of what a vacuum cleaner does.  You know.

To do free-motion quilting, you need a spring-driven jobby like this, called a darning foot.  No problem.

You also need to be able to drop the feed dogs. No problem there, either.

The PROBLEM was this marvel of Swedish engineering, this piece of clear plastic from hell:

The Husqvarna Viking quilting table is supposed to help by 1) spreading the weight of the quilt around, and 2) making the quilt easier to maneuver by elevating the work to the level of the sewing machine bed.

But the Husqvarna Viking quilting table does not help.

It skootches around as the quilt moves, causing my hands on the quilt to skootch around with it, making big loose sloppy stitches in places where I did not want them.  Sometimes it even gets under the needle and breaks the needle.

The result was some of the sloppiest free-motion quilting I've ever done.  It looks so bad, I'm not even going to show you.

I'm reminded of Thoreau's statement:  "We are become the tools of our tools."  It's true.  But it's no consolation. 

I faced my fear, and the result was a mess.

I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm not letting that get in my way.

That's my artist's statement for today.

If I let the fact that I don't know what I'm doing get in my way, I wouldn't have spent the past few hours sitting on the sandy path down to the bay in a rickety rocking chair with my pastels on a milk crate beside me, applying color to paper, messing up my shirt, and expressing myself about this extraordinary place as best I can.

I had to save this view of this place, and I wanted to do it badly enough that, every time I messed up, like the time I blew the pastel dust away so hard it baptized the paper, I kept going.  I figured out how to cover up my mistakes and go on.  I learned, for example, that an exacto knife can double as an eraser in removing unwanted pigment from textured pastel paper.

How else am I going to learn, if not by doing?

Keep going even though you know the results  might make Grandma Moses look like Albert Bierstadt.  That's my artist mantra for today.  If there's one insight I internalized after six years of following Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, it would be that.

http://www.theartistsway.com/

Heaven on Earth

Overlooking Cape Cod Bay, Eastham, Massachusetts

I'll never be a great artist, but when I'm before a sight that resonates within me, I want to say, "I was here.  This is what I saw."

I was here.  This is what I saw.

My excellent pastels teacher, Kristine Sullivan, would not approve of the attention I paid to the weathered wood of this staircase.  Kris, I had to do it.  Something inside told me it was important to record the splintery wood as truly to its splinters as I could.

As I was sketching, the dogs sensed the presence of a nearby canine and shot down the stairs, barking.  They made friends with a golden retriever passing on the beach, did a few play bows, and came back when I called them.  As they parted, the golden retriever saw fit to mark the post at the bottom of the stairs.

This image, and the memory of having created it, have to get me through the winter.

Can you hear the water?  Can you feel the heat of the sun?

The Significance of Brtha Kak

Joe Rubin, for the first time in 36 years, did not bake my birthday cake this year.  I volunteered to do it because he's so busy, and because my schedule is so much more flexible.

Our family has been using this recipe since I first saw it in the Washington Post in the 70s, when I was a law student.  The cake recipe was from the Post; the frosting recipe was from my mother, who ticked it off the top of her head without consulting a written word:

 

 Chocolate Cake with Mocha Frosting

For the cake:

2 c cake flour

2 c sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/8 tsp salt

¾ c cold strong black coffee

1 c sour cream

½ c butter, room-temperature soft

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

4 squares unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled

1. A couple of hours before you make this cake, take refrigerated ingredients out of the refrigerator and let them come to room temperature


2. About half an hour before you begin, melt the unsweetened chocolate and let it cool.


3. Line the bottoms of two round 9” by 1 ½” cake pans with wax paper.  Butter paper.


4. Into the large bowl of an electric mixer, turn all ingredients in order given.  At low speed beat ½ minute; at medium speed 3 minutes. 


5. Turn into prepared pans.  Bake in preheated 350 oven 30 to 35 minutes or until cake tester comes out clean.  Let stand on wire racks 10 minutes.  Turn out on racks and remove paper.  Fill and frost as desired.

Mocha frosting

9 to 12 tbl butter, room-temperature soft

¾ c cocoa

1 tbl vanilla

¾ tsp salt

4-1/2 to 6 c confectioner’s sugar

6 tbl brewed coffee

Mix by hand or use beater.

This became our family recipe, even before our first child was born in 1982.  Now it's an important, if not THE most important, part of a birthday party in our family.  

When Julia was 6, and asked to draw a picture of her favorite food, she did this:

On the day of Lucia's tenth birthday, September 11, 2001, those over age 10 around the dining room table did not want birthday cake.  We were consumed with shock and grief.  But Lucia got her birthday dinner and her cake.

Now it's my birthday, a date and year which I share with the author Jane Smiley:  September 26, 1949.  Jane has already gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize, but I'm not jealous.  Not at all.  Happy birthday, Jane, wherever you are!

As for my having to make my own cake, it's like this:  Joe Rubin has baked it almost every year in the years we've been married.  I can cut him some slack this year.  Besides, he's making scallops sauteed in vermouth for my birthday dinner.

 

Quilting the Huppah

This huppah has to be quilted so that the three layers of the quilt sandwich will stay together.  I'll do most of it in simple straight lines, which are easy.  The hard part is that I have to roll the whole thing up in order to fit it through my sewing machine for the machine quilting process.

The opening of the machine is called the throat, I'm told, and it's like a constricted tunnel for the rolled quilt to pass through while part of it goes under the needle.  When I get paid for my commission, which should be around Easter time of 2011, I'm going to put that money toward a sewing machine with a bigger throat.  Maybe I'll call it Deep Throat.

I'm stitching in the ditch, which means I'm sewing the three layers together by laying down a line of stitching in the "ditch" or the tiny declivity of the seam where two pieces of fabric come together. Here, I'm stitching in the ditch to make a little frame around Marc's name and date of birth.

I couldn't do any of this quilting if I didn't have a walking foot.  That feeds all three layers of the quilt sandwich evenly.  Without it, the backing and the top move at different rates.  I learned that one the hard way.  "Walking foot?  Who needs a walking foot?"  Right.  Next thing I knew I had the seam ripper in my hand and I was ripping out lines of quilting four feet long.  The things I learned the hard way are the lessons that make the most painful and lasting impressions.

Walking foot

Next I'm just putting some straight lines of stitching into some of the spaces to hold the whole thing together.  Adhering to the KISS rule here.