Pamela Thiele Art Quilts

Sending My Scarf Thru the Printer

I have never wanted to take the time to make covers for my machines. So my sewing machine, my computer, and my printer are covered with silk scarves. These are pretty and pleasant to the touch and pull off very easily. Possibly too easily. Because this morning, and not for the first time, the scarf that covers the printer is stuck in the printer.

How does this happen? Well I tend to forget to pull it off until I notice that odd grinding noise the printer makes when there is a scarf jammed up in its innerds. You know the sound? Or maybe you don’t since I am not convinced that too many people have this problem.

It’s not a pretty sound. What is even less pretty is what happens to a scarf that has spent time enmeshed with the gears of a printer and near the ink wells. I think I am going to pretend that I have intentionally added that rather strange black and turquoise stain pattern on purpose to the scarf.

After all, the scarf will ultimately be part of a quilt since I don’t wear scarves which is why I have a few to throw over my machines. So I am going to pretend this is an intentional embellishment.

Provided I can get the scarf out of the machine. I have always been able to before. But it takes a certain finesse.

I am hoping that the printer won’t have to be replaced. Because I went and bought some extra inks and of course, they won’t fit in any other printer. I am trying to sell some ink on eBay that worked on my previous printer. I am hoping that there are people who don’t run scarves through their printers and thus still have the model that takes that ink.

All this to procrastinate getting the printer to part with the scarf. Okay, guess I’d better try it again. I am actually getting pretty good at this. A new skill to boast about – pulling scarves from printers. Is it a talent or a gift?

A VERY BAD IDEA

I have trimmed the blocks and they are looking better so my panic has receded. Somewhat.

Now all I have to do is arrange them so they work. Since this task is facing me, I decided to layout another quilt.  Except I cannot get this even newer quilt to work.

I am using the leftover semi-circles from the Water is Wide. I’ve sewn them into –well, not exactly circles, more like ovals, and I’d like to use them. But nothing seems to work for the background. For instance: Not black and cream stripes.

And definitely not colored stripes. I thought the red would be great but –no. And then I thought maybe the olive-ish green but not really. None of these.

And then I tried some Australian prints. First with a cream colored print in the mix. Yech.

Then again with another print. Blah.

I think the basic problem is that this doesn’t work as a quilt. I have no overarching idea. No reason to make this except to use up those damn ovals. And so nothing works. So back to the Water is Wide. Which is working because I started with a concept and listened to the fabric. Is there a lesson here? Hmmmmm.

TIME TO PANIC!

Is anything scary than the first cuts you make into the fabric for a new quilt? I have a design in my head, based very loosely on the drunkard’s path. VERY loosely.

I want to use all blues for all the pieces, of which there are a lot—lots and lots of semi-circles and the other parts–except for three. These three semi circles will be red. This requires a lot of juggling – which blue goes where? And a lot of moving things around on my  design wall.

I believe I have the basic blocks all figured out and have pieced them.

I forgot that I’ve never pieced in semi-circles before. It is very different from piecing in quarter circles. I have had to redo every damn one of them. Because I don’t want ANY gathers. But they ALL gathered at one place or another. ARGH!

Now it’s time for blind panic because the blocks aren’t right. They just aren’t right.

But happily I remember this is almost always true of my basic blocks. Why I can’t remember this before I panic is a question I often ask. I always panic at several stages of each quilt. Would that I could remember from quilt to quilt when these panic stages hit! But alas, I never do.

The blocks are too large because I always make the blocks too large and then I cut them down to the size I want and to be uniform. More or less. Give or take. Mostly take.

I am headed to the cutting board with a thousand (okay it only seems that way) blocks to cut smaller. And then I shall be happy again. Until I panic again.

Time for the Next Quilt

I am beginning the next quilt. I figure this is okay because I only have three tops waiting to be pieced. Last year at this time, I had 18. So, the way I figure it,  I am way ahead.

It’s not that I don’t like to quilt – I do. I just have so many ideas for tops in my head, I get carried away with piecing. So I now swear that I WILL quilt these tops within the next two months. I SWEAR IT. Honest.

Whew! So now I can cut out and begin to evolve the next one. The inspiration comes from an American Folk Song, “The Water is Wide.”

I’ve already made one quilt, “Our Love is Like a Ruby,” which is in the Gallery, also based on this lovely folk ballad.

I first heard this song as a teenager at the Broadway show, “Spoon River Anthology,” and it has haunted me ever since. I think it’s the perfect description of what a committed relationship can be. Plus it’s an extraordinary tune.

I waited for 52 years before I met someone for whom this song fit – that is, it fit our relationship and isn’t that swell! I am so lucky! And grateful.

We sang it at our commitment ceremony and should we ever get equal marriage rights, we’ll sing it then. Loudly and joyfully.

It goes:

The water is wide, and we cannot get o’er.

And neither have we wings to fly.

Give us a boat that will carry two,

and both shall row, my love and I.

Done in the meadow the other day,

a-gathering flowers, both fine and gay,

a-gathering flowers of different hue,

I did give thought to what love can do.

Our love was tender, our love was true

our love was like a ruby when it is new;

as our love grew old, it sparkled true;

it did not fade; it only grew.

The water is wide, and we cannot get o’er.

And neither have we wings to fly.

Give us a boat that will carry two

and both shall row, my love and I.

WHAT TO WATCH??

It’s gotten a lot harder to find something on t.v. that is good to quilt by. I don’t want to be one of those “back in the good old days” kind of people BUT when I started quilting, back in the 1980s, it seems to me there was more variety on t.v. Or there were more shows that I’d consider perfect for an afternoon of quilting.

The problem may be me. (Ya think?) Let’s face it, I miss Columbo, that old quasi-mystery, quasi-cop procedural, starring Peter Falk. It was the ideal length – at least two hours with commercials. And it was on so often that I got to know the shows pretty much by heart.

So that meant I didn’t have to WATCH them, really. Since I’d already seen each one, millions of times. I knew when to look up. I knew when I could run the sewing machine which would drown out the dialogue because I could knew what everyone was going to say.

In fact really I never had to listen because I knew the plots thoroughly. Indeed, why I even had to t.v. on, is a question. Since I didn’t watch it and frequently couldn’t hear it. I simply looked up periodically and sort of checked in to where Columbo was in trapping the killer.

And I reckon I liked how high end the killers were – a more palatable class of villains. They rarely were scary. They often were attractive. People I didn’t mind spending an afternoon with although I would not have invited any of them to dinner.

No other mystery show has ever come close to this comfort level for me. I am beginning to think I have absorbed some of the shows as being true. Almost. Hope not. But like family legends that become true with reiteration, these shows have genuine reality for me.

There was one with Donald Pleasance—I mean, hey, Donald Pleasance! – he was a wine lover and grower who had to, just HAD to kill his younger half brother who was going to sell the family vineyard (if memory serves). And he was being blackmailed by his secretary played by a truly scary Julia Harris into marrying her, because she’d figured out what Colombo had figured out, that Donald’s character had “done it.” Why you would think marrying a murderer would be a safer choice, beats me.

It was just swell!  And nothing nowadays delivers the same ideal conditions for me to quilt along with. Talk shows demand too much attention and I don’t like angry people much. Nobody is ever angry on Colombo.

The court shows can get really loud and again you have to pay attention. Reality shows, ditto. Although I believe that Project Runway reruns could maybe fill this gap – but there are so few of these now that Lifetime is running the Runway. Tim Gunn as the wise Colombo, non-judgmental and helpful.

All this to say I’ve got to quilt two quilts and there’s nothing on. I am going to have to resort to music. Which is not the same.

Hanging Quilts

Hanging quilts is a true test of nerve in our house. We have a very heavy, very tall ladder that stores collapsed. This means it needs to be opened and the various sections locked into place, which ain’t easy if you have arthritic thumbs. Something the ladder designer oddly enough apparently never took into account. Perhaps he never imagined two 60+ year-old women would be using his product.

The two quilts in the living room go on walls that also line the stairs. So getting up on the ladder, one is essentially hanging over a stair well. This makes me go kind of limp which is not a good condition to be in climbing a ladder.

I have been known to totally freeze on ladders. There was the time I had to be talked down from an observation platform ladder in western Massachusetts.  However I don’t see myself as a chicken and so I constantly seem to put myself into places where I really should know better.

But since yesterday was Valentine’s Day, let’s include the nicest gift I’ve ever gotten, which is Lauren doing the climbing. She is not so tall as me so she has to climb even higher than I do, to get these quilts hung.

My palms sweat the whole time she was up there.

Now the quilts are hung and they took terrific and I just love seeing them up. It helps me see them in a different way. I am able to see better somehow what I did and what the effect of the decisions I made was. Plus it makes me proud and happy.

We are going to have to invent a different way to get them hung. Another year or so and it will go from being brave to being dumb to climb the ladder.

But today I am delighting in the present of their presence. And plotting all the things I’ll do differently the next time I do that pattern.

Which Step is This?

Today I pieced the top. Didn’t take long. In fact, after all that angst and fretting and auditioning fabrics and waxing philosophical, once I get to actually piecing a top, especially a simply top like this – it feels very anti-climactic.

But good. always good. Because I get to be working with the fabric again. Now I just have to find a binding that goes with that red.

Funny how I spend a lot of time to get to this step and yet in a sense it feels just like step one. Next biggy is quilting, of course. And making the label. And binding. Have I just completed step one?

While I work, sometimes Button, our standard poodle, sleeps near me. Sometimes her older sister, Luka, the labradoodle, does. Neither of them sheds because I am allergic to dog hair so our dogs must be hypoallergenic.

They seem to alternate studio duty. By some signal I can’t figure out, they switch. One goes upstairs to help Lauren; one comes down here to help me. I love their presence although I get a trifle concerned when they are very VERY quiet.

Luka has a taste for silk, especially duponi.  One afternoon it was stunningly quiet down here and I found her by my bookshelves of fabric, happily working her way through the silks. Not good for her. Not good for my stash.

Button, on the other hand, prefers flat-headed pins and push pins. Truly scary. I try to pick up every pin that drops but every now and then one will sneak by me somehow and Button will gleefully find it. So I get up a lot to monitor her when she is down here napping. Just in case. She thinks I very rigid and nosy.

Needless to say, my spools of thread are a dog’s idea of the perfect toy. And they are all VERY high up. And pincushions are beyond tempting too—those live at my height up up up on shelves and window sills.

It’s good I’m tall-ish. Tall enough. On their tip toes, they can’t quite reach this stuff. On my tip toes, I can.

GOT IT!

I’ve got the perfect 16^th square. WHEW! I cut it out for the middle of the yardage I have thus reducing the amount of usable fabric a lot. But I always go for the exactly right section. I never worry about conserving fabric. Because that means your choice is being driven by the wrong things. Even if you only get one usable piece out of your fat quarter or half yard, if it’s a perfect piece, if it lifts up the quilts and fits in and makes you happy and the quilt just right – that’s the piece.

The fabric has large and medium red flowers and small black flowers. I choose a section with two medium rather than one large because I figured the big red flower would be so insistent and rude about being noticed that the rest of the quilt would get depressed.

I have only one black flower in the section also intentionally. I needed black in this patch but not too much black.

SO MEGA WHEW! The top is now ready to be pieced. And while I’m doing that, I can start pondering what design the quilting should have.

YIPES! With the red element introduced, my thread choice no longer works. I wonder, maybe red thread??? Would that be cool or would it be too much? Hell, I think it would be cool so I’m going for it.

LOTSO FABRIC

So I have now pulled enough fabric to make at least 3 more quilts and I have found the perfect fabric for several baby quilts. The studio is a mess. HOWEVER, I have also found about 20 fabrics to audition for the hole in the GrandBaby’s quilt.

After looking at each of those, and I refrained from cutting them all up, which shows we CAN learn and grow or maybe shows I am getting kind of tired…anyway it has come down to three possibilities.

I always photograph my quilts in progress and look at the pix on the computer which helps me see what I’m doing with less emotion and more dispassionately. So that’s the theory. It does help.

I think I have three good options here. I have to live with each one for a while. Not a long while. But a little bit.

My whole THEORY of MAKING ART is that it really matters what fabric and what motif I cut from that fabric. I fussy cut everything so I can control what’s on each piece of fabric I use, no matter how tiny.

I like doing this. I love handling the fabric and seeing so many possibilities in each design. This is a deep pleasure of this art form for me and I am reveling in it. I think I will go roll in all the fabric that’s on the floor by the studio’s east wall.

I know that I will have to pick it up soon because I am neurotic that way. I don’t like clutter. But for now, in this moment, I can go love up my fabric and clear my head. And then I can return to this quilt and make the right choice.

A Gaping Hole

And here’s where we are now today. I have 15 large squares that work perfectly. I love the placement of each. The quilt top makes me happy EXCEPT for one wee tiny problem and that is I need 16 squares, not 15.

The horrible gaping hole is in the upper left hand corner.

And absolutely NOTHING works in the place for the 16^th square. Nothing. I have tried that and it didn’t work either so stop suggesting things.

Lauren, my spouse, who possibly thinks I’m being a little dramatic– I CANNOT GIVE THE BABY A QUILT WITH A GAPING HOLE IN IT!—but who tries to sympathize, has suggested I have one square of colored fabric. YIPES.

As an artist, I haughtily sniff and say that RUINS the design.

HOWEVER she is back upstairs and I’m thinking…I’m just thinking maybe just maybe she has a point.

Plus this lets me dive into my huge stash of large COLORFUL florals.

I need to remember that I do not have to cut out a huge selection of these which will lead to my starting a whole new quilt and I NEED to get this top finished so I can figure out the back and quilt it …but it’s tempting.

If you don’t hear from me for a while, send out the search dogs. They will find me wallowing in florals along the east wall of my studio.