A Quiet Japanese Couple

Perhaps by now you're craving a palette cleanser for all the emotional posting that's been going on around here- an antidote to my cathartic oversharing.

And so I give you "The Quiet Japanese Couple", a textile series I've been working on in the studio.  (SEE, there is still the sewing!  And you thought it was going to be all that touchy-feely stuff all the time.)

They are chambray fabric backed by some kind of freaky starched poplin I had in the studio and then thin batting in between.  Follow by sewing for ten thousand hours each and here you go.  They're really just placemats, and I planned to make a set of six, but they are so lovely as a pair, I am torn!  (As I usually do you the courtesy, I will note here that I refrained from more than one joke about "looming decisions", etc.)

I want to offer you the chance to admit that you too *swoon* when faced with chambray selvedge.  When marrying the selvedge of nice chambray becomes legal in the eyes of the federal government, I will be there.  Marrying the selvedge of nice chambray.

The Quiet Japanese Couple is a set of two panels that are inspired by Japanese boro textiles, which I just cannot get enough of.  You feel the same way, no doubt.  I mean, look at these muvs!:

yukaipa.tumblr.com

ddutch.tumblr.com

pilgrimandpie.blogspot.com

This is Crazy, This Is Crazy, This Is Crazy!

Hi cornpones,

I HAVE been working you know.  I've been workin' on my twerkin'.  Yes, all these months I've been spending all my free time perfecting my booty bounce.  Because, well...zeitgeist.

Also, I made this recently.  It is the Grabbox Quilt for Phinny.  This is just the front and it may remain as such since I'm afraid to eff it up by trying to back it.

It's about a kertrillion pieces of sweatshirt sewn together.  Here's a rather lovely shot of multi-generational art-making.  Rug handmade by my Grandma Agnes Boyle, and wooden bird sculpture by Phinny!

For scale:

And here's a bonus close-up with Phinny's wooden bird.

And I have done other things, too, so you stay tuned to find out what they are, okay?

Chevron Quilt and The Potty Zombies

I know it's been a long time since I loved up on my blog, but I have been getting chased by The Potty Zombies in an especially vicious manner lately.  The Potty Zombies are Annika and Griffin and they are like zombies in many ways right now, which, since they kept me awake last night (SEE!  Zombies.)  while Julie was out of town, I am going to go right on ahead and detail the similarities for you.

1.  Like zombies, they teeter menacingly in your direction with arms poker straight in the air.
2.  While doing so, they drool, usually across previous patches of dried up face plaque of unknown origin.
3.  If you try to run, they come faster.  Their talent for somehow matching increasing speed defies physics.
Four. (You remember the spilled coffee on my computer's 'four' button right?):  They bite.
5.  If you try to go to the bathroom alone- if ANYONE tries to go to the bathroom alone, they will be immediately set upon by two teetering, high speed, drooling creatures who, if you are lucky to get the door closed, will bang on the door until it falls to the floor in a pile of splinters.

Still, they're very cute, which ameliorates some of the terror.

Here's what I made, while running from The Potty Zombies:

 

It's part two of a series of six.

For scale:

 

The Real Workroom Reveal + New Quilt Panel

Since I promised I would post a photo of the new studio with all my junk strewn, I must do it.  I'm sure you can guess how it pains me to have defiled such a chapel.

Heal thyself.

I finished this sweatshirt fabric stroller blanket top this morning.  I am working on a series, officially now, so I am going post them as they come.  It may take some time, since sweatshirts are out of season and all my fabric sources have dried up for the time being.  I was smart this summer and bought a load of t-shirts to work with for the winter.  I will be smart this winter and buy a load of sweatshirts to work with off season.  I'm headed for bulk buying soon.  500 lbs. of sweatshirts in my studio?  Sign me up.

Meaningless but pretty color composition shot:

 

Now, you've been wondering about that fraying in the seams on the sweatshirt quilts I made for the babies.  I've gotten many e-mails about it.  Not really, but writing that made me laugh out loud and I take my kicks where I can get them.  But, if you were wondering, I am trying out a seam reinforcement to try and prevent this problem.  This is called Stay-Tape (creative play on words, isn't it?)  I'm hoping it will solve the problem, but I will resent the added 3 bones per blanket it will cost me to put it in.  

So last, but not least, for all you lovers out there...Super Sexy Stitch Time:

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Playmat in Action! Okay, Not Really.

Playmat I made +  amazingly adorable baby Everett I made it for falling asleep on it in less than a nanosecond = extreme heartwarming satisfaction.

I mean, YES, this was only a reason to post a picture of this baby.  So?  Can you blame me?

The Epic Endeavor Named Grabbox

How satisfying is THIS?!

 

Phase one of Grabbox, complete.  Here's where I'd like to leave it.  Just hanging on this door for all time.  I'd like to not piece this together in rows now because it will get all wobbly and obstinate and terrible.  And I think it's lovely the way it is. 

Alas, in order for Phinny to ever snuggle underneath it, I will have to keep going on the path to quilthood.  

I have to lay it all out and arrange the rows, and I don't really have the best wide open space for that, so I may have to wait until my new studio is built.  Thasright- my new studio!  We are waiting on permits to construct a detached studio space behind our house, in which I will plot and execute the takeover of my inner procrastinator, nag and creative confidence goblin.  It's about the get REAL up in here.

For now, let's just behold these hundreds of bits of sweatshirt.

Goats Fighting on a Bridge Playmat

I feel like ALL playmats for children should feature images of goats fighting on a bridge.  Am I right?  Too bad there isn't a troll hanging out on this one.

Thanks again to Ikea for the fabric.  After this trip to Ikea though, we broke up.  I will only shop at my nearest Ikea from now on: Craigslist.  Too far, too much gas, too much consumption.  Too much time.  Too much everything.  Plus, I hate buying new fabric, however nifty it is.  I think I can buy Ikea prints from other people who have leftovers and feel okay about it.  "Secondary Consumer" fabric, we'll call it.  Not re-used, but at least not purchased by me, and not left to waste in someone else's sewing room.  Come with me on this one.

Anyway- new playmat for a new human:

 

Ahhh. Failure.

I think I'll just cut pieces of fabric and lay them out on the floor and then...put them away.  It's the sewing part that always takes a lovely design and sends it straight to the rubbish.  This one was particularly disappointing because it was to be a gift (sorry, Tina and Heather), and I was really happy with the design and color.

I should have taken a BEFORE (I ruined it by sewing it) picture.  All I have is the depressing result of my wasted effort. 

 

Things that went wrong:  even though I paid attention to the stretch and heft of the fabrics, I needed to match them even more, because that french terry on the orange mucked everything up.  Wobbly bastard.

 

Then, the serging.  Oh, dear serger.  You are nasty.  An instrument of the devil, really.  I know now that you can't, under any circumstances, have serger seams, however innocuous they may seem, lie in directions all willy-nilly.  You really have to get them all going in flow, so you don't end up with this scalloping mayhem here.  Which, cannot, despite all the wishing, be ironed into order.
'

So, from now on, I stop here:

See?  Pretty.  Why mess up this quilt, which I'm calling "Grabbox" (since I am engaged in an exercise where I just grab random strips from a box and sew sew sew without thinking so damn much about it).

There.  Done.  Who wants my sewing machine?

Just kidding, actually, I am fixin' to buy a new, fancier machine.  Which will certainly change my life and make all my dreams come true- HEY?!  Who's at the door?!  Kate Winslet?!  She's here because she has always been in love with me and wants to marry my wife and I in a freaky San-Francisco-style three way marriage?!

See, even thinking about buying a Viking Huskylock S25 improved my life tremendously.

Quilted Wood Playmat

After I lost that battle with t-shirt bindings around my baby quilts, I re-upped my commitment to conquer them and bought a bias tape maker.  Ingenious little invention!  It is SO satisfying to run that bugger along and iron out a perfect bias tape.  Mmmm.  Hot.  I mean, like actually hot.  Be careful of the iron.  You can get a little hypnotized watching that razor sharp fold peel out of there.

So I had to figure out what needed binding.

Wife: no.
Phinny: no.
My post-twins girth: yes
Babies: yes, (with swaddling blankets, of course)
Playmat: yes.

Playmat.  I used that sweet-ass wood drawing fabric I had from the cushion-gone-goblin and made a quilted playmat where in, LISTEN TO THIS: quilted along the drawn lines of the fabric print.  MacArthur Genius Grant, I'm coming for you. 

And, though it's a shame to put chambray onto the back of anything because it is so purdy, it is also makes for an awesome secret surprise to put chambray onto the back of something. 

 

 

HA, binding!  I win.  I WIN I WIN I WIN I WIN.

I Am a Very Fancy Artist

I am not a very fancy artist.  Though I used to think I wanted to be.  The day I matriculated at the University of Chicago in the Master's Program for contemporary art, I left all notions of craft and actual art-making behind in favor of putting my brain on a conceptual treadmill.  I'll tell you about the day I quit:

One student, Mince, let's call him, turned in as his semester final a twenty page long list of everything in his studio.  All my professors were standing around scratching their chins, contemplating this tidal wave of unbridled genius.  One said, "Now, let's talk about what Mincent meeeeeaaaaans with this list."  When they came to me, I said, "It means I should quit.  Like, right now." No Master's Degree from The Committee on Visual Art.  AND THAT'S HOW I WAS GONG TO MAKE THE BIG BUCKS, GUYS. 

So since then, I've been on a slow trek down from the pretentious peaks of high art.  I used to be self-conscious, in a way, about a love of craft (both in the work of contemporary artists I'm drawn to, and just craft for the glory that is something well-crafted).  But that's over now, and I get my kicks out of loving on all of it.  I see the germination of high art forms in the simplest and most mundane craft work and I can also appreciate the craft that is inherent in certain contemporary works that may at first seems off the cuff and careless. 

So it brings me to some recent work on textile panels.  These here I made.

I was really interested in the strong feeling of satisfaction I have with these and the influences I was channeling when I designed them. 

OMG, I just had a revelation that the color is totally and exactly Matthew Barney Cremaster!  I loved that work once upon a time.  And I think the composition is a little bit Anni Albers, little bit Clay Ketter?  Anyway, it's really fun to see all the compartments in my brain for design, craft and art bastardizing one another.

I am tired now because I have so many children.  I better stop writing.  Suddenly.  Before I say something stupid.  That above paragraph is starting to show the strain of sleep deprivation.  Goodnight.

Stylin' and Textilin'

I CANNOT HELP IT WITH THE CHEESY POST TITLES.  I AM SORRY!  YOU WILL HAVE TO FILE A LAWSUIT.

I always get my best ideas in the shower. Apparently, something about scrubbing the sensual contours of the armpit helps my mind assimilate all the visual fragments that have been floating through during the previous night.  Hey I know you wanted to know that.

I have been very interested for some time in textiles, as my dedicated reader knows.  I have for a while been kicking around the idea of doing some pillow/ cushion covers...WAKE UP!...in sweatshirt fabric.  And I have found that it provides for a very interesting set of challenges. 

First, the same problem I have with the clothes I design using the fabric of pre-existing clothing is the size limitations.  Since it would be nearly impossible to ever find more than one garment in exactly the same shade, I am confined to either making very small things, or conceding to mix the pallette in a single piece of clothing.  Usually that's great.  Sometimes it makes things look overworked and obvious.

So when I started making these textiles from sweatshirt fabric, I ran into the same problem, though now compounded by issues of scale and whatnot.  I won't ever have enough fabric from say two colors to produce even two large cushion covers.  Which at first I found frustrating, but now see as a really good exercise in color.  I am basically forced to mix more colors than I usually would and it puts my color intuition and knowledge to the test.  I am interested to see how I can stretch my tolerance for color in any single piece without crossing the line.  When I imagine these objects in a room though, it means that they have so much color that the rest of the room has to be neutral.  They basically suck up the color allowance for an entire room in the space of a 18 x 18 inch throw pillow.  How nerve wracking!

In terms of sewing, there are also technical limitations with using this fabric for these designs.  Picture, then explanation:

 

Here's the problem- these lobes are each like 6 inches wide, and they can't be made smaller because those opposing curves are a bear, and the serger will not comply with curves any tighter than these- especially on the concave lines.  Holla:

 

So in order to give this pattern the breathing room it needs, I have to make at least a 24" x 24" piece.  If I'm making two, as in a set of cushions, I will not have enough fabric in these three exact colors.  NOW WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO I ASK YOU?!

Use smaller pieces of fabric, so I can get more out of all the nooks and crannies of a single sweatshirt?

Then there's this piece, using the same colorways.  I guess it could be cool if I handquilted the pieces, but I am not doing that.  No I am not.  So this design, with all its sewing, and final product that is less than perfect, is not practical.

See?  Lots of sewing.  Hey I kind of prefer the way this looks from the underside.  Hmmm.

Lee Bontecoute

You pronounce today's blog post title in a Michigan accent, so it sounds like this:  "Lee Bon-tuh-CUOTE".  Get it?!  An art/ quilting play on words, yall. To what other mom blog can you go for such linguistic tom-foolery?

You see, once I got way far into this color scheme, I realized I didn't have green pieces big enough to complete the spokes, so I had to piece it together.  I decided I was okay with the fractured glass pattern thing and then when the center of the quilt turned all vortexy and swollen, all I could think of was Bontecou sculptures.  It makes me want to do a whole series of them. 

Anyway, yeah, the whole thing is a wobble now, owing to the design of thin strips of bulky fabric conjoining at the center.  I mean, I sort of knew that might happen, but you know- me and physics, we have an adversarial relationship.  So I'm trying to figure out what to do about it.  I have this two projects rule going so I can't just move on from it.   

Oops, how did that picture get in here?  Bonus cute.  Annika Hedy.  What a pleasure is this baby.

Breaking Out of Baby Jail

Baby Hobo is not dead.  In fact, at this oddest of times, I am feeling a renaissance of affection for it, even as my Baby Griffin and Baby Annika threaten to pull me into a vortex of neediness and cute.  I was all sorts of ready to shelve my creative aspirations and my entrepreneurial impulses for several years following the birth of these babies.  "There won't be a moment to adequately shave my legs for the next five years, let alone sew," is what I rightly thought. 

Howeverly, I was able to control my impulses for all of three weeks.  Once my head stopped spinning- the moment it stopped spinning, I trained my weary eyeballs on the stack of imploring sweatshirt scraps in my sewing room, and decided that if I am making things for the kids, then it is A-OKAY to ignore them as people for a little while each day and instead sew myself to sanity.  So there.  And I have been making a sort of remarkable number of things, some of which I will show you here right now!  Yay. 

Introducing the most cozy and useful baby quilts I ever made.  (Okay, they are are two of only three baby quilts I have ever made, but still!)  They are basically like saddle blankets for babies, in that they are so heavy and sturdy (though crazy soft) you can practically mold them into an armchair recliner and leave your twins propped upright just about anywhere.  NOT THAT I WOULD DO THAT. 

 

And here are some details for you stitch-o-philes:

You'll have to ignore that t-shirt binding of course, since it is BALLS.  I need to design a good way to make a proper binding, obviously.  But I can't do everything, you guys, I have like two-hundred children.

Here I Am With a Finished Quilt!

I haven't posted in so long,  I almost have to relearn how to use my Blogger function.  Here are a list of things that may or may not have happened that may or may not have kept me from posting in so long:

1.) My sewing room was infested with Senegalese weasels and I had to hire the Animal Planet Police to come and film an episode of "Catch and Care: Animal 911" before I could get back in there and put the pedal to the metal.

2.) Our dear friends Abby and Michael are having a baby and I have been working on a quilt done by hand for them.

3.) We moved from the city to the suburbs.  Where's my Green Acre, bitches?

4.) I have a small child.  Her height is in the 75th percentile, her weight in the 50th, and her head in the 95th.  Which makes her a living bobble-head.  Her high maintenance 'tude is in the 436th percentile, so she requires a lot of time.

So, mostly it was the quilt and the moving.  But finally (!) I have pics to post of the quilt.  It is, as I've posted before, my first quilt.  It's made from re-purposed materials (sweatshirts and a sheet), and I made it without using a quilting hoop.  Still can't tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing.  But here it is.  I like it very much and am scared to make another because I might not like it this much.

 

 

 

I'm Getting Straighter Every Day

(Right now, some ex-girlfriend of mine is thinking, "A-Ha!  I knew it!"  No.  No, honey, it really was just you.)

I'm talking about my quilting effort, people.

Here are the fruits of my labor in the department of stretching and pinning this bugger in order to get the grid straight.   Not too bad, right?  Had a bad run-in after that though when I soaked the quilt and it let loose red dye all over onto the yellow pieces.  Those rose colored patches bled like an octopus squirting ink on it's own self!  So self-defeating!  Whyyyyy?!?!?!  

But I'm not deterred, no.  I will prevail.  Got some velvet trim the other day at an awesome secret sourcing place in Forest Park. 

>>>>BABY HOBO UPDATE<<<<<

I haven't just been obsessing over the quilt.  I have also been slowly, ever so slowly working on moving the Baby Hobo line forward.  Found someone to make patterns, found someone to grade patterns.  Found someone to sew.  Maybe, MAYBE found some knit ribbing.  Knit ribbing?  Yes, it's the stuff they make sweatshirt cuffs from, and that shit is like extremely, extremely hard to find in quantities less than a bajillion yards.  But I might be on it, thank you Etsy.

Next step will be to get a sample made then cut all a whole bunch of pieces and drop them off for sewing of the first batch of Crabby Jackets!  It could happen in time for fall.  I mean, probably not, but maybe.  I'll keep you updated so that you don't fall off the edge of that seat there that you're sitting on.

Since it's been a long time since I posted, here's a bonus picture of our main Baby Hobo model: