quilting Archives - Page 11 of 12

Blind Stitch

My obsessive desire to create sewn tapestries is butting up against the incredible amount of work required to do so. Most of that work is non-expressive; it is carrying out orders dictated by the design; it is execution; it is craft. I may be discovering, for myself, where the boundary between Art and Craft lies. All Art has elements of Craft; all Craft contains elements of Art. But Craft, in its purest abstract conceptual form, is pure work; Art is pure emotional force, perhaps idea. You can’t have one without the other, but the proportions vary widely.

I want to be spontaneous and expressive. Quilting is sort of like those dreams where you try running through molasses. It. Is. So. Slow. I have much patience for art, but quilting is so slow my expressive force peters out before it reaches expression. It’s what writing would be like if writing consisted of carving the letter punch, punching the letter form, setting the movable type, and pressing the press. By the time I did all that, I’d have forgotten what it was I wanted to say in the first place.

Can I sew expressively? I hope so. Here are a few experiments.

Neenzilla, 5″ x 5″. I did this really fast, while showing some friends how to free motion quilt. I like it a lot. But it’s just a sketch; it doesn’t feel like a “real” piece to me. It lacks sufficient Craft.

Blind Stitch, about 10″ x 10″. In an attempt to free myself up, I stitched the outline of this with my eyes (mostly) closed! I’d do more of that but I’m afraid of accidentally sewing through my own fingers. I filled in every other space tightly with more thread, in the usual labor-intensive eyes-open free-motion quilting way. So it attempts to balance expressive freedom and labor, except expressing myself with my eyes closed doesn’t really satisfy me. I prefer to say something, intentionally.

Here’s Blind Stitch from the back.

Fire/Burnt Offering

I just finished #3 in my 4 Elements quilt series.

This tapestry is a lot more colorful and contrasty than the others. It uses that “trapplique” technique I posted about before – that piece was a study for this one. Continue reading “Fire/Burnt Offering”

Trapplique!

Oh how I love this combination of applique and trapunto. I wasn’t sure what to call it: double trapunto? Trapplique? It’s not a technique I’d seen before, but I’m sure others have done it because it’s obvious. Anyway, this technique is for me.

This is actually a test for a larger piece I’m making for my wall. It’s in the Hippie craft tradition I so admired in my youth, so pardon the Orientalism – it’s an integral part of American Hippiedom. The pattern on the hand is based on mehendi, the spirally flames on Tibetan art, and the eye in the palm of the hand is plain ol’ Hippie mysticism. Continue reading “Trapplique!”

Attention Economics

Today I viewed a small art quilt show. Many of the quilts were quite beautiful. Still, it took my friend and I less than half an hour to view everything, on two floors. We spent no more than a few minutes contemplating each one, lingering longest on the ones we liked most, less on the ones we liked least. We weren’t in a hurry; a few minutes of attention was all we needed to spend to be satiated (I would have spent a bit more if touching the quilts was appropriate, but that seemed like a no-no).

These quilts took countless hours to make. I’d estimate about 20 hours for each piece, though that may be conservative (they were all smallish wall hangings – no bed-size quilts here, which take much longer). All those hours, so someone could look at it for a minute or two. How many people would have to attend to a quilt to “break even” the attention the artist put into it?

That I even frame a question like this means I’m thinking about attention economics. I ruminated on this concept a lot (before I knew there was a name for it) while working on Sita Sings the Blues. Usually the only investment in films people recognize is money. SSTB was ultra-low budget money-wise, but I gave it 3 years of near-constant attention. Every day I asked myself if “enough” people would view the finished product. My reckoning went something like this:

60 hrs/week (approx) x 156 weeks (3 years) = 9,360 attention hours

Finished film is 82 minutes long; add a few extra attention minutes to learn about before/discuss after rounds up to 90 minutes = 1.5 hours

9,360 attention-hours / 1.5 hrs attending time = 6,240 pairs of eyeballs

Therefore the film would need 6,240 viewers for me to “break even” on my attention investment. Today millions of people have seen SSTB, but at the time, 6,240 was a reasonable goal. Because of all the views of the film, I’ve turned a very large attention profit.

My daily comic strip, Mimi & Eunice, currently has about 1,200 subscribers (yay!). It takes me about 1/2 hour to produce a Mimi & Eunice strip; there’s also organizing them on my hard drive, uploading and scheduling them, and thinking about them for whatever reason. So I’ll err on the high side: 1 hour of my attention per strip. Let’s say the average viewer spends .5 minutes (30 seconds) attending to that day’s comic. 1,200 x .5 = 600 minutes = 10 hours. I’m getting a whopping 10-to-one attention profit on Mimi & Eunice! I’m rich!

Even if subscribers only attend for 15 seconds, I’m still getting back 5 times the attention I put into it. That’s a lot of profit!

Back to the quilts. An art quilt that takes 20 hours to make needs 1,200 people to view it for 1 minute each to break even. Of course, some individuals may spend much longer attending to a finished quilt – 10 minutes, say – while others will breeze past, barely glancing at it. I wonder what the attention profit margin is of the art quilts I saw today?

My own large art quilts are taking about 60 to 80 hours each to design and make. They’re currently running an attention deficit. But I have a plan….

“Water,” or Art Is Stupid

I finally finished and hung tapestry #2 in my “4 Elements” series: Water.

This one wasn’t nearly the joy to make that the first one, “Earth,” was. In fact it was so fraught with anxiety, errors, and frustrations, it inspired today’s Mimi & Eunice cartoon:

I’m glad it’s done now. Here’s some of the insanity that went into it (photos by Ian Akin, who has been a houseguest here through the whole thing): Continue reading ““Water,” or Art Is Stupid”

Piecing Water, or Why I’m Going to Make a Proper Pattern Next Time

I finally started the second in my series of “4 Elements” quilted tapestries: Water. Here’s the design:

Now, I’ve been avoiding proper pattern-making. I just print the thing out on multiple sheets of 11×17 paper, which I tape together and trace onto more taped-together sheets of freezer paper. Then I cut those out with a rotary cutter… Continue reading “Piecing Water, or Why I’m Going to Make a Proper Pattern Next Time”