Patience and the Sweet Spot

Carving out time to be in the studio is a challenge at the best of times. Life gets in the way unless the things that keep us whole are unashamedly and ruthlessly protected. My life busy by my own design and choice and the dogged insistence on living creatively is the only way I fit everything in. Not necessarily brilliantly organised, but I'm getting better at it. Better at ensuring the discipline and joy of creating happens every day. When there's greater chunks of possibility, that's the time for Sweet Spot. Something that follows persistence, practice and patience. Over and over again. Sweet spot is my dear friend. She's with me right now, quilting an improv quilt pieced from leftovers, scraps and orphans. The layout took days, if not weeks, of rearranging, walking away, fresh eyes, different approaches and trusting I'd know when we reached Sweet Spot. We're in the zone, a rhythm that's lost all sense of time and place. Magic space. In the spaces between everything else in my life, I try to use the five or ten minutes here and there to make sure the machine and I are ready to go. That means a basket of the right threads, small scissors, pre-filled bobbins and a fresh needle. Gloves at the ready. Sometimes it's preparing leftover fabrics , wadding and backing into 30cm squares or thereabouts - having a stack near the machine is great for practice, warming up, relaxing the shoulders and upper arms into the space. Great for checking posture, chair height and all the things that matter about an hour or so into the Sweet Spot. Nothing new in any of that - it's just a nice place to be.

Comments

The peaceful rhythm of quilting

Three or four hundred upper thread and bobbin changes over the past four weeks. There's a textural effect I'm trying to create with the quilting - that compliments the imperfect shapes of the pieced fabrics. Something akin to wabi, sabi and shibui. The infinite ways that dense, linear quilting can be used to create story are coming to life, one piece at a time. Sometimes barely visible, sometimes contrasting. There is an uneven fullness in the seams that help create miniscule bumps at the end of each line. There are also the seamless directional changes absorbed into the looser weave of some fabrics. Every change and every bobbin. Testing tensions, adjusting for the different threads as each shape submits to the process. It is a peace-filled activity, permanently set up so I can work for several minutes at a time. Never wasting moments. I get immersed in the meditative quality of the quilting and thinking only about the stitch. Some of the combinations I use: using the same ...

Carvings and the meaning of life

Carving a new print is relaxing but requires full mental presence and even more patience. A rushed cut or slip results in nothing printable at all. The grevillea leaf is one of my favourites. Spiked points and gentle curves mean it can carry many meanings in an art work. It can speak to nature, trees, the outdoors, Australian native plants at a very obvious level. It can also carry deeper meanings about our lived experiences. This one is carved in soft plastic - which generally works better than lino on fabrics. It has a little more give and manages to get the full print onto the substrate whereas sometimes the linocut version leaves an imperfect mark. Getting to the final carving is an evolving process. Then there are test prints on paper, choosing paint, ink or decolourant (dye stripper) and how that works (or doesn't work) with a particular project. Sometimes I will use discharge paste and strip out the dye before offset and overprinting with ink. This gives t...

TYOM W1 5 October 2021

Midnight came and went. Seven more hours of suffering before we go to hospital and that was probably the best birthday decision of all. Turning 60 in the ER. Another 4 days before I am home and the positive takeaway is there WAS a stone blocking the duct to the liver, and it WAS the cause of me turning yellow. It WAS NOT copious, continuous comsumption of champagne. They had landed that one on me 8 weeks previously, and I obediently and conscientiously avoided said champagne for almost 7 weeks until the weekend immediately prior to TYOM. So there WAS a bottle of Dom Perignon 2010 consumed between four of us - deliciously sipped down to the last drop. It WAS true the pain started sometime in the next 24 hours and truer that I thought this was the end my relationship with champagne. How blessed to be wrong. They had managed to rule out all forms of known hepatitis, some novel considerations including HIV, drug use in my younger years, clots in one or more vital organs, a...

Home on the Main Range

Search This Blog