My stash of shot cottons depleted, I opened a bin of long-neglected fabrics hand-dyed by a quiltmaker who lives about 20 blocks from me and decided to work up some samples to see how these sturdier, opaque cottons would look in the four-patch design that continues to intrigue me.

Here’s today’s result. I still like the underlying design—the shapes, the proportions, and the partially machine-pieced, partially overlapping, partially appliquéd patches. And I like the green patchwork in the vertical strip. (I can see myself playing with all kinds of monochromatic variations since the woman who sells these cottons specializes in making deliberately-dyed color gradations.) But otherwise, it’s not right.

The colors are wrong for each other. The double-needle stitching has lost its “sketched” look (perhaps because it’s sewn edge-to-edge?). Even the colors in the thread miss the mark. And I miss the see-through look of my previous experiments.

I do think it’s worth doing again; I’m already mulling what to change, and I’m also wondering how its eventual use might influence my thinking. (It was obvious to me, for example, that the translucent patches had to be back-lit and thus belonged, somehow or other, in a window.) The sturdier cottons mean this block could be part of a quilt destined for snuggling, on a sofa or in bed.

On my bed, however, I favor a comforter in a duvet cover. A flannel duvet cover, always. And since I’ve never seen quilt patches on a duvet cover, that’s what I’m gonna try.

Here are two photos of the noren that Cathy was describing in an earlier post. As Cathy wrote earlier, it is quite a trick to capture the transparency of the piece, the lustrous quality of the fabrics, the subtle variation in hue of the thread.

I photographed it throughout the day and found a way to convey the change from transparent to nontransparent. I’ll keep playing around with this challenge. There’s closeups to try. I’m curious about how I will convey the light padding of the rectangles. It doesn’t seem like a major component of the piece, but as you move through the noren the slight dimension of the rectangles creates the slightest tension — a mild unyieldingness — that changes the noren from a curtain to a sculpture.

I don’t just use up fabric; I blow through paper, too. And I’m going to be using a lot of Red Squirrel Studio pastepaper and handmade Cave Paper as I get in practice for teaching a Cross-Structure Binding class in the new year.

I learned this wonderful limp-paper binding in a class with book artist and conservator Hedi Kyle. Combining contemporary and historical features, the book has a cover made from one long piece of paper folded so it’s double-thick and especially resilient at the spine and foredges. The textblock is sewn directly onto straps cut into one end of the cover paper. The straps cross at the spine and are laced into the front and back covers, forming a decorative asymmetrical pattern. For fun (and practice!), I’ll have my students make the book twice, once with a Cave Paper cover and again with pastepaper.

This experiment will grow up to be a lap quilt, backed with a snuggly peach-colored wool.
It’s a traditional pattern—Chinese Coins—that alter-
nates strings of randomly pieced fabrics with a background fabric.

There’s double-needle top-
stitching straddling every seam in the strings. And between each string there are five or six bits of double-needle stitchery, designs without a design. In real life, the quilt top isn’t as rumpled as it appears in these scans. But no pix of the whole thing yet; it’s still too messy around the edges.

I’ve got two other pieces with double-needle stitch-
ing in process. This one is somewhat smaller than a twin-size coverlet, but whether it’s intended for a bed or a wall I don’t know.

It consists largely of batik (the white areas in the sketch). The horizontal and vertical strips are shot cottons (again). The full-length strip along the right edge is a patchwork of cotton remnants. And all the solid cottons are densely embellished with double-needle stitching.

This was the first of my double-need undertakings, and it shows: The background fabric overwhelms the solids, and the strips are too narrow to showcase the stitchery. It’s unfinished because it’s got me stumped.

Occasionally I sketch on paper in hopes of avoiding the wholesale sacrifice of my entire fabric stash to wanton experiment.

I thought better of both sketches on the right. The one on the bottom left altered itself in the making and eventually materialized in the sheer panels pictured in my last post. The sketch in the upper left also seemed promising.

In fabric, it started out as two mirror-image units stitched back-to-back with organza in between. But their weight was too much for the organza. So I picked out the stitching, nested the two units close together but not touching, and sewed them to one side of the organza.

Even though I had purchased an entire bolt of organza, I was running low. And my one remaining piece was too short to qualify as a window panel. So it became a noren instead.

Could the new owner add a photo, please? (Photographing see-through stuff utterly defeats me.)

Jumping back in without apology or explanation for a vast gap of unchronicled time, I have lots of experimental pieces to share from recurrent bouts of quilting this fall.

I will apologize for the photo, however. I simply cannot get this sheer panel, which hangs in front of a pleated shade in my bedroom, to look like what I see! So, you must imagine the reality: the patchwork is stitched onto sheer, pale moss-colored organza. It has no backing, so when it is lit from behind during daylight hours, the colors have a serene glow and multicolored lines of stitchery appear in contrast to the fabrics they crisscross.

Stitching the lines in each of these patches felt to me like sketching with a sewing machine. The more I allowed myself to “just sew,” the more fluid and unselfconscious the line. I ended up stitching 30+ patches, mainly for the
pleasure of seeing the look of different combinations of verticals, horizontals and curves.

Curiously these quick-sewn strokes bear a strong resemblance to a few of my paper weavings from months ago and even more curiously to a string weaving that was part of a book I made in a class with Hedi Kyle. But such similarities are for another post.

I just uploaded this image to see if something was amiss with our image uploading “equipment.” The software has been updated a bit, but it seems to be functioning. I wrote up a quick description of how this system works and added it to the How To section.

The image started as a photo of my niece Sonya celebrating her 30th birthday with an impromptu dance, “Death of a Cowboy.” I plan to use it as the starting point for a print.

Apparently January 2008 was an anti-watershed moment for settling in with a daily practice! One choice is to begin again, which I will.

I wonder if the annual magic of fall color in the trees — one day this week we noticed that the trees had taken on the autumnal glow of reds and yellows — and the visceral “fullness of being” conveyed by crisp apples, fat chipmunks, and the last few tomatoes transmit a subliminal message that will galvanize me.