So, I’ve taken the plunge and begun to practice free-motion quilting. I arbitrarily chose a pattern that I’d heard was the easiest to master, stippling. In the hands of an expert, it looks like this:
Sometimes I think it looks beautiful. Other times, like brain coral!

It didn’t take me long to discover that stippling should not be the first undertaking of a beginner! The pattern is dense, the direction of sewing changes constantly, the curvy ins and outs are quite small, perfectly rounded shapes are essential, and fast sewing is key to the flowing look of the design. All of which are beyond my meager skills, as the next few pictures attest.

What you’re seeing are my 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th (finally, some improvement!) and 20th samplers and the back of my 25th effort.

At this point, I heaved the 65-pound Bernina down the stairs and into the car (seat-belting it in place!) and drove to the nearest expert for hands-on help.

Sharon and I spent 2-1/2 hours cleaning the machine, looking for errant threads, experimenting with every conceivable combination of thread and bobbin tension. It turned out that everything that was amiss with my samplers reflected my inexperience—except for two things. We discovered that my default bobbin tension produced tighter-than-normal tension and that a tiny icon in the bobbin case recommended a looser setting to achieve the true factory default. And it turned out that a flange in the bobbin case had somehow rotated out of alignment.

During all this patient experimenting, Sharon cheerfully plied me with tips and suggestions and didn’t let me leave until I could produce some curvier curves without tears.

I revived myself with an apricot-almond oatcake from a nearby bakery, went swimming and then came home to try again.

I’m still a long way off from real stippling, but at least there’s visible improvement. More important, perhaps, I actually like the look of the pattern in these last two photos.

My plan now is to continue making stippling samplers, but not exclusively. I’ve found some easier, looser, larger free-motion patterns, and I’ll add those to my daily mix. I’m blazing through yards of muslin, and I treated myself (on Sharon’s orders) to some large floral prints from Satin Moon for practice in outlining shapes.

I’m starting to have fun!

It’s been so long since I’ve posted here I’ve practically forgotten how.

I’ve still got it—that wonderful sophomoric ability to balance a salt shaker on its edge on just a grain (or two) of salt! Glen caught me in the act at Spinney’s.

I don’t know whether I’m ashamed or proud of it, but I have upholstery fabrics going back more than 30 years.

The most venerable of the bunch is a glorious chocolate Deco fabric, purchased on the lower East Side at Zarin and used for black-out drapes in our Park Avenue South bedroom. (I worked the lob-
ster shift back then and slept by day.) I’m also partial to a fabric with grey-green leaves and peach- and mauve-colored flowers that I used for pinch-pleat drapes in our 2nd Avenue home. And there’s still a scandalous quantity of a rugged tan material, splashed with white and pink flowers and lots of foliage, that I managed to turn into roller shades. In the pre-Martha Stewart era, no less.

The fabric held up well to the rigors of the shade-making process, I remember, and blessedly never frayed along the edges. But the roll-up mechanism was always a little bit unreliable. So occasionally we’d be awakened in the dead of night by the loud fwap-fwap-fwap of a lowered shade unexpectedly rolling itself up.

The picture above shows one of the roman shades in my kitchen. With the amount of leftover yardage I just found in the garage (what was I thinking!?), I could make new shades, curtains, swags and valances for three kitchens. But I’ve lived with this fabric for nearly 16 years now and I think I’m ready to retire it (and all things floral, perhaps).

So I boxed up all the unused yardage, set out for SCRAP and then turned the car around and came home. I couldn’t do it. That’s when I came up with my latest harebrained scheme, a way of honoring the sentimental tug of these fabrics without actually keeping the whole lot: Bags and aprons.

To borrow a phrase from my sister-in-law: Like a need another time-suck? But evidently I do. (Besides, it’s such a pleasure making piping from bias strips!) So now that I have proof-of-concept, I’ll cut out all the pieces for bags from all the different fabrics, plus an apron or two. And then I’ll try again to jettison the excess yardage.

I was gathering the materials to explore moku hanga. The blocks, baren, and brushes were finally ordered from MacClain’s after a six-month break. And just today I located my first try at carving and all the proofs from that block. Lots to learn.

D’you remember that my sister-in-law Maggie works for Eliot Feld Ballet? Well, today I had a quick tour of the company’s fabulous studio and school AND I got to shake hands with him!

After lunch, walking through Madison Square Park, my brother, Glen and I began noticing oddities on the surrounding rooftops. Workmen? No. Jumpers? Thankfully, no. Life-size nude statues? Yes!

They’re part of an exhibition called Event Horizon that has placed 31 statues around the park and atop buildings in the surrounding Flat Iron district. The British sculptor, Antony Gormley, had this wonderful nonsense to say about the installation:

“I want to play with the city and people’s perceptions. My intention is to get the sculptures as close to the edge of the buildings as possible. … The gaze is the principle dynamic of the work; the idea of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, and in the process perhaps re-assessing your own position in the world. So in encountering these peripheral things, perhaps one becomes aware of one’s status of embedment.”

Molly’s “emergency mom” in Washington (and our host for 10 days) is about to get a degree from the Smithsonian Corcoran masters program in the history of decorative arts. Bev is a lover of textiles, costumes and above all, lace. (Her thesis concerns “refash-
ioned” lace in the Gilded Age, of which more later.). Last Thursday, the day I let Molly go back to dorm life, Bev got me into a behind-the-scenes tour of the lace collection at the Museum of American Art.

The laces are housed in jam-packed room, in special metal cabinetry, something like a cross between specimen drawers and flat files. Their names come the towns where they were first made.

I wish I had scribbled notes as the drawers were opened and closed, opened and closed. But I spent the two hours in stun-
ned wonder-
ment and now, alas, remem-
ber very few names. The topmost pic is Chantilly. The 2nd full-size picture shows samples of tat-
ting. The bot-
tom picture demonstrates the making of bobbin lace.

Pix from my excursion to Purl Bee!

The first two pix show Liberty prints; isn’t the map incredible? Next, yarns. Then flannel wool, also available on the bolt. And finally, oil cloth made from Japanese cottons.

The store is in the cast-iron district, a nice walk south from very strong coffee at La Lanterna on MacDougal.

Take time for fun stuff, solo.

For me, that meant patting Patience and Fortitude on their paws yesterday afternoon and spending time exploring two exhibitions in the New York Public Library.

Both celebrated anniver-
saries: Candide at 250 and Mapping New York’s Shoreline: 1609 to 2009.

I’m returning to the map exhibition today—it was extensive, beautiful and deserves a second visit.

My timing was very lucky; it was the very last day of the Candide exhibition. It was quite small but filled with pleasures and treasures. The (soft) background music was excerpted from Bernstein’s Candide, which I like but which I haven’t listened to in an age. The centerpiece of the exhibition (for me) was a small table with 17 small books, copies of every edition that appeared in 1759. The only other library with copies of all 17 “first” editions is the Bodleian; not even the French have them all. These were published anonymously and the author’s name was given as Mr. Le Docteur Ralph!

The other stellar object was the sole surviving manuscript of Candide, loaned by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Look at that handwriting! Voltaire dictated it to a secretary, but the annotations are in his hand.

The head of the NYPL is a Voltaire scholar and listening to a video about his first encounter with Candide, at 18, was a pleasure. He was then a student at Holy Cross, Candide was still on the Vatican’s list of banned books, and he had to seek permission from the bishop of western Massachusetts to read it!

The exhibition showed only two Rockwell Kent illustrations (the artwork I most associate with Candide), but all the others are online. I hadn’t realized that the Rockwell Kent Candide was the inaugural publication for Random House, and that its logo comes from an illustration on the colophon page. Nor had I realized that a sexually explicit drawing was held back from publication but happily it was in the show.

Okay, it’s a stretch writing about a visit to New York on a blog called The Working Artist’s Daybook. The thing is, my pictures look better and my stories read better in blog form than in email. So by way of justification I offer the headline above and the nonsense below.

Part of our pleasure when visiting les girls is to eat out—at places they can’t afford, at places we remember with fondness or places they’ve discovered. The pictures below show the vast pastrami and corned beef sandwich we shared at the Carnegie Deli this past Friday night. The remainder fills much of Emily’s freezer. And today’s leftovers will supply her week’s lunches!

Sunday, Emily introduced us to her local Indian place, Mughlai, and a shop called Bomboloni that specializes in tiny round delectable jelly doughnuts. Oh, and Paul. But that’s for another time.