Fibermania

Home for a minute!

It's great to be back home in the loving arms of Dave and not great to be back home in a snow storm, which while beautiful, is a nasty turn of events after being in gorgeous Florida last week.

Booo!

Not being willing to pay $7 a day for internet access (on principal!) I was offline all week and had to wait until last night when I got home to get back online. Then the Oscars then distracted me so I waited til this morning to read all the blogs I missed and to evaluate my New Jersey show.

Here's the bottom line. I love love love teaching. I loved connecting with my students and playing with them in class and getting to know them at lunch. Because of a snow scare in NJ, several registrants stayed home so the 25 spots were reduced to 18 one day and 13 the next, making for a very intimate group setting. Then Saturday, I taught two sessions of machine quilting and since the snow never really happened, all attended, filling 25 spots in the morning and another 25 at the afternoon session. Then I gave a lecture after that, so my mouth got a real workout.

On Friday I was able to see my exhibit and the rest of the quilt show. The winners from the Mid-Atlantic quilt show were on display, which was great since I was not able to attend that show, and was so happy to see the great work that won all the awards. I saw several pieces from people I know, and was so pleased at the recognition they so richly deserved.

It gave me pause however... I had this feeling, which may be difficult to express here, but I will give it a try. When one is beginning to enter quilt contests, one is willing to go for more and more, or willing to put the whipped cream, the nuts and the cherry on the quilt and spend months and months perfecting every little thing before sending it off to be judged. These quilts have a tour de force quality to them and are fully loaded with every trick the quilter knows. It is very impressive. Exhausting, amazing and impressive.

I know the feeling of making something like this, and I just don't want to do it anymore.

This was a big realization for me. For years I loved the race, the competition, the process, the award winning, but somehow, it all seems to be over for me in my heart. I just haven't the enthusiasm for jumping through the hoops that I once had.

I still love making the quilts. But I want them to be somehow different. I want the motive to be different. I need to make them for other reasons.

The quilts I will be making from now on will be the kind that will be loved not for the pyrotechnics but for the satisfaction of enjoying the process, the design and the color...just for my own satisfaction. I will probably still enter them, for a myriad of reasons, sharing, participating in showing new work, and for the fact that I am happy with the product. But I wish to step back and just make work that pleases me. I have lost interest in tap dancing as fast as I can, tired of trying to prove something...

That said, here are some shots of the exhibit I had in New Jersey. I sent in 16 large pieces, which have never been shown together before. Three pieces were made just for this show.

Moonstruck which was made in '97 I think. 62"x80, fused, hand dyed and machine quilted. The piece looked pretty good here and hung straight, always a plus.

Parallel Paths which was my Visions piece from '96 I think. A bit of a curl at the edges from being rolled up in my closet all these years.

Ringscycle #? hung in the same bay. It has not been exhibited very often, but it was nicely lit and the silk looked pretty good.

Tropicana was creased and the rod pocket was skimpy, because I had reduced it to hang on a smaller rod at home, and forgot that I had done that. The huge rods at the quilt shows take up all that ease and make the top roll in an icky way. Not good.

Leaf Light looked positively awful. The angle of the lights made every wrinkle OBVIOUS and my heart sank. I wanted to rip it right off the rod and hide it from view. This quilt hangs in my living room regularly and looks just perfect there. I was sick when I saw how horrible it looked there.

But wait, there were worse things to come. Croton, in the actual light in which it hung. Need I say more?

This was Cruciform #1 RED. The light was behind the quilt and only one bottom corner was in the light. One had to pick up the quilt (verboten) to see what it really looks like. The same bad lighting situation happened to Green and The Dance, which I will not even bother to post.

While I was grateful to have the opportunity to have the exhibit, at the same time, I was so disappointed at the lighting. I understand the restrictions of the site, and the fact that all the quilts in the show had similar chance of being in the good light or not. This is not the first time this has happened and I know it has also happened to you when you entered a quilt you dearly loved and saw it hanging in the dark.

There is a problem with these halls and convention centers, since they are not art venues, but we as quilters are so willing to overlook the bad lighting and don't make waves about it. Would men take this sitting down? You tell me.