art quilts

[dragonlady7]

isn't really an art quilt, but it's a thing, anyway, embroidery, sewing

via https://ift.tt/3mjY3N3

so I have been Stirred by Weird Desires to make textile art for about two decades now and most recently I have been consumed for a couple of years now about how I want to do complicated little embroidery pieces with applique and couching and shit like that, and I did start one such project earlier this year. While locked down at MM’s house, I took a canvas panel I’d cut for something else, and appliqued some strange bits to it and began a complicated piece that says “Sorry For Party Rockin’.”

(I go on about this and my new project behind the cut)

I nearly completed that– I had to obsessively re-stitch over and over one letter I ill-advisedly chose do to in padded satin stitch which is the worst fucking thing ever and I’m bad at it??– and have set it aside and lost it, but when it’s done I’m going to probably make it into a wall hanging and give it to MM.

(She had a CD that included that song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng_t5D8tVvM, around the time it came out, and she used to listen to it as she drove her former hour-long commute to work, so she has it completely memorized and will occasionally recite it. Including during our Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt playthroughs– on one memorable occasion he was killing drowners on a beach and she sang the entire song start-to-finish and we debated what kind of tan lines Geralt would get. As if that man could tan.)

(that’s a photo from before I did the satin stitch on the R.)

ANYHOO I decided that I had to make my mother-not-in-law something for Christmas, since she’s the only person I’ll see on Christmas, and since when I asked her what she wanted for Christmas the only thing she wanted was a cheap kit on Amazon of sewing threads. She’s a quilter and makes a little over 52 quilts every year for the last several years and so for some fucking reason, for some inexplicable and bizarre fucking reason, my heart is set on making her a tiny quilted thing like to be a hot dish mat? Like, you are the most accomplished quilter I know if and I have made a grand total of one (non-pieced!) quilt in my life so clearly this??? is what my dumb ass is going to make you???? I don’t fucking know but my brain is hung up on it so I Must, apparently. (Don’t worry, she’ll be polite about it.)

But. About 15 years ago she said some Latvian folk saying and I thought it was really funny and wrote it down and since then I have been trying to figure out how to make it into something. The saying, literally translated, is “It’s not my first time on the roof with a pipe”, and roughly means “it’s not my first rodeo”, meaning like, I know it’s dangerous but I also know what I’m doing (can be said sarcastically)– and by roof, they mean thatched roof, and by pipe they mean smoking pipe, so.

Anyway I had a little frenzy of creative output this weekend, watched two how-to videos on art quilts, realized I can’t follow directions for shit, and just went for it. I looked at image searches of thatched-roof buildings, came up with a minimal sort of design, sketched it roughly to fit on a sheet of printer paper, decided that was the scale I’m working at so there, and went in the basement and found scraps of fabric that suited my aesthetic. Cut the templates out of paper, cut the fabric with overly-generous seam allowances as is my wont, and sewed two of the pieces together. Sewed on a third, and then realized that… you can’t… attach two wildly curved pieces to one another by sewing them together from the wrong side. That’s not how anything works. Pieced quilts are made largely of triangles for this reason.

So I contemplated my options. Redesign the whole thing to only use straight lines? Perfectly reasonable, then I could hand-embroider the wavy lines I originally designed over the top, and that would add an extra level of dimensionality. Sure! Perfect.

But then these pieces I cut would be trash. They were already bits of salvaged garments, scraps and remnants I bought or my mother gave me– nothing I’d purchased would be wasted, here. But I couldn’t face having to start over.

So instead I taught myself needle-turn applique so that I could stitch down the wild curves by overlapping them over the excessive seam allowances of the neighboring pieces. So now I have an excessively handstitched little quilt block. (And as a bonus, I fully mastered a technique for the first two seams that is not needleturned applique, and so the stitches show, and then I tried another technique, and– well, it’s wildly different in quality from start to finish, and the only redeeming feature is that I didn’t work left-to-right so it’s not as obvious. But it’s wildly varying and kind of hilariously-so.)

WHATEVER.

So here’s my quilt block, for a one-block quilt I have no actual notion of how to finish. I think I’m going to bind it, and i don’t know how to do that so I’m going to bind it badly, and probably do the whole thing by hand, so there we go.

(See the roof at the bottom (two different pairs of corduroy pants i wore out more than ten years ago), and then blue sky, and then the middle is… not blue? I also didn’t take a picture yet but there’s a brown corduroy chimney I’ve now appliqued down in the middle there between the yellow and the pink. And the yellow is the bit I did first where I was like ahh applique is so easy I am doing well and then I looked and was like whatever technique this was, it was not needle-turn applique. Also: was I careful about grainlines in the whole thing to avoid distortion? I tried to be and yet I was not, somehow! Ha I am bad at this.)

The problem now is that i wrote down what she said but I have no way of spellchecking it or otherwise making sure it’s accurate. I can find some of the phrase used on Latvian-language websites; obviously from context it’s a real saying, but the one source is clearly using it as a double-entendre (some sex scandal making it clear that getting pipe on a roof translates with idiom intact, thanks!) and I just can’t find independent corroboration of, like, the little things like subject-verb agreement and word endings. Google Translate is of some use but keeps “correcting” it to no longer specify who the speaker is, etc. (i.e. it makes it say “not the first time” instead of “not my first time” so I’m not sure how correctly to say “my first time” instead? am I saying it wrong or is it just that Translate has more examples of the former and so thinks it’s correct?)

So like. Anyone fluent in Latvian? Please hmu. I don’t want to hand-embroider this and then finish the block and then find out I made a screaming error in grammar though that might actually make it even funnier, since I’m depicting a bad outcome and it’s a saying meaning don’t worry I got this and it’s funnier if I’m wrong?…

(I could ask her but I don’t want her to get suspicious. Well to be fair there’s no way any reasonable human would suspect that I’m making a quilt block for a master quilter so it won’t matter. I really should just ask her.)

(Orrrrrr I could just put it on there in English.)

Opinion time– I was going to couch down some fluffy gray handspun coming out of the chimney to be smoke. Should I, instead, couch it down in the shape of the letters, in the sky? I was thinking “not my first time” in the sky and then “on the roof with a pipe” on the roof, but another option is just to do all the lettering on the roof. I feel like the latter will be more easily legible but does it matter that much?

I guess that’s two opinions I’m asking for– #1 do it in Latvian or in English? and #2 put the text all on the roof, or make some of it be in the sky?

Comments

[redstapler]

by roof, they mean thatched roof, and by pipe they mean smoking pipe, so.

I 100% imagined someone on like...a suburban roof with an 18" long lead pipe and I am holding this image in my heart like a treasure.

[harpers_child]

I don't have any advice but this sounds awesome.