Category: Quilting

When more is more

11/5/2025

I’ve learned to live with a head full of bees but these days it’s all about wasps.

So. Many. Wasps. Wasps that retreated indoors last week after the pest-control guy shot up the kitchen fan vent with a killer powder. Wasps that just wouldn’t stay away even after two pest-control guys came back to deal with the discovery of an impressive-sized nest metastasizing inside the wall. I spent most of the week whacking at wasps and sucking them up in the hand-held vacuum cleaner. Whacking and sucking, whacking and sucking.
It’s not the sight of a single curled-up carcass that gives me the willies; it’s the sheer volume of them. A ladybug on my forearm might prompt that little rhyme, Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your children are burned… Wait, what is that all about? My point is, if a cloud of ladybugs landed on my arm I would be screaming like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Hitchcock knew all about the power of numbers to turn bird-friendly movie-goers into ornithophobes.

Poster art from the 1963 Hitchcock classic, “The Birds.”

A large mass of harmless insects doesn’t even need to touch me to get my skin crawling, like the summer when I watched my mother slap at a few flying ants on the window with her fly-swatter while behind her a black mass of hatchlings oozed out of a wood ceiling beam and swarmed the room. Even writing about that overabundance gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Large accumulations of a single object — animate or inanimate — cranks up the visual volume. Canadian artist-photographer Edward Burtynsky introduced viewers to the extreme-scale reality of global trade in Manufactured Landscapes from the first scene of some sewers bent over their machines in the Hongqingting Shoe Factory, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. There is no commentary as the camera slow-pans down the length of what emerges as a stadium-sized building full of several hundred workers, allowing us to fully grasp the enormity of this production. (And that was 20 years ago.)

Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photograph, Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China, 2005 via Public Delivery (https://publicdelivery.org/edward-burtynsky-china/)

But the power of increased scale, accumulation of objects and repetition of patterns isn’t always in service for horror; how or when to use that power comes into question whenever I’m developing new work. Is more more here? Or does repeating the unit or method dilute its essence, reducing the overall work to an underwhelming pattern? More importantly, is my interest in pumping up the volume in art just hoarding?

An accumulation of matchbooks is just a collection.

“Matchy Matchy”, an atypical presentation of an accumulation of matchbooks (left) and a three-hour painting-sketch of that collection (right). (Carlyn Yandle)

A benign single ‘log cabin’ hand-stitched quilt block.

The growth potential of “Hearth” (2020), hand-stitched log-cabin quilt blocks of different sizes, is limitless. (Carlyn Yandle)

When more is more: A large scale painting of an overabundance of layered squares aims to overwhelm in “PopUp: Triptych,” 2010, acrylic on panel, 96”Wx48”H

These are the busy-busy bees’ questions that mostly come at night when the wasps have gone to sleep, resting up to torment me another day.

Quilting and connecting

9/7/2025

If you stitch it (in public) they will come

An artist-instructor friend advised me, as I was preparing my portfolio to apply to art school, that if I was planning to include images of my quilts and rag rugs and mosaic’d vessels, I should group these as Craft Use Objects.

I’m sure she didn’t mean it but the word ‘craft’ seemed to have a stink to it. And the fact that these items were for actual use (as opposed to useless?) was also a bit whiffy. I spent the following six years of fine-arts studies needling at the question, What’s the use of art?

I eventually found two good uses for creating exhibition-type paintings, sculptures, floorworks and fibre installations: making use of used, disused or misused materials instead of consuming new materials; and growing community through the gathering of those materials. I monkeyed around with job-site debris delivered by construction workers; broken toys from my sister’s kids and her friends’ kids; old embroidered linens, doilies and buttons from my mother’s friends and other artists; jeans from my brother and others; old paintings from my father; burlap coffee bags from the coffee-roaster; pennies from friends; and businessmen’s white linen shirts from, well, businessmen.

In the end it all boiled down to one three-word artist statement: Making is connecting. This is not an original idea and maybe a little obvious but it’s been my roadmap for creating ever since.

Which brings me to “Shatter”, the title of my latest virtually/almost/nearly finished not-at-all-stinky Craft Use Object. (After many decades of making quilts I’ve decided that any quilts that are not direct copies of a pattern, that have taken on a personality of their own, deserve a title just as much as Artwork.) This one has emerged as a field of shattered circles, a project that shatters any expectations for this quilt and this quilter. It also relates to the times of its making, November 2024 to June 2025 — need I say more? “Shatter” is a cozy, slightly chaotic project that embeds silks and satins gifted by friends, as well as hours of focus, frustration and endurance, all in the service of creating the many meanings of comfort.

Hand-quilting detail, Shatter quilt, 2025 (Carlyn Yandle)

The sunny, warm weather this past week made it possible to take “Shatter” to the park to spread out for a few hours of the victory lap in quilt-making: encasing the mess of batting and threads in a precise frame of binding through hand-stitching. We made it! And it’s square! -ish!

AN OUTDOOR TRADITION: When there’s no room indoors to spread out a queen-sized project, quilting is necessarily a seasonal activity. (Carlyn Yandle, 2003)

“Shatter” is an attention-getter. The pie-piece blocks of satin and gold top-stitching shimmer in the sun against the matte midnight-blue cotton background. It compelled some park visitors to comment as I bent over the binding. Nice quilt. I love quilts. Did you make this yourself? My grandmother was a quilter. I would love to learn to quilt. I found a great vintage quilt. Do you fix zippers? (Please stop asking me if I fix zippers.) By the end of the day “Shatter” was also the site of a long discussion with a friend broken up by her break-up. When all was said and done we stood up, hugged and I rolled up the quilt, the equivalent of seeing someone out of the office.
It remains rolled up, ready as another sunny, social setting or a cozy, tears-absorbent spot to stretch out on or curl up in.

MAKING IN PUBLIC: The neighbourhood park on a sunny, dry day is the perfect/only space for hand-stitching a large project.

Originally published on Substack earlier this summer.

Beyond a cozy retreat

1/10/2025

Handmade quilts of found fabrics layer up multiple meanings

The squirrels that inhabit my head have been threatening to start a roller derby so I’ve shut it all down by doing something constructive: I’m literally wrapping myself up in my ongoing Perfectly Imperfect quilt project.

I’m a construction team of one these dark days, bound up in binding together found satins, brocades and denim with cotton batting and mattress ticking. In this inherent need to make, I am a lady-in-waiting, making myself useful while the MAGA/Trump/tech-oligarchy snarl takes hold later this month.

Hand-stitching around design elements that are more sawtooth than circular in the Perfectly Imperfect quilt.

I made my first quilt out of old bedsheets and pillowcases as a teenager for my little sister shortly after my mother gave me my first sewing machine and before I knew what I was doing. When my skills were adequate, I advanced to birthday and Christmas gifts and my own homey items like table runners and cushion covers, then moved on to crib quilts for babies, many of whose names I’ve forgotten and are now in their 30s, and for weddings for couples who are still together or have since divorced.

Many moons ago an aunt gave me a spiral-bound notebook with a picture of a quilt on the cover so I used it to stuff in all the photos, notes, design sketches and written correspondence related to each project. I see this book now as a personal history of learning about pattern, colour and cloth. I try not to wince at the early projects in the way that you should not berate the kid you once were. That bulging notebook is as multilayered as the under-construction Perfectly Imperfect quilt. Both are useful, improvisational objects embedded with explorations in form and function, and memories of the endurance, joy, frustration, satisfaction and an acceptance that the maker herself is a work in progress.

Laying down the layers for basting in place. An added border of string-pieced satins and silk echo the inner design and bring the quilt to my preferred dimension of queen-size.

By the time I left the newspaper and started art school the notebook was full so it felt like the end of those life chapters. I relied on some of those skills to lead hand-stitching sessions during post-graduate work but it took a pandemic lockdown to see the connective power of quilt-making. Friends and strangers found ways to share unwanted fabrics via drop-offs and pickups through social-media groups and met up online for hand-stitching sessions that opened up a safe space for talking through these curious times.

For those of us without a long-arm sewing machine, ‘in-the-ditch’ machine-stitching a queen-sized quilt is an endurance test.

I finally bought another spiral notebook and started gluesticking in photos and design sketches from my more useless quilt-y artworks. Then two years ago last Fall, after increasingly difficult weeks caring for my brother, I pulled out a stack of six-inch-square blocks in a pale palette of aqua-blues, creams, greys, and pinks left over from my 16-year-old nephew’s crib-sized quilt. I grounded the palette by adding twice as many matching blocks in earthy browns and navy blues, stitching them all into rows and then into a queen-sized quilt top. I call that one Rough Patch, fittingly unfinished.

A quilt makes its mark at births, birthdays, seasonal holidays or political moments, marriages, friendships, illnesses and in remembrance. I like the idea of a quilt for a new human who isn’t here yet or may arrive after I’m gone. Imperfectly Perfect, composed of unstable, slippery, fraying fabric scraps and made during the time when Americans fell for the grift of the century, feels like it’s for that person. I hope they like it.

When going back is good

11/23/2024

Past failures are invaluable teaching tools

This is my picking-up-the-pieces post, which is literally what I’m doing these days (and late nights).

With the outlook looking very dark indeed I turned to my colourful stash of fabrics that I keep at eye level in a wine crate on the wall. The ‘BACK’ and ‘NEXT’ sign plates — evoking the buttons on the bottom of every online form — are courtesy of an artist friend, so I texted him for his opinion on how to proceed in these times of need:

Turns out things are going back politically, now that the majority of Americans have voted in villains to run the show. I’m going back too, but only to revisit those failures for the lessons they hold for moving forward.

Exhibit A: Here I spent a good portion of one day heating a tapestry needle with a Bic lighter and poking it through a piece of stiff synthetic paper. Over and over. I loved the subtractive mark-making (also known as ‘burning holes’) and the increase in density that culminated in a large negative space. I was working as an artist-research assistant with astrophysicists and other big brains at the time so I think I was trying to get a grip on the concept of black holes or negative energy (not so much). Learning outcome: Breathing in melting synthetic paper fumes creates a whopper of a headache. Not an indoor sport.

Exhibit A

My father was a lifelong painter of mostly landscapes but I knew he was losing his mind when he looked at the last work-in-progress on his easel and declared, “Well I don’t know what’s going on here!” This is how I feel when I look at Exhibit B: A four-panel collage painting of lacy construction-crane patterns topped with bits of Tyvek building wrap and strips of acrylic skins. Learning outcome: I need to add a letter to my will requesting that all weird artwork be destroyed upon my demise.

Exhibit B

Moving on to Exhibit C: some jeans with all fabric removed and re-configured as a net or scaffolding. Maybe a more clever artist could write a profound statement about this that could land it in an Important Art Exhibit, perhaps something about togetherness or workers united, or maybe the hollowing out of union labour. It said nothing to me but the materials and technique were eventually incorporated into two distinct large-scale artworks. Learning outcome: Even dead-end projects contain something to build on.

Exhibit C

Exhibit D is a collection of coffee-bean sacks attached to a wall with sewing pins. I was exploring the sculptural possibilities of burlap, the shadow effects and warm tones, the varying weaves and the fonts of the silk-screened labels. But tacking bunched-up bags wasn’t enough.

Exhibit D

I doubled down, stitching one bag after another to a rusty concrete-forming tie, then pulling out most of the weft from the weave, macramé-ing them, then coating them with ready-use concrete mix. Meh. I knotted up the deconstructed sacks following designs of specific architecture, including a cathedral. I lashed the steel ties together and suspended the lot of them in an overly ambitious arrangement that called for a dozen more of these time-sucking labours from hell. I was stuck in that encrusted, fibrous rabbit hole for most of 2021. Learning outcome: Going bigger isn’t the answer when it’s not working and it’s okay to drop the project despite the large investment in time. Also, turns out my lungs don’t react well to the burlap-fibre dust bunnies floating around the studio.

Detail of concretized burlap macramé experiments

I finally received a sign to restart a couple of weeks ago when another artist gave me a collection of silky striped fabric swatches. They reminded me of some finicky, slippery satin quilt blocks I started a decade ago. I pulled out the fraying, wonky squares that had defeated me but decided to work with them. This will be a queen-sized memory quilt of my perfectly imperfect past. Learning outcome: Failures may need time for new energy, ideas and skill to arrive. This is that time.

Work in progress: Piecing together an abandoned project with new energy.

On radical self-care

11/20/2024

Making ourselves whole through making

First there is shock. I saw it in a coffee shop in a small US city the morning Trump was elected — again. The place was full but hushed. “Are you okay?”, one customer after another whispered to the three female baristas. Nods. Shrugs. Back to work.

Another shock hit the next day, when a friend confirmed our worst fears: the cancer had spread, nothing more for it. Silence, then tears all around.

First the shock, then the rage. Why? Why now? Why them? Why us? We cast around for blame. Eventually we arrive at the only thing for it: regrouping, starting from the self and working out from there.

My no-nonsense inner grandlady tells me to Get a hold of yourself, advice I take in the most loving way. I hold myself up by burrowing in for a nap, taking a walk wherever the trees are, sinking into a hot bath. There is a kind of exquisiteness during this inward time of radical self-care. This engagement with the physical world is a humane activity that breaks the paralysis, the start of ‘getting it together’ or gathering oneself.

Gathering is also a trauma response to life-shattering events (look at hoarding). The urge to collect the shards and scraps is an attempt to make ourselves whole. I find solace in pulling together material scraps of handwork by other makers and other traditions, not to recreate the past but to consider new possibilities, new forms. Puzzling over textures and techniques is quiet, contemplative work. There is no pre-planning, no goal-setting to be achieved; I’m simply forging connections, intent on finding a fresh beauty in the rejected and damaged remains, one stitch at a time in a sort of personal/political practice.

After we collect ourselves we collect up with others because we humans are pack animals. We share our grief because we know that that emotion is a monster not to be ignored. Even the kitties or pups instinctively know when the moment calls for cozying up to their people.

Some of us share our art because we have to. We brew up a mug of Bengal Spice tea, clear a space on the table heaped with scraps of fabric, unravelling lace and stained embroidered linens, plug in the laptop and open an empty screen. And we reach out.

Donated hand-stitched linens and lace offer a further layer of meaning to an expanded painting practice (detail). (Carlyn Yandle)

An iron will is needed now

11/4/2024

Working out those wrinkles is so satisfyingIf you’re uselessly wringing your hands right about now, pump some iron.
Hear me out: Ironing is useful, which, in the few days left before the US election, is the opposite position of those of us watching who can’t vote or compel Americans to vote. With democracy itself teetering on the brink it’s best to stop flitting about, pants on fire, and instead grab onto something stable and practical. Just maybe don’t do it in front of the latest broadcast of any of the mega-rich misogynists’ rallying cries; the TV screen is no match to an overhand launch of an iron.
If you’re rolling your eyes at this suggestion you may still be triggered by the iron as symbol of just more unpaid women’s housework, promoted through those post-war images of an ecstatic housewife standing before the only board she has access to. If you view her hubby’s freshly starched white shirt as his day pass out of one of those little boxes made of ticky-tacky, you are still afflicted.
I get it; letting go of the iron-as-shackles connection doesn’t come easy when you are born into that milieu. My cousin recently shared a photo of the two of us, as young as six, standing knock-kneed in skirts and knee-socks at a kid-sized ironing board, playing ironing yet there was little evidence of ironing activity in my own childhood home. This shit was insidious.
Inflation was hitting hard those days, and the petrochemical industry found an opportunity: pushing polyester as the time-saver for women who by choice or necessity entered the workforce. When my grandmother found herself single in her 40s she traded her home-sewn floral cotton dresses for Sears Fortrel mix ’n’ match coordinates, got her teacher’s certificate and moved to a remote town for work. My McDonald’s uniform was an itchy kelly-green combo of stretch pants and striped zip-up collared top.
Skip forward a few decades and we’re barely treading water in the synthetic polymersea of fast-fashion clothing that fuels microplastic pollution.

Ironing has no role in this wrinkle-free, race-to-the-bottom system. It’s part of the repairing-is-caring continuum toward a circular economy of natural-fibre clothing and toward our own well-being. It relaxes both rumpled, creased woven cottons and linens and our fine selves. You can’t doom-scroll when you’re gliding across a soft surface, settling wrinkles with puffs of steam. Ahhhhhh.
Quilters know all about the rewards of ironing following hours of wrestling bits of fabric into new arrangements with a temperamental sewing machine. Even the wonkiest quilt blocks in that stack “will all press out.” Ohhhmmm.
The time spent ironing favourite linens and natural-fibre clothing is an investment in those pieces, a time for personal reflection on their making and their makers. Grandma Flo may have embraced her wash-and-wear polyester pieces but she never abandoned ironing her quality dressy things or her fine cutwork table linens hand-stitched by her sisters. When it was my turn to have her over for tea she would tsk-tsk at my creased tablecloth. That it was thrifted was no excuse; all linens deserved pressing.
A decade after her death I created a part-figurative alterpiece anchored by a Teflon iron plate. The assemblage of found objects reflects her strength in the face of tumultuous change and the little pleasures of her everyday like teatimes, decoration and costume jewelry.

Two views of “Teflon Flo”: Found lamp base, iron plate, jelly mould, tea strainer, chandelier crystals (Carlyn Yandle)

At this writing, it is Dia de los Muertos and Teflon Flo is front and centre and shining its light. A few feet away from this ofrenda is a deep scorch mark in the circa-1898 wood floor that, judging by its diminutive footprint, dates back decades. I take it as a warning from a past homemaker — I’ve conflated her with my grandmother — to unplug the iron or it will all burn down. Which I am not thinking will happen if Trump is elected. Not thinking about that at all.

A warning from decades past: Don’t let it all burn down (Carlyn Yandle)

End of an era for Vancouver makers

9/7/2024

The one great store that fuels textile dreams is closing due to small-business struggles

Judging by the early deluge of reactions on Reddit last week, we Vancouver makers are stunned to learn that our mecca for material and more is selling off its inventory and properties and closing for good. And I’m dealing with it like the full-grown woman I am.

Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!

Vancouver has never had the big shmata (cloth trade) districts like Montreal or Toronto. In these parts, we have Dressew Supply, a sort of rough-around-the-edges department store almost bursting with bolts of liquidation fabrics, sparkly applique patches, headbanger wigs, thousands of buttons, zippers, feather boas, skeins of yarn, rolls of ribbon and every sewing notion imaginable to satisfy the city’s crafty counter-culture vibe.

Vancouver never had the garment district of Toronto, where “Uniform Measure/Stack" (1997), designed by Stephen Cruise (stephencruise.ca), monumentalizes objects of the trade, originally with painted path of yellow measuring tape.

I am with my people here: the grandmothers who sew Christmas-gift pajamas, the goths, the quilters, the film and theatre set designers, the dance-gymnastics girls, the fashion-school students, and more recently, Pride paraders, Halloween costumers and cosplayers. Moving through those jammed aisles of colour and pattern revitalizes the brain, especially in our soggy, dark mid-winters.

I have a long history of ruining homemade garments made from my purchases at Dressew. I blame this on the tedious, mandatory Grade 8 girls’ sewing class designed to turn us into skilled workers or housewives. So when my community-college-student budget demanded I make my own nightclubbing “look” and wedding-guest frocks, I took an improv approach, using the cheapest $2/yard “100% unknown fibers” fabrics that smelled as flammable as they looked. I was lured by the big books of “Make it tonight!” Butterick, Style and Simplicity patterns and when this timeline proved unlikely, I’d game the instructions by swapping, say, a long back zipper with self-adhesive Velcro, or cramming in some thick shoulder pads to try to give shape to my latest sagging acetate atrocity. I don’t have photographic evidence of the voluminous emerald taffeta dress with the watermelon-sized sleeves that I wore to a cousin’s wedding but I can see in the snapshot of the baby-blue Cinderella-style dress at another wedding that I didn’t see ‘fit’ as an area of concern.

Nevertheless I persisted! I dreamed big, undeterred by minimal skill and patience or my wonky sewing machine that I dropped on the floor more than once. These projects were doomed to fail, like the grey pin-striped double-breasted suit for my university boyfriend who actually wore the blazer for a while but who was also likely relieved that the trousers never materialized. And I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all those unwilling children in my life who endured the double humiliation of being gifted one of my hand-sewn polar-fleece hats and posing for a photo in it for their mother’s thank-you note.

Evidence of ill-fitting, over-padded and plain cruel past projects.

The magic of that store is in the endless possibilities and I always left with hope in my heart that this time I will read the directions. I will take breaks. I will use pins. I will find scissors that don’t chew the fabric. I will not view interfacing as optional.
I eventually redeemed myself as the family-and-friends’ Halloween costume-maker, taking the bus downtown with one kid or another while conferring over their concept drawing that I assigned to weed out the uncommitted. They also had to help cut, sew, glue and paint as required, so I wouldn’t take all the blame for shoddy workmanship.

Learning to sew is more fun when it’s a costume.

I also got pretty good at reupholstering because I had the good sense to take some continuing-ed classes on the subject as a young adult (rather than a self-conscious, hormonal 13-year-old) led by a retired skilled professional. Still on a tight budget, I learned to revamp found vintage armchairs with Dressew’s bargain upholstery fabrics but moved over to making crib quilts for all the new babies. Eventually I got serious about fibre art and went to art school. When the pandemic lockdown hit I re-focused my plans for my stash of quilting cotton and sewed up three-layer cotton masks — so many masks — to fill the early gap in the supply chain. Elastic was a scarce commodity and that’s where the owner at Dressew stepped up, delivering yardage of elastic to me from the shuttered store’s back alley door, like a dealer doing a drop.

So many Covid masks, made possible during lockdown by Dressew.

The imminent demise leaves me — us — in the lurch. Shopping by the hand-feel (and smell) of fabrics, yarn, fun fur, trims, felt, wigs, and all the strange liquidation items is an in-person experience in the energizing milieu of other creatives. So now what? Will next year’s Halloween costume missions now take place around the ol’ iPhone peering at fabric images on Amazon, not really knowing what will show up as we hit ‘Add to cart’?
That’s a hard no. Sorry kids.

Stitching a story of a final send-off

6/16/2024

This one’s for my brother, on his second memorial Father’s Day.

I started the artwork just after returning from his ashes-scattering ceremony on one of the Gulf Islands, as he requested in the few weeks before his death. I had suggested a flotilla led by his “Brudderhood” of friends, on the Sabine Channel. He liked that but said, with some difficulty, They’ll never make it.

But they did, buoyed by a legendary/hazardous flotilla at one of their dads-and-kids camping trips. It was everything he would have wanted. An odd collection of watercraft was rafted together and his two teenage sons poured the ashes into the ocean, creating a cloud of what my brother would have called “a lovely turquoise.”

My sisters and I would exchange smiles whenever he described his many plans as Lovely, usually emphasized with a fluttery hand gesture. It was his signature descriptor in his otherwise utilitarian, East Van vernacular.

When I got back to the city and into my studio I was listless, managing only to fold and re-fold my stash of old work jeans, many of them contributed by my brother for my art purposes. The scraps of indigos and greys, rips and frays reminded me of that shoreline and those mountains and soon I was layering the pieces together in the sashiko (Japanese for “little stabs”) way, working up a boro (indigo textile repaired and reinforced through sashiko) from memory.

The urge to use those jeans stitches up nicely with the waste-not-want-not sensibility of mottainai that has been informing my work and life since living in Japan in my early 20s. Old jeans are too rich in embedded modern culture to not use. And these particular jeans needed a new narrative.

When the chaotic patchwork became too heart-heavy I tucked it away. In the year that followed I traveled back to Japan, then Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and central Mexico, where the connecting threads of narrative fibre-art fuelled new energy for the boro-project.

Stories told in cloth throughout the world are often worked up not as a pre-planned design but as a journey. This is one of those. After I stitched together the scraps of the memory landscape I traversed it with more sashiko in different blues, then added french knots for sand, and in the centre, swirls of stitches in shades of turquoise. I considered adding the kayaks, paddleboard, my skiff, his motorboat, maybe an air mattress or a driftwood log or two but decided against adding that cluttered narrative to the already raggedy, improvisational patched piece.

I chose instead to stick to the feeling of that golden moment of that lovely final goodbye.

"Lovely", 2024, Found denim, embroidery thread on stretcher, 24" x 24"

Detail of "Lovely", 2024. Found jeans, embroidery thread on stretcher, 24" x 24"

Faith is key when you're cutting up family heirlooms

6/7/2024

Is it easy to cut up hand-embroidered linen tablecloths, runners, pillowcases?

It is not. As an adequate hand-stitcher I understand the skill, labour, time and patience that goes into each linen. I understand the desire to cherish these vintage domestic-craft objects made for the joy of it that are eventually passed around and down the generations only to be hidden in some drawer or closet. I understand the impulse to rescue them from the humiliation of their thrift-store price tags of maybe five dollars.

Cutting through all these layers of meaning feels a little like slicing into someone else’s skin. What right do I have?

Am I ruining family heirlooms? Or daylighting unused linens that have been in the dark for decades? (Carlyn Yandle photo)

As word got out that I was amassing old embroidered linens for an artwork I gratefully received donations from friends and family. It’s a lot easier to be the rescuer of those tragic cases dotted with stains or holes. At least I can console myself that I’m ending the quandary over whether to keep this piece of Grandma or let it go.

But the weighty, pristine Irish linen tablecloths that bloom with finely stitched bouquets and drawn threadwork borders are quite another thing. I take a deep breath and make mental apologies and thanks to the unknown or long-gone maker. I remind myself that I’m not ruining a family heirloom but daylighting the work of handmade things that have been in the dark for decades. Then I let the rotary-cutter rip. I am Edward Scissorhands. I can’t help myself. Sorry, not sorry.

This is the struggle behind Forage, an under-construction field of improvisational log-cabin blocks in my preferred scale of queen-sized. Each embroidered scrap is a literal snippet of a larger piece, the analogue equivalent of a digital thumbnail image. Machine-stitched together the blocks are as cacophonous as an Instagram Explore field.

That effect grows exponentially as the blocks are stitched into rows, then rows onto rows. I’m now part-way through constructing the thing as a single field (“top”, in quilt language). Viewed horizontally it is a chaotic community garden of 42 unwieldy plots that spill out into the paths (“sashing”). I find new patterns for connection while merging the embroidered elements of one block into another block through the sashing, in a sort-of snail’s trail of stitches. As I mimic these markings of those makers, I feel a connecting thread. I am walking in their stitch-steps.

Despite the garden-plot references, this work is defying the horizontal, offering a reverse-side textural experience of an unstable grid of frayed edges. The maker-contributors never intended for the ‘wrong side’ to be seen, but when it’s all brought into the light, the translucent stained-glass effect cannot be denied. Suddenly I see connotations of religious symbolism, and I’m wondering about the power of the loose threads and those cryptic-looking stitches when viewed from behind the scenes. Something about sacrifice or at least about having faith that the discomfort in detaching from nostalgia is for good, not evil.

That openness is rich ground, another area to forage.

Connecting embroidered elements feels like walking in the stitch-steps of past makers. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

A backlit view of this work-in-progress adds further layers of pattern, texture and symbolism. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Unwieldy and unfinished — fitting for this pandemic project

6/13/2022

“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

When my nerves are frayed and it feels like the social fabric is unravelling I feel the urge to amend the situation, often by actual mending.

These hands do much less flailing when they're taking up loose ends, making something out of nothing anybody wants or repairing the damaged, discarded and disregarded. But the pandemic has hit hard and for the first time in ages, I am compelled to fall back on something cozy and familiar, for the body — any body — in need. I need to make a big ol' quilt.

Even as the fleeting thought was bonking around my distracted, pandemic-disturbed brain I worried I was regressing. Are a dozen queen-sized quilts — each a barely-passed test of my patience and endurance — not enough for one lifetime? Have I gone circular?

This (and much more) mental pummelling has manifested in the not-yet-completed "Current Conditions" quilt, a weighted blanket in a bluesy palette and undulating pattern of strips of discarded, freely available jeans. Too thick and heavy to wrestle through my vintage Pfaff, I've taken a page from the Japanese traditional "boro" method and hand-stitched long waves of white cotton sashiko thread through the layers of denim, cotton batting and denim whole-cloth backing.

BORROWING FROM BORO: The "Current Conditions" quilt in progress, after hand-stitching through the layers and before the growing roster of pandemic-era hashtags are embroidered.

Soon another layer emerged: hand-embroidered text in the form of some particularly heavy hashtags over the course of this making. Working each of those hashtags into the strips of found textile has become both a meditative activity as well as a meditation on the meaning of those words of these times. This is my physical engagement with the world, one stitch, one block at a time.

Weighing in at more than 10 hot pounds, "Current Conditions" is an unwieldy beast of a blanket but my stitching encounters with the latest hashtags seem far from over. (Should #monkeypox be included? Do I need to reserve a line for #heatdome2022?). Like the global pandemic at this point, it's not clear whether the beast is finally done or will demand more from me.

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