Category: Quilt

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.

VIDEO tour: 'Joyful Making in Perilous Times'

4/21/2021

Click HERE for a 10-minute journey through the methods and motivations behind this MFA thesis. (Film made by Ana Valine, Rodeo Queen Pictures, August 2020)

Joyful Making in Perilous Times

9/10/2020

Where is the joy when you’re living in a time of a global coronavirus pandemic and a local toxic-drug epidemic? What is the use of making when your city is seized by global investment-real estate schemes, when there’s too much stuff in a overheated planet and a hateful, superpower president next door?

These questions ricochet around my brain, only abating when this futile, exhausting expenditure of energy hones in on the rote activity of knotting and needleworking. The hand-wringing falls into rhythm as I grasp at lost, tossed threads that I make whole and into whole new ideas.

Making is a very personal physical reaction to perilous times and unstable circumstances but working with found fibre is also an intrinsically social action that weaves in disparate economic circumstances, language, race, age and abilities. Braiding, stitching, knotting, needleworking create resilient connective tissue between one body and another. Strands thicken into solid links between the ancient and the modern, utility and self-expression, the digital and the physical, the personal and the political.

By exploring the inherent qualities of abject manufactured material, the body binds with other bodies and other places, some known, some not. It is work, but outside the tumultuous dominant economic system. It is an experience of the history of production and distribution through the material at hand.

Even in these times, when gathering around a table is a hazardous activity, when our pack species is feeling at loose ends, masked up and reluctantly apart, the tactility of rote hand-making grounds us into the here and now, one stitch, one loop, one knot at a time. We grasp at the tendrils, continuing the work, with the results standing as artifacts of a time, place and our individual and collective states of being.

Three major works created over one year remind me of the uncertainty, the panic, the perilousness of these times, and of the solace gained through individual making and the joy of making with others. The three are relics of two years of material research that culminated in a Master of Fine Arts 2020 exhibit set up one day before the university locked down.

1. Scaffolds

'Scaffolds': 2019, 10' x 10' x 8" All materials gathered by workers at residential tower construction sites in the Vancouver area.

2. Resurge

'Resurge' is inspired by the palette of the West Coast foreshore where it began.

Spanning 12 feet in diameter and grounded to the floor, 'Resurge' troubles distinctions between utility craft and visual art.

3. Hearth

'Hearth' serves as a visual archive of five months of community hand-stitching sessions at kitchen tables and art studios.

A close-up view of the wall installation reveals provisionally-composed strips of fabric and sewing pins framing the several dozen hand-stitched "log cabin"-style quilt blocks by many hands.

The simple blocks were made by artists and members of the community at large during five months of open weekly sessions.

Hoping for heat in this log cabin

11/5/2019

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I have this idea for building healthy community in this pretty/cold city through hand-making. It’s a process of making peace with ourselves and connecting with others, transforming individualized desires (thanks, capitalism) into shared desires for a sustainable life and world.

Vancouver artist Jenn Skillen — collaborator No. 1 — beta-tests a freeform, no-measure hand-stitched log cabin block method. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

That's the idea. 'How' is the big question.

I start with a few rules of thumb. (I love that phrase for its controversial origin that is a deep-dive into human history and etymology, but also for the visual of the hand-as-tool.) First, the activity must be low-barrier enough to open it up to as much collaboration as possible — no need for special skills or equipment or fees or even shared verbal language. Second, the project must use only found material: freely available, with no better use (because there's already too much stuff in the world). Third, the project must spark interest, otherwise, why would people bother?

A decade ago, these rules of thumb resulted in The Network, an ever-growing public fibre-art piece engaging a wide variety of folks around Vancouver, co-created by Debbie Westergaard Tuepah. That knotty piece continues to weave through my work, mummifying a perfectly good painting practice, winding around ideas of alternative space-making, shelter, and safety nets. Now it's needling into my current project: the Safe Supply collaborative quilt.

'Safe supply' were the two words on the lips of the crowd at a CBC Town Hall gathering two months ago. Providing a safe supply of opioids would go a long way to addressing all the problems and fears raised by everyone from student activists to local businesses, from concerned politicians and developers to Indigenous elders: the toxic-drug death epidemic, violence, homelessness, sexual exploitation, theft, vandalism, mental illness. A safe supply is inherent in the view of addiction as a public health issue, not an individual, moral failing.

'Kettling' homeless people into Oppenheimer Park has resulted in a colourful display of a national humanitarian crisis. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Ground zero of this humanitarian crisis is the colourful, chaotic tent city crowded in Oppenheimer Park straddling Chinatown and the old Japantown. The sight of all those bright, tenuous shelters layer up with this history of racism and injustice, stolen land and lives, and soon I am binding up ideas of found colourful material and that call for Safe supply!, embedding it all in a design, with designs for this as a group project destined for exhibit in more privileged spaces. It is planned as a comforting activity in this often ruthless, discomforting city: a dis-comforter.

Historical clipping from the llinois State Museum website reveals the log cabin quilt has ties to ending slavery.

I begin this overarching theme one block at a time, and that block is, fittingly, the traditional 'log cabin.'

There's a long history of the log cabin block, ingenious for its simple construction that makes use of even the smallest, thinnest available scraps as well as its history as a vehicle for social justice.

I am attracted to the name that stands as aspiration for home and all that that entails, beginning with the hearth, the centre of the block. From the hearth, the block is built in a spiral of connected scraps to form a foundation for countless quilt designs (traditional examples below).

The work has not yet begun but like all collaborations it begins with faith in people and trust in my practice. Something will emerge. We will engage. We will generate some heat in this log-cabin community.

Some useful how-tos and overall pattern examples:

Traditional quilts made from colour variations of the log cabin block (clockwise from left): Straight Set, Barn Raising, Light & Dark, Courthouse Steps, Courthouse Steps Variation, Amish Crib Quilt. (From http://www.museum.state.il.us)

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Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on

5/26/2018

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Clockwise from top left: Great-Grandfather Quilt; Dad's Throw; Tie Cushion. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Materialistic. People say it like it's a bad thing.
But there's not necessarily anything selfish or hoardy or wasteful about feeling deeply connected to materials. If we all started being a little more materialistic we might not be now contending with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or space junk. I want no part with parting so quickly from one-use-life materials when a meaningful second life is possible.

So when a couple of people dear to my heart were clearly torn about parting with some favourite clothes of their loved ones who recently passed away — one within this year, the other within 18 months — I felt it too.

These bits of cloth are interwoven with the memory of the wearer, his style, the special occasions and the everyday. Just looking at them hanging in the back closet brought the son, the wife, to tears. Some of that emotion is also about feeling at odds with what to do with it all. Yet holding onto useless things, especially in this town where we're so squeezed for space we have to go outside our living spaces just to change our mind, can even bring on some shame or panic that we can't let go, move on.

I felt the potency of the pieces too, and suggested selecting a few items to be repurposed into something that would bring comfort, and in remembrance.

The first project this spring was the Great-Grandfather Quilt, for the first of the next generation who missed meeting his great-grandfather by 9 months. The second was Dad's Blanket, which lives on one of the two matching sofas where father and son watched the baseball in his last three years. The third is a lumbar-support cushion made from silk ties that's parked on his wife's favourite reading chair.

It takes a bit of faith to allow those blazers and sweaters, ties and dress shirts to leave their dark cupboards and be subjected to my fibre-art experiments but I'm grateful they did. It was a little unnerving, plunging wool blazers into a hot-water-wash and tumble-dry, or severing several silk neckties in one swipe of the rotary cutter, but that's the deal with making and innovating: sometimes you have to take a deep breath and boldly go, risking failure.

And there is definitely failure in all of this making. Design changes happen on the fly, dictated by odd dimensions of the pieces and unpredictable fabric behaviour. (It's a thing.) Trying to wrestle slippery bias-cut silk, unstable cashmere knit and coat-heavy woven wool into submission enough to lie flat together is a test of one's patience. The trick is to embrace imperfection and keep the big picture in mind. I think about the Gees Bend quilters I saw a few years ago at Granville Island and the gospel spiritual song two of them sang at the start of their talk, and I say a little prayer myself: God I hope this works.

The other challenge is creating works that resonate with the spirit of the original wearer, so it's not just a matter of chopping up the clothing into tiny unidentifiable pieces to be re-fabricated in a generic quilt. You don't want to be too literal either, appliquéing ties into a Ties Quilt or (creepier) using every last button and pocket or (horrors) just sewing all the clothes together into a blanket or something.

Binding the one blanket with necktie fabric and appliquéing the suit labels in one corner of an army blanket backing (for the man who served in the US Army) felt like the right balance.

I post each Remembrance Pieces project on Facebook to inspire other material girls and guys, and to pay my respects to the stuff of life and to those of this life no longer.

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Am I blue? Yes, and grey and silver too

3/29/2017

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“Your hair seems blue,” a friend noted over dinner.
It really is. I’ve joined the blue-rinse gang — emphasis on the blue. Denim blue is an unnatural hair hue that seems only natural now that I'm surrounded by heaps of old jeans and altering all those tones of denim. As usual, I’m not questioning why, but how: how to add some pleasing form to a traditional working fabric; how to infuse some lacy aspect into that utilitarian cloth.

What I do see is that after four months exposed to the bright colours of urban Mexico and the glare of the garish new Trump era, I am thirsty for cool, serene tones and patterns of rain-soaked skies and coastal stones rolled smooth by the sea. I returned to discover that I am, in fact, attached to the world of hot-water bottles, mugs of tea and toasty quilts, the coziness against the cold.

Blue is my touchstone: something real and eternal to cling to in these uncertain, unfathomable times. I may be seduced by sun-baked yellow, spicy red, lethal lime green and sunset pink but my deep, serene dreams are all denim blue.

(For a sample of my blue-jean fabrications, check out my other site, Workwraps.weebly.com)

Below: Recent experiments with denim include dousing doilies in bleach and imprinting them on on jeans before cutting for quilts.

Impression of two overlapping doilies on a pair of jeans.

Detail of the lacy traces through the bleaching process.

Samples of experiments with different dilutions of bleach, duration and fabrics.

A roll of quilt binding made from three denim shirts.

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Big painting shift at little house on the prairie

9/19/2016

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Day 12 painting: Embroidered details in a scene of a newly "thrashed" hay field.

I've just returned from a month in the big country of southwest Saskatchewan: big skies, big farming operations, big empty days that were all too much at the start of my artist residency at the Wallace Stegner House.

Suddenly agoraphobic, I pulled down all the blinds and paced around that lovely century-old house, wondering what on earth possessed me to throw myself into this imposing patchwork landscape. I am not a landscape painter; that's my dad's bag.

Plus I came by plane and an eight-hour car ride, so even if I did want to paint, I didn't have my usual large stretched canvases and totes of paints. I did bring a few of my usual travel essentials: embroidery hoops, needles and floss — and an old bed sheet. I knew there was just a couple of stores in town, and none would be selling art supplies so I packed a tiny travel set of liquid acrylics, a few brushes and a pad of mixed-media cardstock.

My sketchy plan involved, well, sketching with my father, who has spent some of every summer in this tiny town of Eastend ever since he filled the Stegner House with his landscape paintings 15 years ago.

We were quite a pair: me, not at all comfortable with the whole plein-air tradition, and him, increasingly unfamiliar with his life's work of painting that involved biking into the country to sketch then returning to his basement to paint in the heat of the day. (Actually we were mostly a trio, his wife acting as facilitator for whatever this was, supplying us with water bottles, sunhats, sketch pads and willow charcoal, and generally getting us on the road.)

We circled around this vague idea of mine as we circled around this dead-quiet, struggling little town every morning. But the awkwardness turned to anguish back at my studio as I undertook the tedious pursuit of finding some interest — or even the point — in painting puffy clouds and dun-coloured hills.

A week later and out of sheer frustration at my lack of landscape-painting prowess, I resorted to dropping diluted paint on a taut scrap of bedsheet in an embroidery hoop just to watch it bleed. I threw the first painted scrap away and did another, with a little more intention, then threw that away too. Within a couple of hours I figured out the right water-to-paint ratio to create a slightly controlled bloom with each stroke. A lot of other distracted behaviour (baking apple crisps, walking by the river, venting via text to my artist friends) meant that each additional stroke was added to a dried layer and by the end of the afternoon, a landscape was emerging on a miniature stretched canvas. That one I didn't throw out. But it was still a little hazy. That's when I thought about using my stash of embroidery floss for final line work.

I sat in the cool of the front screened porch that evening and embroidered some more information onto the painting. It was a clumsy first effort but soon I was enjoying the daily practice of biking in the morning with my father, painting something inspired by the ride in the afternoon, then embroidering some details in the evening, inviting others to join me for stitching sessions on the front porch.

I did this every day until I had 12 little paintings, each a progression from the last. I saw them as blocks for a future quilt, which led to a well-attended culminating exhibit, "Scenes from a Quilted Landscape."

But now I'm viewing them as something beyond a quilt and beyond the horizon. I'm calling them Points of Interest: something to build on and build with.

As with all creative pursuits, forcing solutions is futile. My original idea of coaxing my father back into his painting studio by getting him to share some of his process with me was a non-starter. These days he finds everyday joy in the moment, whether that is spotting a hawk while biking the backroads, playing a languid rendition of The Girl from Ipanema on piano in the hot afternoons, or watching the town's many cats on the prowl from the front porch of the Stegner House while his wife and I embroidered the summer evenings away.

I'm not sure if he knew it but he passed on to me the most valuable lesson for painting a scene: You have to actually see it.

My first effort: a clunky rendition of the Wallace Stegner House

Day 2: Black bridge behind the Stegner House, in black stitches

Day 3: Fun with architectural detail and embroidered lettering

Day 4: Sky and hills and embroidered sunflowers facing the morning sun

Day 5: Our hangout: coffee shop and pottery studio, surrounded by gardens

Day 6: The silty back roads, llike biking on velvet. (Wheel-seizing "gumbo" when wet)

Day 7: Embroidery showing the flight path of a hostile hawk

Day 8: Big skies and tiny grain elevator

Day 9: Old Beaver Lumber building in the nearby almost-ghost town

Day 10: The observatory, in some of the darkest skies in Canada

Day 11: "The Town of Eastend" rock formation in the hills, in embroidery

Slide-showing the process:

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Painting to Capture the rapture in the everyday

10/16/2015

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Gotta love Salvation Army and the staff's peculiar display choices. Every other store would break up all the retail items so each one looks unique, but at my local Salarmy they sort by colour, making finding your size sort of a crapshoot. But oh, that visual field! Those collections make my eyes feel like they're turning into those cartoon black-and-white hypnotizing wheel things.

Same thing at the MAC counter or the Shoppers Drug Mart cosmetics aisle. I don't have much use for all the lipsticks and nail polishes but I will go out of my way to pass those vibrating, too-exciting colour grids of reds, oranges, pinks, purples, golds. Rosy rows that that set the soul a-glow!

I am inspired. I take photos, I go to the studio. I try to find that colour-field rapture.

Distracts: Big Red, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 72" X 36"

It's all too exciting, too exhilarating and just the thing for stopping my useless 'what if' and 'if only' thinking — or the screen-peering and pecking.

This latest painting might be better titled, Stop Sign, a visually loud/silent call to "Don't just say something, stand there."

But I will stick to Big Red, part of my ongoing Distracts series. Part meditation, part endurance test, part quilting, part painting, as fractured and distracting as our accelerated world.

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From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

5/15/2015

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There is really no way to know whether a blanket covered in brightly coloured buttons will read until the very end of all the work so I wanted to build in the likelihood of failure. That's how I came to decide on "The devil is in the details" as the line of text that would appear on a QR code reader. If it didn't read successfully at least it would prove the rule.

But it wasn't as simple as that. The details that bedevilled me began with my big idea to use masking tape to indicate the grid instead of tailor's chalk (too dusty), disappearing-ink marker (fades too quickly) or basting (tedious).

That tape plan might have worked if I had removed it in a timely manner, like within a few days or even weeks. But when you pull masking tape off of fine white cotton sheeting after 13 months you are left with a hard, yellowed embedded adhesive residue. You scrape it, scrub it, attack it with solvents and still it does not un-adhere. In desperation, you ball up the entire quilt and chuck it into the washing machine, despite the raw edges and exposed batting. When it comes out in a tight mass of threads and shrunken batting you curse your hare-brained impulsiveness. You let out a little scream when you realize that the colours from many of those buttons have inexplicably run, bleeding all over the white cotton. (Lesson 2: Research your materials.) At this point you roll yourself up into a little ball and go fetal in a corner somewhere until you're ready to rejoin humanity.

I knew going into my second QR Quilt project that there was a very good chance that after sewing more than 1,000 buttons into three layers of fabric the pattern may not be recognized by the QR code reader. But I also knew that I had a fighting chance after the surprising success of the readable QR Quilt: After Douglas Coupland. My quilt version of his painting, I Wait and I Wait and I Wait for God to Appear proved that a quilt composed of scraps of coloured business shirts and scattered buttons could contain a message as easily as the typical black and white grid. After several weeks of piecing over 1,000 squares together into one queen-sized square I stood back, aimed my phone at the quilt, and prayed. The sentence appeared, like a message from god.

I wanted that euphoria again. I needed it. (Lesson 1: Avoid great expectations.)

You eventually decide that the title has suddenly gained poignancy (Lesson 3: Embrace unexpected results) so you pick away at the binding selvedge threads from the quilt-ball until you can hang the wet, lead-apron-heavy slab of fiber and plastic to dry for several days. You start to notice that the sheeting is puckering from the shrinking and is sagging from the weight of all that hard plastic in this queen-sized quilt of the damned. Turns out some of those buttons were of some early plastic vintage that were painted after they were fabricated. (Who knew?)

You attempt to find salvation from a bottle of stain-remover -- Out, damned spot! Out, I say! -- but it looks worse. The next time you have the nerve to look at this fabricated failure you notice that -- praise the lord -- the bleaching agent has worked -- sort of. You stipple-quilt out the sags and bags and the rest of the discolouration disappears -- also sort of. You trim it square and bind it in black with a devil-may-care attitude. After it's finished you realize that the stippling was essential for creating enough rigidity to prevent the buttons from sagging when it hangs. You like the resulting topography. (Lesson 4: Innovate solutions.)

Then you air the whole sordid story on your blog, knowing that sharing the anguish is part of the process, though you regret you don't have any images that would give the full impact of the horror story. (Lesson 5: Photodocument the process, even failure.)

The title of this work is Discomforter (The Devil is in the Details). It's a cumbersome title befitting this project that took me to the edge of my sanity, or at least close enough to see that there is in fact an edge and I know I can't go there again.

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QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

3/21/2014

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After three months of sewing one donated button after another into a giant QR code, the big moment arrived this week: time to stand back and scan that baby with a reader app, translating this quilt-thing to read, "The devil is in the details."

Except it didn't read. Don't panic!, I thought, then spent the entire next day working with a photo image of the QR Button Blanket, Photoshopping in more buttons and darker buttons and bigger buttons, trying to add the minimum amount of density for the software program to register the pattern and work its magic to produce the punchline. No luck; even a sliver of white in one button cluster puts a wrench in the wholecloth works. I filed this one under the category of Epic Fail, not worth finishing it as intended, framing it in black bias binding. I do not want to create something that is 'still' good; I want the thing to be good, full stop.

Failure demands confronting the why. Why conceive such a laborious, risky project in the first place? Why endure the painstaking process when half-way through it was becoming abundantly clear that this was not going to 'read'?

But there is another power here, and that's tied to the process beyond the product. The achievement may lie in the endurance (in an increasingly A.D.D. world) that is not necessarily attached to the product after all. It may be in seeing it through, without the promise of a sure result. The power may lie in the humble, everyday materials and the community of women who contributed all those bits of plastic saved from the waste stream. (There should really be a global ban on production of billions of plastic buttons. Plant-based plastic, bone, wood, and leather- or fabric-wrapped tin buttons eventually return to the earth.)

But what's really starting to click in for me is the cultural reference of this button-grid design. A decade ago, it might have been viewed as an oddly arranged colour field or an abstracted grid but we're so acclimatized to codes that the pattern begs to be 'read.' The fact that this is irresolvable might be annoying. And that's interesting.

Wavy Gravy, marker on synthetic velvet, 58" x 43"

The possible multiple references could be more engaging than the one answer provided by a QR reader app. There's something to be learned in the discomfort of the open-endedness.

Moments like these, I seek out the artists who have embraced what New York artist Polly Apfelbaum calls the 'tough beauty' of visually exciting works that incorporate everyday materials in surprising ways. Apfelbaum, who calls herself a bad crafter, articulates the process of hard work in this video.

"I work all the time," she says, without a schedule and in a highly experimental way. "You make the work and then you hope for the best."

"It's very important to get your fuck-you back."

I'm going with that.

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<<Previous

Unwieldy and unfinished — fitting for this pandemic project

VIDEO tour: 'Joyful Making in Perilous Times'

Joyful Making in Perilous Times

1. Scaffolds

2. Resurge

3. Hearth

Hoping for heat in this log cabin

Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on

Am I blue? Yes, and grey and silver too

Big painting shift at little house on the prairie

Slide-showing the process:

Painting to Capture the rapture in the everyday

From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

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