Lisa Call

Structures #97   (In Progress)    ©2008

Basting on a Bed

This evening I layered the composition for Structures #97 with the batting and backing, so I could baste the layers together with safety pins, before I start the surface stitching. As I talk about in my how I baste blog post, this step is extremely important in ensuring a flat finished piece.

I’ve perfected my method by pinning the layers to the carpeting in my studio (see the post above for details). I know exactly how tight to pull each layer for it to come out right for my style of stitching.

Problem is there’s not a lick of carpet in my new little house. Hardwood floors everywhere. I’ve been pondering how to baste this quilt for a week and finally came upon the idea of basting it on my son’s queen sized bed - the only large flat surface in the house.

It worked out quite well and I think the final textile painting will be wonderfully pucker free. Although I have to admit I had to remove at least 80% of the pins and redo them as I ended pining the layers to the mattress pad. I finally got my long rotary cutting acrylic ruler out to slide between the quilt and bed to prevent this little problem. With carpet, if a pin catches some fibers I can just yank it up and no harm is done.
 

The Right Tools

Today Photoshop CS3 arrived at my house and I installed on my new laptop. It’s amazing what 4 gigabytes of memory and a fast processor can do to speed up the manipulation of images. It’s wonderful. I’ll save hours of time each month not sitting around waiting for photoshop to load my huge raw image files.

The other exciting news is that I can process the raw images from my new Nikon D200 with this set up. I was unable to get my older version of photoshop to behave with a mixture of D70 and D200 raw images. This means I can now take my own high resolution images for publication.

Finally, I have all the right tools to do what I need with my images. It’s definitely time to take some classes to learn how to use them instead of my very improvised methods I use today.

Markings #10 In Progress - stitched section ©2007

 
One of my goals for this year states:

I complete the 17 major pieces started prior to 2007 that are still unfinished: Structures #47, Structures #48, Structures #49, Structures #50, Structures #65, Markings #4, Markings #5, Markings #6, Markings #7, Markings #8, Markings #9, Markings #10, Markings #14, Portals #1, Portals #2, Circles #1, Circles #2.

When I revisted my goals mid year, which I failed to write about, I changed this to completing the 13 pieces in the Structures and Markings series. This week I’m very likely to complete this goal. Markings #10, the last to be completed, has about 14 more hours to go.

Completing this work mostly involved hours and hours of sewing parallel lines of stitching into the work to create the texture I love. To me my work isn’t completed just because the design is done and all the shapes have been sewn into a composition. It looks too flat, too untidy, less interesting. Plus it doesn’t store well as the fabric gets all wrinkled:
 

Markings #10 In Progress - Prior to Stitching ©2007

 
I have to added dense stitching or it just doesn’t feel right. After creating a fabric composition I layer it with cotton batting and a second layer of fabric for the back. I baste these 3 layers together and then spend hours adding stitched lines to the work to add texture.

This goal has been a good fit given the difficult year I’ve had, spending teh majority of my studio time in this meditative process of sewing lines back and forth. There are some artistic decisions to be made but much of this work is done on autopilot. A wonderful time to contemplate the events in my life and try to make sense of it all. Or listen to music or books on tape.

I had to take a quick break as I ran out of one of my green threads and I’m waiting for the local quilt store to open. It’s a rare occurrence for me to run out of thread given my rather detailed thread inventory system but Markings #10 is a large piece (probably 7 feet x 8 feet) and I forgot just how much thread is needed for such a beast.

Time to brave the first snow of the season an go get my thread and some more books on tape at the library.