Category: Redwork

Keeper

5/19/2020

This post is about unfinished projects and imperfections.

In the quilt world, we say there is no such thing as a perfect quilt. Look outside. Nature is crooked, bent and twisted. We also say in the quilt world, when imperfections become too noticeable by the maker, the quilt becomes a “keeper.” It’s perfectly beautiful, just not one you want to offer to paying customers.

It’s probably true about all forms of creativity, that if you are in a middle of a project and, for whatever reason, find yourself being pulled away from its completion, getting back to it can be problematic. You forget your place. Inspiration fueling advancement dries up. Impressions are forgotten. Keys to next steps go away.

While reorganizing fabric, separating cloth into piles of like-minded colors and textures, I stumbled across an unfinished quilt project. We had a sit down, the quilt and me, as I tried to remember what the quilt wanted. I couldn't remember.

I was all set:
tea, audio book,
threads, needles.

Luckily, a new set of inspiration arrived. The quilt and me moved forward. There were shortcuts. I decided not to continue hand embroidering which, now that I think about it, is probably one of the reasons why the quilt remained unfinished. Hand embroidering is time consuming and more than that, our bodies have just so many cycles. Embroidery has become hard on my wrists and fingers. I decided to finish the quilt, try to remain as close to the original plan as possible, but without adding more hand embroidery.

I always preach to my students the importance of hand sewing bindings. You don’t want to see hemming threads from the back on the front of the quilt. Plus, there’s such a calming effect that happens when you hem: the pretty hem stitches, the mesmerizing rocking of the needle. I was all set: tea, audio book, threads, needles. I began hemming, realized how long it would take me to finish, and coupled with the tingles in my fingers as I worked, broke one of my cardinal rules and decided to machine hem.

Here's Redwork In Blue Variation. The word variation is added because the binding fabric is black and gold. A traditional redwork quilt uses only two colors: red and white.

Materials include cotton fabric, West African woven and hand dyed cotton cloth, pearl cotton and embroidery floss. Techniques include hand embroidery, applique, machine piecing and quilting.

Reorganizing? Find an unfinished project? Give it another go. Nothing unfinished? Try something new. What better time.

Thanks for reading. Hope to see you again!

To learn about and see other examples of redwork, click the following links:

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Muddy Footprints All Over My Soul

6/3/2017

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Redwork in Blue - in progress

This morning at 6 a.m., I was awakened by the sounds of screaming. I looked out of the window and saw nothing. Then I noticed what I thought was a white garbage bag lying in the street. But suddenly, the bag moved and I heard the awful, in-pain screaming again. The white garbage bag was a woman lying in a fetal position in the street, not the sidewalk, in the street. Oh God. Her intermittent moans and screams. A woman alone and in distress. Then I heard the man's ugly voice, "Get out!" and remembered, not lying in the street moaning, rather, in my bedroom on the floor. At least I had the privacy of brick and mortar. But it wasn't privacy, it was the luck of the draw. I called 911.

I wrote on my calendar, on the June 21 block, “go back to work today.” I figured, first day of summer, refreshed by the newness of life. In this blog, I have written about artists needing to feed their creative wells because, well, ideas get used up. I was feeling used up and took a long stretch of time off, decided to do some reading. I consulted goodreads. But what does reading have to do with quilting? With layers, texture, background, character, plotting (thinking), color, surface design, interior grace, letting go of ego, letting in of Spirit, and it was so beautiful yesterday. Perfect. Sun. Gentle breeze. A trip to the library and Gwendolyn Brooks’ first and only novel titled Maud Martha. “Copyright, 1953, by Gwendolyn Brooks Blakely. Copyright, 1951 by The Curtis Publishing Company.”

Redwork in Blue - in progress

There is a description of Maud Martha added to the inside, glued onto one of the book’s front pages, typed with a manual typewriter:

BROOKS, GWENDOLYN. MAUD MARTHA.
The story of Maud Martha Brown, a colored woman - daughter,
      wife, and mother - who lives in Bronzeville, a neighborhood of
   Chicago, told with the intimate understanding of a woman who
   has made a life-long study of negroes.
Retail Bookseller

The book is so old, and I think, valuable, that it is housed in the third floor restricted section. Someone has to go back there and get it for you. I look at the book’s old fashioned reddish brown hard back cover, the back in the day check out card stuck on the inside pocket documenting that the last time someone checked out Maud Martha was September 13, 1972, when fines were “One cent a day on juvenile cards and two cents a day on adult cards for each book kept overtime.”

In Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks opens with:

“What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions.”

In Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks ends with:

"But the sun was shining, and some of the people in the world had been left alive, and it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world—or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower: for would its kind not come up again in the spring? Come up, if necessary, among, between, or out of—beastly inconvenient!—the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush infallible and sincere."

I go into my sewing room, look at the Redwork in Blue quilt hanging lonely on the design wall.

I finger my hand embroidery, remember my numb fingers as I told myself, just 20 minutes more, then you can take a break. I try to remember where the quilt wanted to go and why I had stopped driving it there. “Hmm,” I say aloud to no one. Or maybe I am apologizing…to the quilt for her loneliness, that fact that she is unfinished.

Next, I am reading Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton, BOA Editions, Ltd, 2000. In Blessing the Boats, I am reminded of honesty, the integrity and fearlessness needed to create. You just gotta put it out there. Say, “Here, this is what I made.”

From Blessing the Boats:

praise song
to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one Sunday morning.
i was ten. i had never seen
a human woman hurl her basketball
of a body into the traffic of the world.
Praise to the drivers who stopped in time.
Praise to the faith with which she rose
after some moments then slowly walked
sighing back to her family.
Praise to the arms which understood
little or nothing of what it meant
but welcomed her in without judgment,
accepting it all like children might,
like God.

My girl, Ice.

How painful is insecurity. In not knowing. In our intermittent moans. I pick up my guitar. Her name is Ice and she talked to me, said, “So what you just decided to learn me last year. If you listen, really hear me, I will sing to you and you can mimic me.” And so I became accepting, like a child, and thankful that I stopped listening to insecurity, just in time. Insecurity woulda ran me over again, its booted foot kicking me in my ribs, leaving me on my bedroom floor in a fetal position, muddy footprints all over my soul.

From Blessing the Boats, Gwendolyn Brooks writes in “study the masters,”

like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words:
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.

So maybe I'm misinformed. Maybe this isn’t a blog about quilting, only.

I decided to listen to the masters, Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton. This is a blog about us and our internal Maud Marthas and Aunt Timmies. A blog about how to iron, perk up our own dried edges, how to dream, how to remember and decipher, how to think in multiple languages, how to hope and ritual chant so we can better recognize our hot irons need to strike.

This is how we make things.

See and read information about the completed Redwork in Blue Variation here.

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Redwork in Black

3/19/2017

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The Black & White Quilt features several techniques.
The first technique is the traditional nine patch pieced block. Three squares at the top, three squares in the middle and three squares on the bottom. These nine pieced and combined squares make up the nine patch block.

I think it's important to use various textures and values to bring interest to the quilt. But on the other hand, it is equally lovely to use fabric in the same value and texture family. For example, Redwork in white, where the quilt is using only one color fabric and threads. It all depends on what the quilt wants. Here is where we learn how to listen to the needs of the quilt.

three nine patch blocks

The second technique is hand embroidery using simple patterns immediately recognized as patterns for Redwork. In this case, Redwork in black or Redwork using black embroidery threads on white fabric.

The third technique is hand painted fabric, used in this quilt as sashing strips. I painted white cotton fabric in various shades of black, cut the fabric in strips and connected the strips to the pieced blocks. I like using sashing strips because the strips break up the quilt and allow the eye to focus on the entire quilt and individual blocks at the same time.

The Black & White Quilt

Well, that's it for now. Hope you enjoyed viewing The Black & White Quilt. Stop back often and Happy Quilting!

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The Quilt With Many Names

3/18/2017

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In quilting, traditional Redwork is the art of patterning using only red and white fabric. The red fabric is solid red and/or various shades of red within fabrics. The solid white fabric is used to hold hand embroidery sewn with dark red threads, including embroidery floss and pearl cotton.

I was drawn to Redwork because of the beauty in its simplicity. Many Redwork embroidery patterns can be found in books and freely downloaded from the internet. The patterns are usually, children, faces, flowers, birds, animals and fruit. One drawback is that all of the faces reflect one culture. To solve this problem, you can make your own pattern. Make a copy of a photograph and using a lightbox, tape the copy onto the lightbox (to secure it), tape your white fabric over the copy, and then trace using a pencil. If you do not have a lightbox, you can tape everything to a window and use the outside light to trace. You can use a simple stem stitch and add others, such as chain and feather, as the need arises.

The Redwork pillow shown above left is my first Redwork project. Another technique I like is called Stumpwork; it is raised embroidery with threads and wire. I used Stumpwork on the pillow and on The Quilt With Many Names.
The image on the pillow is my great grandmother, Margaret Maynard (1854-1942). Margaret was born a slave in Fitzgerald, Georgia. She told four things of slavery: 1. she had her own drinking cup; 2. she was sitting on a fence when soldiers marched through the plantation where she lived; 3. the soldiers said to her, "You're free, honey;" and 4. she refused to tell other stories, only that whatever bad thing you can imagine happened during that time.

After the Redwork pillow, I wanted to tackle a full sized quilt and next came The Quilt With Many Names because at different times in this quilt's life, it has been called Bitches Brew, Nine Wild Women, Witches Brew, Wise Women Brewing, and Nine Wise Witches.

The Quilt With Many Names began as a scrap quilt, meaning no new fabric, only fabric I had in my stash. But as the quilt progressed, and I saw how big it wanted to become, its size surpassed the amount of red and white fabric in my stash. So, the quilt morphed into what I call a Redwork Variation, meaning that most of the fabric is strictly red and white, but some of the fabrics have other colors. You will see hints of green, yellow and blue. The middle block is traditional Redwork. Its themes are apparent and set the mood for the rest of the quilt.

Then the quilt began to grow around the middle block in a technique called “on point,” where blocks are set on the point of the block instead of its vertical or horizontal side. The wise/witch dolls came next, then the bubbling cauldron and then the Redwork embroidery of the young woman situated next to the magic sticks stirring the cauldron mixture. The young woman is depending on the wisdom of the wise woman to show her, her steady path.

The nine wise/witch dolls represent flora, mother, chef, prosperity, wisdom, mender, divination, artisan and healer. The dolls are made from wooden rods covered with batting and dressed in their particular clothes and tools. Each doll’s face is covered by an antique iron key. My mother, Christine Shefton Richardson (1912-1992), canned vegetables, made pickles, piccalilli and applesauce. She also put white string through red peppers to hang them in her kitchen to dry. The chef doll is holding one of my mother's dried peppers that I rescued after her death.

The Quilt With Many Names was first called Bitches Brew, and I created an artist book to document the process. The Bitches Brew Pensive includes water colors, a miniature quilted nine patch block, calligraphy, machine quilted pages, acrylic paints, threads, buttons, sequins, clay, wood, antique keys and lace. It’s dated 10/18/05. Reading this Pensive again is reminding me of the journey the quilt and I took. I think I might make other artist books to document the journeys of quilts I will make in the future. One humorous thing about the Bitches Brew Pensive is that I used American flag fabric on the back. Not sure what I was thinking about, or perhaps I was just focused on using red fabric from my stash.

Lastly, the quilt takes the shape of a curtained window. Like looking into the next life, the new life, the steady life beyond, our destiny.

Final words about Redwork. You can also do Blackwork, Greenwork or Bluework. Same rules apply. For example, in Blackwork, use black and white fabric and black embroidery floss on the white fabric.

The word Redwork has become a utility word, like pampers means disposable diapers and not necessarily the trademark product, Pampers. In these instances of Black, Green or Blue, you simply say Redwork in Black, etc.

I will share Redwork in Black, Green and Blue (in progress) in later posts. I’m also thinking about Goldwork and Purplework. Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

Whitework, on the other hand, is different. There are no variations, only white on white in white. The quilt on my bed is Whitework. Below is a sneak peek at Redwork in Green in the form of a quilted artist book.

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Well, that's it for this post.
Thanks for stopping by and Happy Quilting in the Key of C!

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Keeper

Muddy Footprints All Over My Soul

Redwork in Black

The Quilt With Many Names

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Keeper

Muddy Footprints All Over My Soul

﻿Redwork in Black

The Quilt With Many Names

About

Categories

Archives

Redwork in Black