Morning Make 2023 - A New Focus

In the last months of 2022 I decided that this year would be different when it comes to Morning Make. Rather than switch it up each month, as I’ve done since 2020, I decided to focus. The three years of exploration and play with different and new things were absolutely awesome, but I was ready for a change. More importantly, I was ready for a deep dive. It was easy to pick my focus, there may have been a slight influence from the BBC, but I did have the idea before I became obsessed with a certain show. My 2023 Morning Make focus is portraiture.

Now I will fully admit that I have extremely limited drawing skills. But when I started quilting I had extremely limited quilting skills. You only get better by doing. Of course, there are a lot of ways to tackle learning new skills and drawing is not the only way to do a portrait. It felt, to me, like the most logical place to start. I mean, if you can’t handle how a face comes together with a pencil you aren’t going to know much about how it might work in any other medium.

This is the very first portrait I drew this year. It’s about the same skill level of me in 6th grade. As I said, drawing is not my thing. To learn the basics I went back to one of the teachers I’ve had - Melissa Averinos. In her book and class on Making Faces in Fabric she covers the basics of anatomy and seeing a face, before you get to the fabric part. She suggests drawing a face first, before you’ve learned anything, so you can see how far you grow. So here is my first face.

And then I dove in to the details. Little things like how we all draw the eyes far too high on the face. How to sort of draw a nose. Using lines to show lines. For a few weeks I did nothing but draw. The vast majority of it is very bad. That’s okay, you only get better by doing.

See? In just a few weeks I got much better! I’ve learned that smiles are incredibly hard to draw though. Those teeth! But I like pictures better when I am smiling, so I guess I will have to figure that out.

Once I felt sort of comfortable with the basics I scrolled my selfies and practiced some more. Trying different styles or techniques. Simplifying things, paint, overcomplicating things, playing. I interspersed this with some fabric explorations, how could I not? For now, however, I want to show you the work on paper.

Am I in love with any of these? No, but they are the ones I like. They are the ones that I feel captured a likeness. Sometimes the jaw is wrong or the cheeks too wide or the nose too straight. But they still look like me.

So far I am realizing that I fall into a less is more camp when it comes to drawing. I want to get the likeness and the energy with the fewest amount of lines as possible. Does that mean I won’t try other things? You know I will. I’m a long way from oils or a detailed watercolour and I don’t know if charcoal will make it to my hands, but my confidence is building.

Speaking of confidence, it is a big thing to stare at yourself this much. Taking a selfie you like is one thing, turning that into something else is a whole other thing. It requires you to stare at yourself a lot. A lot. I am so far removed from the insecurities of my youth when it comes to my face, so this isn’t jarring or anything. But it is eye opening. I have more wrinkles than I thought. My dimple is more prominent than I ever pay attention to. My forehead is still very much a fivehead. As part of my recovery from depression I need to love myself more, give myself more compassion. While I realize this whole experimentation had the potential to make me overly critical and, thus, worse, it has had the opposite effect. I’m enjoying noticing the details, I’m appreciating the life in my face. I’m falling in love with myself. I chose self portraits to start simply so no one else had to feel bad at my mediocre skills drawing them, but now I am grateful.

Heritage Park Festival of Quilts - Quilter of Distinction

Whoa boy!

This is a big honour here in Calgary. The Festival of Quilts is THE quilt show in town. Quilts take over the historical village, with displays on buildings, fence, in the trees, in the homes and buildings of the park. There are workshops (I taught last year) and dinners and a vendor mall. There is also a special Quilter of Distinction exhibit profiling a local quilter. Guess who gets her own show in the Opera Hall this year?

Seeing as I’ve been quilting for exactly half my life this doesn’t make me feel old at all…

Now I have the hard task of determining what quilts to share. What quilts represent me? What quilts tell my story?

For years I’ve said that I don’t really have a style. At least, I don’t think so. My willingness to experiment and play means that I am open to trying a lot of things. Clearly, improv plays a huge role, but I’m not a one trick pony. I like handwork too. While my first love is prints I do embrace solids more now. And I’ve never met a half square triangle I didn’t like. Just how many quilts will they let me cram into the Opera House?

This is a huge honour for me. I’ve been going to this quilt show for 18 years myself and long admired many of the quilters I’ve seen get this distinction. Yes, it makes me feel old. And does it mean I don’t have more work to share? There has to be a joke about getting a lifetime achievement award while you are still living and working.

Meh, at the end of the day I’m just going to keep making quilts. It’s what makes me happy. Thanks for noticing.

January Morning Make 2022

We’re coming up on 2 years at home. Everyone is tired, frustrated, and annoyed. Some lash out, some quietly move on. Most of us are just living our lives as best we can. I fall into the latter category and chose to use my Morning Make this past month as a moment of reflection.

Quilting as a professional author, speaker, and teacher has taken me to some pretty amazing places over the past decade. I’ve travelled all over Canada, hit a handful of US cities, and even went across the ocean to Australia. I really do hope to add travelling for quilting back on my schedule again down the line. This reflective process does have me truly appreciating even more that quilting has given me. That’s because it’s given me all the people in the places, the creativity and laughter in the room, the morning walks before the work begins, and the ability to share my love of play and fabric with so many.

The project actually began years ago. One day my oldest and I were talking about the places I’ve been and we decided to make a list. It was like the twenties version of former lovers, but this place name list is MUCH bigger. I kept adding to it too. Every now and then I would make one of the places on the list. Then, when I started teaching online during the pandemic I would pick one of these places when I was demonstrating techniques for my Make Words Not War class. Every time it was a moment of reflection and appreciation. Needing to extend those thoughts and feelings I decided to make these place names the focus for January Morning Make.

I won’t lie, I’d hoped to finish all of them. I can only get up so early and these days that isn’t very early at all. But I did get through 18 of the place names on the list. Only 11 more to go.

Frankly, I have no idea how or when this will come together. I do know it will be a massive quilt! Maybe I will make it double sided? All I do know is that it’s been fantastic to take daily trips back to these places. I’m recalling people or the weather or even specific projects from events. I’m in awe of the depth of this travel. For quilting? Yes, for quilting!

Perimenopause Chronicle Quilt Update

One month in.

I’ve never paid this much attention to my menstrual cycle. I’m finding it quite eye opening. Part of it is about deciphering whether a mood is as result of outside forces (life/Covid/work/parenting) or influenced by hormones and impacting my responses to those outside forces. Part of it is realizing how much my sleep, or lack thereof, is both impacted by perimenopause and impacts my moods. Frankly, it all has me appreciating just how much we women can get done with all this happening to our bodies.

The project itself involves 5-10 minutes of sewing at the end of the day. After the kids go to bed and before I sit down with my husband I stitch up the block. Pain? Mood? Any flow? What about all that other random stuff? Pain (associated with my cycle only, not my back pain) is a strike through the center of the vagina representation. The background is the mood. The center is about flow or not flow. Orange bits account for the night time stuff (sweats and dreams) or bowel, breast, or other things. In the first month I marked my Covid vaccine. In this second month I marked my restart of iron supplements for anemia. Each night I post the block and quick summary on my Instagram stories. #perimenipausechroniclequilt

I am wildly curious to see consistencies and changes over the year. Sure, I could use an app like my teenage daughter, but this visual representation is very appealing to me. Here is the legend I am using.

Only one person has criticized me for the project, for sharing too much information. While I get that - this is a lot for me to be sharing, I’m sure my teenage nephews that follow me love it - I really do believe that it is important to be open in this conversation. After I first announced the project I received so many positive emails from women of all ages. I really appreciate every comment, it adds to the conversation. If the emails and comments are any indication, we need to have more and more conversations.