Gender equality - still a work in progress

I was inspired by the artists who shared their stories in the film, Who does she think she is?, currently touring North America, which made me laugh and cry. As an afterthought, it still amazes me how, in so many ways, things have not changed radically for women since I was in my twenties. Gender equality is still a work in progress, perhaps even more so for artists than for many other professions. Good film.

Each person has something to teach us

Red Oak Leaves
October 2008

"People do not arrive in our lives by mistake, even when we did not choose them to be in our lives. It is best to learn the lessons about ourselves and life that we can learn from this person. That we do not like this kind of person is not the lesson. This person is in our life as a teacher...to illuminate an area where we struggle and where we can grow."
-Lynn Fitz-Hugl, Tip#10 from 21 Tips on Personal Peacemaking

A link to the article 21 Tips on Personal Peacemaking arrived in my e-mailbox this morning from a friend who has struggled through a very difficult divorce over the past year. As I read through the article, the tip which I have quoted here really seemed to speak to me. It underlines the human connection that exists in all our relationships, including the troublesome ones, and affirms that growth and healing are possible outcomes even when we find ourselves at odds with another person. I also felt happy that a sense of resolve was returning to the life of someone I care about and who has had a long, rough year.

Some day we'll all have perfect wings

"you can use pain to self-destruct or reconstruct."
-Ellen Goodman, journalist [paraphrased]

Things stood still for several weeks, after my younger brother died unexpectedly, on July 21, of unexplained heart failure, he was thirty-eight years old. His home was a short walk from ours, my daughters adored him, and my husband and he were friends. Over the past month we've taken time to grieve, to think about my brother's life, to remember the person that he was, and to say good-bye. Some moments, and some days are better than others as life slowly returns to some kind of 'normal'. Part of me is 'dealing with it' because I have to go around and get things done. Another part is still struggling and to some extent, remains in denial about what happened. I think a part of our brain keeps the person alive in our mind, stubbornly refusing to let go. Eventually I suppose it sinks in.

At the same time, something seems to have shifted for me in my thinking about how I want to go forward with my life. It's something subtle, because I can't really put my finger on what it is, and I often feel I'm in a state of suspended animation waiting for some additional insight to get me moving in a forward direction again. A close friend whose brother is dying of lung cancer, wrote to me and said, "when you lose a part of yourself, you can simply never be whole again. That is what we have to live with." Sometimes, life seems so meaningless, other times so beautiful, a gift. Basically, cognitive dissonance reigns.

For now, I have decided to slow the pace of my activities way down and leave lots of open, still space in my life, I cannot really do otherwise. I have decided to stop blogging except that I will continue to post photos of work in progress, and finished pieces. I'll also post quotes that are meaningful to me, related to creativity and personal growth. This is the most useful way that I know of to keep track of what I am doing, and document my creative journey.

The title of this blog post is a line from a song called 'Don't laugh at me' written by Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin. Country singer Mark Wills recorded it, as did folk singers Peter Paul and Mary. Peter Yarrow has made it the foundation song for the Don't Laugh at Me Program whose mission it is to stop bullying in schools. The song reminds me of my brother, who was a childhood survivor of cancer and was often teased in school because he was very sick for many years and developed a disability due to the aggressive nature of his cancer treatment. You can listen to the song here. Thank you to Christine Kane for introducing it to me.

May TIF - Part I

What do you call yourself and why?

was May's TIF Challenge concept question. I got started on it last weekend. Yes, I know it's the end of June but I liked the concept question and decided to do the assignment anyway.

Presently, if asked, I call myself a mother and a quilt artist. Making this small quilt top partly addressed the identity of quilt artist. In addition I included a strip of a traditional quilt block: flying geese, to further speak to this identity in a straightforward way. I decided to use an anatomical human heart to describe my role as a mother. In western culture the heart is used to represent or symbolize many of the attributes that are essential in the day to day care and nurturing of young children. Among these, love and compassion, honesty, forgiveness, and joy, are supremely important. Additional requirements necessary for effective parenting, and commonly symbolized by the human heart, include stamina, endurance, strength, good health and steadfastness. The image of a heart was drawn by Jason Reid and used with permission. I fragmented the heart to represent the reality of struggle or hardship, which along with joy, is part of family life. In overall design the quilt is a simple collage of fabrics.

The piece was made as a prototype for a larger quilt that I want to make, to further address the question posed by the May TIF challenge question in which I intend to use several unfinished drawings that I made recently in a drawing class. Here in the smaller quilt, I experimented with photo transfer paper for textiles and used three different products to transfer the drawing of the human heart onto fabric. The products I tried were June Tailor Print 'n Press, Wilton Easy Image fabric transfers and HP iron on transfers. I was most happy with the results that I obtained with the HP transfer paper, as it was the least stiff and resulted in less colour distortion than the other two products. It was also the least expensive.

Oh yeah, and don't forget to flip your image before you print it to the transfer paper as the transferred image will be the reverse of what is printed on the paper. As you can tell, if you closely examine the image of the heart.

In truth, I would like to find another way to transfer drawings and digital images to fabric, one that would better retain the hand of the fabric which transfer papers do not do. Something that I would like to learn more about, is digital printing with fibre reactive dyes, a technique used by quilt artists Michael James and Miriam Nathan-Roberts. If you use digital image transfer techniques in your textile art which you can recommend please leave me a comment or drop me a line about what works for you.

Ways to simplify your life with kids: Tip #25

25 Ways to simplify your life with kids was published yesterday by Leo Babauta over at zenhabits. It's a great list and not just for parents. I thought Tip #25 should be way closer to the top of the list:

Focus on doing, not on spending...Spend quality time together, doing stuff that doesn’t cost money.

Good idea.

The creative habit

"It's vital to establish some rituals -- automatic but decisive patterns of behavior -- at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way...Thinking of it as a ritual has a transforming effect on the activity. Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this?"

"In the end, there is no one ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they impel you to get started." -Twyla Tharp, The creative habit, Learn it and use it for life

This book has got me thinking about the physical part of creating a body of work. By this I don't mean doing the work. I mean placing yourself in time and space, on a regular basis, in a way that will optimize the probability of getting something done. In a recent post I wrote about setting some goals for my quilt making over the next two years. One of my goals is to set aside a certain amount of time each week to work. My big push for the next year will be to develop a creative habit. Since I am a morning person this would logically mean working in the morning. I think it would look something like this:

• 5-7 AM: Get up and do one hour of back strengthening exercises and Pilates on the ball.
• Eat breakfast
• Work. This means creative work e.g., designing, dyeing, piecing, or quilting, nothing else. Can probably work for up to four hours depending on what time I get started. Break for lunch.
  

I could afford to do this three weekdays a week, and one weekend day. It would mean paying someone to play with my kids between 8:00 AM (when my husband leaves for work) and lunchtime, three weekday mornings a week. Then, getting my husband to commit to giving me one weekend morning each week.

In The creative habit, Tharp includes exercises throughout the book. In one exercise she gives a list of questions which are to be answered, quickly and instinctively in order to provide a kind of self-appraisal to the reader of her creative identity, that is, what kind of creative work is the reader most compelled to make, what point of reference is she most inclined to take, from what distance, and so forth. One of the questions was: "What is your ideal creative activity?" For me, two answers came to mind simultaneously: -- creating an image and -- creating a functional object. It occurred to me that here is one of the core reasons that I love to make quilts: because they encompass both of these creative activities. Wish me luck instilling a creative habit.

Breathe in, breathe out

Bowman Bay, Washington, USA 2006

I have been in miraculous solitude for the past week. My family is gallivanting around beautiful, fabulous Paris and having a total blast. I am also having a blast right here at home. I am convinced that part of the reason that the universe conspired to keep me here at this particular moment in time was to help out a dear friend who is facing a crisis in her marriage. But mostly, it's just breathe in, breathe out and I am loving it. I worked on the Purple Rain quilt most of yesterday and hope to finish the quilting and binding today.

During this peaceful interlude I have been thinking about setting some goals for my quilt making over the next two years. The first order of the day is creating a body of work with intention. This might mean setting about to make roughly a certain number of pieces, or perhaps it will just mean a commitment to spending a certain number of hours each day in my workroom. In turn I will have to find someone to come and play with my kids while I work/create. It's doable and most importantly will take intention and a solid commitment on my part to do the work, no matter what I am feeling on a given day. I would also like to be part of an exhibition of work, in a gallery, restaurant, show or other venue. This is also doable, and again will take intention on my part.

It seems that my innermost voice is holding out an important concept to me today. The concept is intention: live with intention. Let's see where that takes me, once all hell breaks loose again here in my peaceful world. Smile.

Something very pleasant happened recently which relates to putting my work out there to be seen. A local quilt artist who saw a small quilt I was working on asked me if she could write about it in her e-newsletter where she includes a column entitled 'Featured Artist'. It was a revelation in some sense for me to have someone like my work enough to do that and I was very pleased. Along the same lines, something has been happening often these days: friends ask me "have you been quilting?" At first I didn't notice it much but at a point it hit me and I realized that my creative work is on their radar, is meaningful and interesting to them and they want to know about it. That speaks to me about how my soul is interacting with people who care about me, and I like it.

I end with these words from Sonji Hunt who this week wrote:

Worrying about whether something is "good" or "bad" corrupts creativity and growth. I can't stress that enough. I am so not about patterns or copying or having a number of items to complete. I am about experimenting and guiding. If you don't make something that is "crappy", how will you know what "good" is? That's my philosophy and my practice.

Sonji is obviously a very wise woman and perhaps one day I will have the opportunity to take a class with her. You can read the whole post on her blog.