• In Celebration of Pencil and Paper

    In this digital age of technology I would like to pause, unplug and contemplate the low-tech pencil. These days, most of the quilters I know are all about the high tech toys. Tools like Electric Quilt and CAD programs, Adobe Illustrator… I admit I am partial to Corel Draw to bring my patterns to their pre-press stage.

    BUT – for the preliminary design stage nothing beats a pencil and paper (and a good eraser). The sheer joy of holding an organic tool that is a natural extension of my fingers and hand. There is a sensory link between my fingers and the pencil, I could swear my nerve endings run right down the wood and minerals down to the paper. I know there are some who would say the same thing about a mouse or a stylus but to me, there is an electronic barrier with those much like the difference between a phone conversation and speaking to a person in the same room or like listening to a recording vs. listening to a live performance. Digital drawing is like trying to caress and feel an object while wearing gloves.

    The process of drawing with a pencil is a meditative Zen experience – just me the pencil and the paper – no electricity, no digital translation of my motions through a filter of circuitry. Anyone who has explored tone drawing will know exactly what I am talking about; it’s like controlling your breath to evoke musical notes from a flute or the pressure of your fingers teasing ethereal sounds from a violin.

    I know it is more painstaking to work with graphite on paper, mistakes are harder to change or remove and for many processes such as duplicating a repetitive pattern, drawing by hand is more labor intensive and time consuming. I do it purely for the pleasure, the delight of seeing line and form emerge from the pencil like my life blood running down this  appendage that once had a life of its own as a part of a living tree.

    Here is an example of a contemplation in pencil, trying to work out a border design for one of my Totem quilts.

    Playing with border designs
    Playing with border designs

    And a final observation of the humble pencil – I have heard it said that NASA spent millions of dollars on research and development of a pen that would work in zero gravity; the Russians bypassed the expense and hassle by using – A PENCIL!


  • What to do while you are snowed in? Make Potstickers!

    I love potstickers, we always order them when we go to our favorite Chinese restaurant (Hunan Pearl in Lake Oswego – if anyone cares to ask). I had just cooked up the last ones from the previous batch I made and froze and though I have some commercial ones from Costco in the freezer, I have yet to find a brand I like as much as my own. Luckily, I had anticipated making them and had the raw ingredients on hand. My husband doesn’t eat pork so I use ground turkey, it’s a great pretender when trying to replace pork (plain ole ground turkey, not ground turkey breast, it’s too dry and has a very distinctive taste). I also have diabetic issues and try to steer away from white flour so I used a mixture of AP unbleached white with King Arthur Whole Wheat White flour (very finely milled so it’s a pretty good substitute for regular white flour) at a ratio of about 3/4 whole wheat to white. I like to make my own wrappers, I do not like the commercial wonton/dumpling skins and there is an art to making the dough. I found a great tutorial online at Steamy Kitchen Cooking Shortcuts. For the filling I used the ground meat, minced Nappa cabbage, chopped water chestnuts, scallions, grated ginger and a bit of toasted sesame oil and soy sauce, and as an afterthought, threw in a bit of a dried tangerine peel/Szechwan peppercorn salt mix I make up myself. We had some with dinner last night – YUM!!! The rest are in the freezer in zip lock bags.
     
    I just hope that this doesn’t follow a precedent set about ten years ago in another record breaking snowstorm where I had just made five dozen potstickers to freeze the day before we lost our power in the storm. We were without power for 6 days and our generator was not working. Authorities tell you to keep at least several days worth of non-perishable food for emergencies – which we do, but we never touched it. After the first couple of days eating whatever we didn’t want to go bad from the refrigerator food we put outside in the snow (it was colder out there than in the fridge) our daily meals consisted of deciding what had thawed out enough that it needed to be eaten NOW and we had nothing but potstickers for dinner that night. By the second night, they had thawed out – probably perfectly safe but they had congealed into one big mass of dough with little meatballs. It hurt more to throw those away than the expensive roast that had to go into the trash; the roast may have cost more but didn’t take hours to make.
    My partially whole wheat flour potstickers
    My partially whole wheat flour potstickers

  • New Design Class

    I tend to get excited about all my classes, I wouldn’t offer them if I didn’t feel they were something to crow about. Every now and then though, I come up with something refreshingly different from what I have done before and I get particularly enthusiastic about those. My upcoming workshop for Northwest Quilters  in March is one such class. I have taught a couple of classes for my guild over the last few years and because most of the members know me by reputation if not by sight, I have felt it necessary to come up with something completely new whenever I have the honor of offering a class through them. I do have a cadre of ‘followers’ who take many of the classes I teach (sometimes more than once) and I feel an obligation to offer something new that I’ve not offered at the shops when I present a workshop for my guild; after all, many of the members have taken my other classes through shops already and I want to try to fill my workshop as well as possible.

    Though I never completed a degree in Art, I did take some fairly advanced classes in college and had a great professor who taught me some wonderful insights into art and what I was capable of. In his ‘design’ course – Form and Color – he encouraged us to use subject matter for our assignments where the preconceived notion of what your are drawing does not take over the process of developing good balance and composition. I still hear his voice telling us that “the moment you decide to draw a fish, that fish takes over your hand and directs what it should look like…” He showed us a unique way to find abstract designs in nature, he called these ‘Discovery Designs’. Those of you who have studied art will probably already be familiar with this design process but for many it will open your eyes to design possibilities beyond your imagination. The best part is that you don’t need to have good drawing skills to use this method.

    This will be a design class only, students will ‘find’ their discovery and then create working drawings to play with, fine tuning the design and rendering some color layouts using colored pencils. When you are pleased with your design, you will have a design you can enlarge to any size you wish and make a working pattern from which to make your quilt.

    I am anxious to promote this as much as possible through my website and social media, I have shown my quilt in progress over the last couple of months at guild meetings but only put the final binding on the finished quilt a few days ago. I was planning to show it again at the Northwest Quilters’ meeting this morning but the weather had other ideas; not only did our out of state guest speaker have to cancel (I guess the weather where she lives was even worse than here) but last night the word went out that the entire meeting was being cancelled due to treacherous driving conditions. It is my hope that I can reach a sufficient number of students through the newsletter and the internet.

    I have posted a photo of my project below. Bear in mind this is my original design, it is not a pattern that you will be working from to create this quilt, you will search for and discover your own unique design.

    A Discovery design, finding abstract designs from nature 'through the lens'
    A Discovery design, finding abstract designs from nature ‘through the lens’